Chapter 6: Help Wanted—Inclusive Recruiting

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.

Chapter 7: The Best Person for the Job—Merit-Based Hiring

Debias interviewing and scoring:

• Define the competencies you are looking for and create interview questions based on the STAR (Situation-Task-Action-Result) framework.
• Before beginning the interviews, decide on the exact wording of each question and the weighting of the responses.
• Schedule interviews for approximately the same time of day.
• Before beginning an interview, give the candidate advance notice that you will be following a structured interview process and explain what to expect regarding your questioning and scoring.
• In interviews, ask the same questions of every candidate in the same order.
• After interviewing all candidates, each member of the selection committee should individually write final notes, compare the scoring of all candidates, and write down one top candidate before reuniting with the rest of the committee to discuss. Scoring candidates privately sidesteps the “HiPPO effect”—a tendency to conform to the Highest Paid Person's Opinion (HiPPO) in the room.
• When evaluating the candidates, compare them directly to one another, rather than discussing each candidate separately. When applicants are explicitly compared to one another, your selection committees will be more likely to choose a candidate based on performance rather than subjective judgment.

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:

• Do not ask multiple candidates to take the test in a room together at the same time.
• Allow candidates to adjust the temperature in the room.
• Do not penalize test-takers for guessing, and state this at the beginning of the test.

Chapter 8: It's Who You Know—Protégés and Professional Development

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:

• An inventory of potential mentors and mentees.
• Matching mentees to more than one mentor, and letting the mentee choose.
• Early KPI tracking.

If you are a senior leader, you typically have intense demands on your time. Focus mentoring meetings for optimum value:

• Understand your mentee's holistic career goals, or define those goals if your mentee is not sure yet.
• Identify blind spots or opportunities for improvement, provide constructive feedback, and point your mentee to resources.
• Ask about your mentee's preferences regarding feedback and coaching.

If you choose to mentor someone of a different gender or who comes from a different background than your own, two suggestions:

• Be transparent and visible about whom you are mentoring.
• Use the same structure for mentees of all backgrounds, but acknowledge difference.

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:

• Try to schedule networking events during the workday.
• Make sure your food choices are inclusive.
• Encourage sober socializing. (Women who are seen drinking may be perceived as more intoxicated than they are, and their character may be called into question.)
• Require attendance from senior leaders.
• Track who is attending and who is not. If your events appear homogeneous, distribute a survey to see what would make underestimated employees more likely to attend.

Chapter 9: Exceed Expectations—The Performance Evaluation

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:

• Quantify competencies.
• Document examples.
• Tie performance to progress toward individual goals.
• Tie performance to business outcomes.
• Include everything, even office “housework.”

What you do before and after the evaluation can make or break the success of your carefully selected criteria:

• Share the criteria in advance of evaluations.
• Ensure that managers do not see employees' self-evaluations before evaluating them.
• Ban personality words like “cold,” “warm,” “aggressive,” and “likeable.”
• Audit evaluations for bias by comparing the results by demographic.
• Check evaluations for performance support bias, a bias in which overconfidence in a certain group's abilities gives them more access to opportunities.

Chapter 10: The Physiology of Pay

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:

• Use the standardized hiring practices in chapter 7 to avoid giving special treatment to referrals.
• Consider an “extra” bonus for diversity referrals.
• Collect data around referrals and analyze it to help catch opportunity gaps.

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:

• Clearly state the salary range of the job.
• Offer every candidate the chance to negotiate.
• Do not ask for salary histories or expectations.

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:

• Group together employees who perform comparable work. Analyze each of these groups separately.
• Choose controls (the factors that explain why employees in the same grouping may be paid different amounts) that are relevant to skill, effort, risk, or accountability and not related to gender, race, age, or other demographic characteristic.
• Choose an accurate measure of central tendency (median or mean), and analyze your data with an intersectional lens.
• Measure total compensation, including commissions, bonuses, and any other rewards.

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:

• Communicate the results of pay gap analyses, including causes discovered and targets to reduce the gaps.
• Document and distribute your pay equity strategy, including your pay equity metrics and policies of accountability.
• Share a standardized pay rubric with the criteria behind pay, bonus, and raise decisions.

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.

Chapter 11: Family Matters

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:

• Offer family leave, not just maternity leave.
• For paternity leave to have an impact, male leaders must model taking leave.
• The amount of leave should be substantial, but not too long. A year off can hamper women's abilities to reintegrate into the workplace or return to senior roles.

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:

• Provide private, quiet workspaces and more frequent work breaks.
• Allow the employee additional time to learn new responsibilities.
• Offer a flexible work schedule and time off for counseling, or legal or medical appointments.
• During onboarding, provide an opportunity for employees to state if particular smells or noises are triggering and try remove those triggers from the work environment.

To destigmatize taking leave, consider these unusual but effective policies:

• Develop a keep-in-touch plan for employees on leave.
• Make promotions accessible to employees on leave.
• Administer a brief test to employees returning from extended leave, to prevent their competency from being called into question.

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:

• Determine flexible work policies with employee participation, giving employees at all levels, not just managers, the chance to weigh in.
• For everyone to feel comfortable participating, leaders need to model hybrid work.
• Set targets and track participation. Gathering data on who is participating in flexible work arrangements can reveal imbalances between demographics or teams.

Chapter 12: Leadership Material

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.

• Revisit job descriptions, clearly defining the expected skills for every role. Beware of using titles in place of competencies, and consider your future leadership needs.
• Communicate your criteria for advancement using one-on-ones to remind individuals aspiring to leadership of the 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:

• Communicate the rationale behind the target numbers you choose: pipeline-dependent, representative of the customer base, or representation at all levels of the business.
• Communicate targets as part of a comprehensive leadership strategy and timeline.

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:

• Invoke a one- to two-minute reflection period before accepting feedback.
• If a topic is being presented for feedback within a large group, provide time for participants to meet in subgroups first.
• Provide lead time for review and space for open-ended feedback.

Once you have started recognizing potential leaders, retaining them and recruiting them into the promotion process is key. Actions to encourage engagement:

• Open promotions to all who meet minimum requirements. Select by the STAR method.
• Encourage underestimated individuals to apply.
• Share the reasons that a candidate was chosen for promotion.

Chapter 13: Blueprints for Inclusive Workspaces

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:

• Consider a red-yellow-green color-coded “availability” system to counter the “casual conversation” interruption problem.
• Make the open office optional with movable partitions to accommodate introverts, extraverts, and all personality types in between.
• Provide private spaces (prayer room, nursing room, quiet/focus room).

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:

• State your anti-harassment policy, visibly, from the point of entry.
• Require only first names on badges.
• In settings such as healthcare centers, provide a specific, recognizable alarm for harassment situations.
• In bars and restaurants, provide a panic button for workers.
• Also in food service, employ built-in tipping and state it clearly on your menu.
• Provide gender-neutral restrooms to combat transphobic violence.

Finally, we look ahead in part 3, “Zooming Back Out—The Big Picture.”