In many organizations, policies and systems perpetuate gender and racial discrimination and inequality—often without leaders even recognizing it. When job negotiations and promotions are inequitable, they often lead the dominant group to be compensated more than others for the same work.
In their book, Make Work Fair: Data-Driven Design for Real Results, Harvard Kennedy School Professors Iris Bohnet and Siri Chilazi write that many organizations focus on investing in short-term DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) training to address inequity and overlook the types of systemic solutions that would lead to fairer decision-making day in and day out.
Claim your FREE copy: Teaching Negotiation
Discover the insights you need to deliver the most effective role-play simulations in this free special report, Teaching Negotiation: Understanding The Impact Of Role-Play Simulations, from Harvard Law School.
In an interview with the Program on Negotiation, Bohnet, who is also the author of What Works: Gender Equality by Design, overviews steps professionals can take to promote wiser, more equitable job negotiations.
Program on Negotiation: In the news, we sometimes find examples of how individuals have sought to improve gender and racial equality in their organizations during job negotiations. For example, in recent years, some Hollywood actors and directors promised to negotiate for riders in their contracts with production companies that would guarantee diverse hiring for small parts. To what extent do you think such negotiations and initiatives are useful?
Iris Bohnet: When women fail to negotiate on their own behalf, it’s often because they perceive that doing so is risky—that they may face a backlash for asking for more by behaving contrary to gender stereotypes of women as passive and accommodating. So when other people negotiate on behalf of women and other underrepresented groups in organizations, as is the case with so-called inclusion riders, it can be helpful for everyone.
However, individual workplace negotiations can take us only so far. As my coauthor, Siri Chilazi, and I write in Make Work Fair, there is much more that can be done within organizations through “behavioral design”—systemic changes aimed at reducing bias and improving equity. Behavioral design, which Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein referred to as “choice architecture” in their influential book Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, involves creating decision environments that help us better meet our goals.
PON: What’s one example?
IB: Until recently, women made up only a very small percentage of major U.S. orchestras. Women were auditioning, but decision-makers were biased toward hiring men. This became clear when orchestras started instituting blind auditions where musicians try out behind a screen so that their gender is unknown to those listening. After this change, the percentage of women in the top five U.S. orchestras climbed from 5% to 35%. As this example illustrates, behavioral design bypasses the need to reduce bias in people’s decision-making—bias of which we tend to be unaware and, in fact, often vehemently deny in job negotiations.
In most fields, a completely blind hiring process wouldn’t make sense, but we can at least anonymize the initial screening process. We encourage organizations to institute “electronic curtains” by removing gender- and race-identifying information from electronic job applications before they are first reviewed, including names, pronouns, and headshots.
PON: Eventually, hiring managers will need to interview candidates, and their gender and race will be obvious. How can organizations “debias” job negotiations?
IB: In part, by requiring decision-makers to conduct structured rather than unstructured interviews. We all like to think we’re a good judge of character, but study after study shows that unstructured interviews are a very poor predictor of on-the-job performance. By contrast, structured interviews allow for far more accurate comparisons across candidates.
To conduct structured job interviews, hiring managers should determine what they are looking for in a candidate in advance. Next, they should write up a checklist of interview questions. The next step is to create a scoring system—for example, a scale of 1 to 10—for each interview question and determine how much weight to assign to each question.
During the interview, interviewers should adhere closely to their list of questions, even when it feels awkward to do so. They should score the candidate in the moment, one question at a time, as waiting until after the interview risks allowing faulty memories to bias the process. If multiple people will be conducting interviews, they should meet with the candidate individually rather than as a group. Then, before meeting to discuss the candidate, interviewers should send one another their evaluations in advance, before they are diluted by groupthink.
PON: What would you say to those who might think this sounds like a complicated approach to job negotiations?
IB: Hiring the wrong people creates much more complication. Online tools for conducting structured interviews are available. Most of us put too much faith in our intuition. When we add algorithms and routinized procedures to the hiring process, we reduce the bias in our job negotiations. In doing so, we not only promote equity but also are more likely to hire the best person for the job.
What steps have you taken in your organization to make job negotiations fairer?
Claim your FREE copy: Teaching Negotiation
Discover the insights you need to deliver the most effective role-play simulations in this free special report, Teaching Negotiation: Understanding The Impact Of Role-Play Simulations, from Harvard Law School.
