Unconscious bias in job descriptions can drive strong applicants away from even considering an opportunity.
Be aware of masculine-coded and feminine-coded terms in job advertisements. Since most candidates' first impressions come from the job title, using words such as “journeyman” can have a significant impact on whether or not they apply. Other words, for example, “blacklisting” and “cakewalk,” have racially biased connotations and can embed racial bias.
Instead of asking for a degree from an elite university, requiring a degree in a specific field is more inclusive.
Require only actual requirements. Do you need someone with five years of leadership experience, or do you need someone with leadership skills? Advertise for competencies and look for transferable skills, such as the ability to solve complicated problems.
If your organization is taking specific steps to create an equity-centered work environment, note it in your job description. Stick to the specifics you offer, such as flexible work arrangements or paid leave. This information encourages underestimated groups to apply.
Show the number of applicants you've received for a posting. Again, underestimated applicants will be far more likely to apply.
Don't post only on LinkedIn. To appeal to a more diverse pool of applicants, promote your job openings where underestimated individuals are more likely to see them.
Debias the selection process by adopting a clear procedure for blind resume reviews. If you work with an outside recruiter, ask if they conduct blind reviews.
Debias interviewing and scoring:
Assessment tests can be helpful when they have been vetted for bias and are used appropriately. Here are levers you can adjust to level the playing field:
Men are less likely to mentor women than they were before the #MeToo movement, and white people are less likely to mentor people of color than they were before the Black Lives Matter movement. White men's mentors are far more likely to be in senior roles than mentors of women or people of color. While mentors have an impact on career advancement for employees of all backgrounds, men benefit much more. The critical variable: the seniority of the mentor.
When women and employees of color have access to mentors in senior roles, they advance more quickly, are rewarded with higher compensation, and have higher levels of job satisfaction. Closing the mentorship seniority gap catalyzes career advancement and pay equality for employees of all backgrounds. It starts with intentional matching that includes the following:
If you are a senior leader, you typically have intense demands on your time. Focus mentoring meetings for optimum value:
If you choose to mentor someone of a different gender or who comes from a different background than your own, two suggestions:
Mentorship and sponsorship are often used interchangeably, but they require different levels of commitment. Sponsorship means verbally advocating on your sponsee's behalf and connecting them to your network. To sponsor underestimated individuals in your organization, communicate your plans to become a sponsor and allow candidates to apply informally. If you don't have time to provide ongoing sponsorship or mentorship but still want to further the professional development of underestimated employees, focus one-on-ones on this single question: What are your career goals?
Women are less likely to be invited to opportunities to grow their technical and business-critical skills. If you are about to forward a training announcement to the “perfect employee,” send it to all the employees in your department instead. After underestimated employees complete the training, ask if they would be willing to share their experience with others through a presentation or summary in your company newsletter.
Make sure that your networking events are inclusive. Here are some keys:
Unconscious bias in performance evaluations can make or break careers.
One way to limit the effect of such bias is to conduct more frequent reviews. In businesses that conduct shorter but more frequent reviews, the perceived performance gap between women and men is nearly nonexistent.
Women's performance evaluations tend to be shorter and focus more on skills that are not as promotable as men's. The feedback women receive is also likely to be vague, lacking specific directives for improvement or clear connection to business outcomes. Men are more likely to receive longer performance reviews focused on the technical aspects of their jobs.
One way to counter this trend is to replace the common “open box” on performance reviews—a comment field, usually prefaced by a generic question such as “How did this employee succeed?” or “How did this employee not meet expectations?” Instead of the box, apply structured criteria. Investing the time to develop meaningful criteria is crucial to optimizing performance:
What you do before and after the evaluation can make or break the success of your carefully selected criteria:
Pay does not exist in a vacuum. To close your pay gap for the long term, you must close opportunity gaps in hiring, evaluations, and promotions as well.
