Why Are Gender Stereotypes So Difficult to Combat at Work?

After a failed gender equality training, here is what we learned and how workplaces can support women better.

The police were worried. The police had taken a deep look into diversity within their large UK based force and found that when female officers and staff talked about their time they were expecting to deliver, only 39% of them felt supported by their managers.

I was part of the Behavioral Insights Team’s effort to create a more supportive environment for those female employees. This would involve transforming the way managers communicated with and supported their female employees: Just over half of the women who took on another job after announcing that they were having children had been involved in such an arrangement while only one third (33%) informed their supervisors about how to contact them during pregnancy.

We thought that stereotyping, prejudice, and bias might have been at play. It could be that the superiors believed that it was important to shield female workers from external influences or perhaps pregnancy would make women fail in achieving higher positions.

We reckoned this required change in our perception. Perspective taking is purely about visualising your self into another person’s mind or shoes so you can see exactly what someone else’s life looks like; lab studies showed it improved communication, reduced stereotyping/prejudice, and increased empathy. We reasoned the same could happen for the Police force.

We created a 15-minute online perspective-taking task for line managers whereby they were asked “what if?”. First, each manager did a short writing exercise to recall moments when they overcame challenges to assist others so as to raise their confidence levels. They were then given an outline plus photograph of Anna who was one pregnant policewoman officer where they had to write some lines on her background including experiences at duty and with other people around her which they fabricated using imagination. Lastly, managers needed to come up with several specific things they will do next week in order enhance supporting or communicating with females among their workers.

It was not what we predicted. There was no positive effect in a randomised controlled trial involving more than 3,500 police managers. In fact, line managers who completed the perspective-taking task performed slightly worse in hypothetical scenarios asking how they would support female employees.

But this should not surprise us so much: stereotypes about gender are pervasive and persistent due to their invisibility to ourselves and their influence on judgments that lie outside our awareness. Hence, even when people think they are impartially treating both sexes alike misogynistic attitudes based on such stereotypes can slip in unnoticed by the one holding them as true beliefs. Gender roles are also stickier as compared with other areas of progress like universal suffrage, education systems et cetera have been made towards gender equality yet stereotypes still dominate in such areas as media and entertainment.

Changing unconscious and conscious thoughts about women is hard; indeed programmes to do so have had limited success. This has been supported by research into diversity and unconscious bias training: Trainings are mostly ineffective at changing behaviour and can even backfire, especially when they are mandatory and participants resent being sent to the course. Diversity trainings may also fail if they give the impression that the organisation has now resolved its diversity issues.

Perhaps the same forces were at play in our own study, explaining why it failed. It could be that line managers did not know how to offer more support even if they perceived a need. Future interventions must provide specific tools for behavioural change as well as organisational support to sustain new behaviors.

But there is hope despite these barriers. However, eradicating stereotypes from our minds will not solve the problem. This will entail breaking down deeply ingrained prejudices in our systems such as hiring and selection in organisations or marking students in schools according to behavioral economist, Iris Bohnet.

Take, for example, the issue of recruitment. As statistics reveal low numbers of females holding managerial positions, this system disadvanatges women consistently throughout. The Applied program is an antidote created by my colleagues on the Behavioral Insights Team that removes biases from HR choices like paper tests and interviews by removing data which may give away an applicant’s gender or other information that can influence selection decisions.

“But we hardly ever realise we have them,” admits Dr. Tiina Likki with a smile.

For instance, performance reviews are good for debiasing.For instance, Emilio Castilla found out using data from a large service organisation (type of organisation not specified) that equal ratings given during performance appraisal were more likely to result in promotions among men than women (performance reward bias).

The starting point for all organisations is analysing their employee data. Look at disparities based on gender when allocating work assignments; development opportunities; remuneration packages including salary and bonuses and promotion and retention within each grade level . Where are the gaps? Why do they happen? There has been recent questioning of UK businesses’ results after they were required by law to publish their gender pay gap reports indicating differences between hourly wages earned by men and women across all grades.

Once a company reveals possible systemic prejudices it could start applying behavioural economics. However this is still just step one: any organisation needs to keep monitoring the initial data, evaluating interventions and setting targets for change that can be measured.

Moreover, when things go wrong, we need to announce these failures openly. If our global fight is to make gender equality a reality, then a large part of it involves recognising when our initiatives went wrong or were terrible investments. I will continue this path, solving this problem and sharing my failures and successes along the way.

This article was originally published in Behavioral Scientist. Read the original article here.