Relying on referrals with no standards or checks can hurt your efforts to build a diverse workforce and progress toward pay equity. Keys to making your referrals work for all:
Salary negotiations can reward employees who are great negotiators but who may not be more deserving of higher wages than their peers. These guidelines can help to debias the process:
Use employee self-evaluations wisely. When self-evaluations are allowed to influence pay decisions, managers may reward aggrandized self-perceptions rather than actual performance.
Not all gap analyses are created equal. These guidelines will help to ensure an accurate audit:
If you discover a pay gap, be transparent about it and what you will do to correct it. An employer's ability to communicate clearly about compensation has been shown to play a larger role in employee sentiment than traditional measures of employee engagement. Sharing pay data is likely to relieve employees of negative perceptions they may be harboring.
When communicating about pay, focus on the “why.” Employees care more about why they are paid what they're paid than about the exact dollar value (within reason). Essentials for pay conversations:
Conducting a pay gap analysis once captures a moment in time. Continuing to evaluate pay regularly ensures that hidden gaps don't grow as your company evolves.
In 2020, the year of COVID, women lost a million more jobs than men. Women of color were hit the hardest, facing higher unemployment numbers than white women.
Much of this “she-cession” was driven by the additional caretaking that working mothers had to take on. The companies that lost new mothers lost someone who was likely to have been a top performer. Multiple studies have found that working mothers are more productive than their peers.
Employees and employers can benefit from expanding paid leave in the following ways:
Parents are not the only employees who may require leave. More adults find themselves “sandwiched” between caring for their own children and parents living into their late eighties and nineties. Employers that offer caretakers' leave are more likely to retain their caretaking employees.
Twenty-one percent of full-time employed adults report that they have been victims of domestic violence, and over four-fifths of domestic violence victims are women. Time off allows employees affected by domestic violence to seek medical attention, meet with a lawyer, file for a protection order, attend court hearings, or relocate, if needed. Accommodations such as these can allow them to perform successfully:
To destigmatize taking leave, consider these unusual but effective policies:
Many employees prefer the flexibility of remote or hybrid work options. Earning potential and career advancement are still highly correlated with in-person work, however, making underestimated groups more vulnerable to an “out of sight, out of mind” dynamic that can leave them behind. To ensure an equitable impact, provide the following supports:
We are prone to mistake confidence in potential leaders for competence, especially in men. Most employees are dissatisfied with their managers, but most managers, especially male managers, see themselves as highly effective.
Overvaluing confidence and charisma means that we miss out on diverse leadership styles proven to be effective across all backgrounds. Introverts, for example, may hold some of the most undervalued leadership potential. To move from rewarding the stereotypically charismatic to recognizing and promoting typically unsung leadership potential, define clear, transparent criteria that let employees know what steps they need to take to advance.
Although skepticism over quotas is strong in the US, multiple case studies point to the same conclusion: Over time, quotas work. To implement quotas for underestimated employees effectively, leadership groups must achieve a critical mass of underestimated individuals. While there is not a “perfect” number, stereotypes have far less impact when minority groups represent at least one-third of a group. For organizations that are facing unbalanced pipelines, this 33 percent target can seem out of reach. In this case, the organization must set a target.
The following steps can foster buy-in:
Group meetings provide another early opportunity to spot potential leaders. These inclusive meeting behaviors can help ensure that a diverse range of voices are heard and their contributions are recognized:
Once you have started recognizing potential leaders, retaining them and recruiting them into the promotion process is key. Actions to encourage engagement:
Without inclusive design practices, even workplaces that seem inclusive in theory can build in bias. Open office spaces, for example, were well-intended, but they robbed women of the productive time and focus needed to advance. Employees of color also preferred more privacy over too-open spaces where they had experienced being perceived as the “angry Black person.”
Several “inclusion mainstreaming” steps can moderate these effects:
The kinds of role models we see or are reminded of can affect our performance. Consider your wall art. Are the images homogeneous, or can all of your employees relate?
Workers in healthcare and service industries are disproportionately exposed to threats and violence, and these workers are disproportionately female. The following steps can make the workplace safer for those who are placed in vulnerable positions:
Finally, we look ahead in part 3, “Zooming Back Out—The Big Picture.”