As published in the Finance Digest, by Dulcie Swanston

The business case for increasing the number of women in senior roles in business is startling. If companies with 33% or less women executives were to perform with the same net profit margin as companies with more than 33% women executives, this would lead to an additional £195bn of pre-tax profits.    

With a broad acceptance of this evidence, the stated and positive intentions on social media (so evident recently on International Women’s Day) and robust diversity strategies in most workplaces, it can be hard to get your head around how gender inequality can still persist in business when it does not make good financial sense and so much effort is seemingly put in to level the playing field.

However, a little knowledge about the science behind gender bias and our personal ‘immunity’ to change can highlight the complex and concealed reasons that stand in the way of women overcoming the challenges they might face at work to progress – and help women and their organisations to work through and beyond them. 

Unconscious Gender Bias

Our unconscious biases were embedded long before our careers began. We all have them, even when we believe ourselves to be genuinely committed to equality. One study highlighted that blind auditions increased chances of female musicians being hired by 46%. And, over 630,000 people in world-wide Implicit Association Test (IAT) for bias correlated males more strongly with competence in science and females with humanities when this competence has no basis in fact. 

This evidence can help us to realise that whilst we might be actively committed to the idea that we want to contribute to having a progressive workplace where women can progress, there may be some things that we are doing that are unhelpful and work against our good intentions. 

For example, if your organisation uses Cognitive Ability or GCA tests which look at thinking and reasoning then you might be interested to know that women perform less well on these tests (this applies to BAME and neuro-diverse candidates too). Non-cognitive battery tests which look at motivation, integrity, and interpersonal skills, don’t have these sub-group differences. 

Your organisation may have research that shows these tests have ‘high predictive validity’, meaning that people who perform well in role, also do well in these tests. However, one study showed that people who do well in these types of tests (white males) have had resources given to them throughout life, such as schooling, childhood postcode and in some cases simply more practice at these types of tests, that make a difference to scores in later life. Another research study showed that men are simply more confident in their abilities to do these tests well. When no brief was given to a group before a GCA test, men performed better than their female counterparts. However, when the women in the group were shown evidence beforehand that women had just as much innate ability as men at maths, the female candidates outperformed the men. 

Does your organisation measure commitment on output or presenteeism?  There is lots of research to show that hours worked do not correlate with equal performance. Are people in your organisation penalised for working shorter hours? It might be worth questioning, aside from salary, what else they miss out on that has simply been overlooked.

It’s hugely discomforting to confront that you personally, or an organisation that you have worked hard to make more diverse, isn’t free of bias and that it is just something that a few stuffy, out of date colleagues have going on. Many of the barriers that women face to progression are unintentional. Appreciating that the ways in which we may all be contributing to making a workplace more difficult for women to progress in and which may even be hidden from the women themselves and their strongest supporters, will be crucial for individuals and organisations that really want to make a difference.

Personal Change Immunity

Whilst we can accept personal change is desirable and necessary, doing something about it and sustaining new habits is easier said than done. Our innate ‘immunity to actual change’ researched by two leading Harvard academics in 2009 soberingly summarised; 

‘…a study showed that when doctors tell heart patients they will die if they don’t change their habits, only one in seven will be able to follow through successfully… 

Business is not life or death so our ability to follow though with change that makes us feels uncomfortable or requires confrontation of personal biases is likely to be even less than one in seven.

Give up?

Understanding the hidden biases and the human difficulty of changing anything at all can help us to appreciate there isn’t likely to be a quick fix or a silver bullet for your organisation or yourself when it comes to levelling the playing field. Without a deeper understanding of the neuroscience that exists underneath our organisational cultures and values, we may understand the business case and actively support the initiatives intended to level the playing field but not understand why the return on investment is frustratingly elusive. Lasting change takes time, constant vigilance and a permanent commitment to cultivating a growth mindset for the women themselves and their supporters – let alone their detractors!  

You’d be forgiven for thinking the changes seem insurmountable! Alternatively, we can take the view that by understanding this science and appreciating the complexity, we can avoid investing organisational finances and personal energy into initiatives that are well intentioned, but which don’t generate change that having a genuinely diverse workplace brings nor at the pace we need for growth. 

Here are three things to invest your time and money in that just might make a difference!

Build trust to get permission to challenge

To have any chance of exposing unconscious bias and addressing our immunity to change, we must trust the person that is challenging our assumptions. As human beings, if we don’t trust that the person who feeds something back to us genuinely has our best intentions at heart and is being authentic and honest, then we can’t help but move into defensive mode to protect ourselves.

Leaders in an organisation who are trying to encourage more women into senior roles must cultivate trust for their teams to feedback openly, or people simply won’t speak truth to power. When it becomes normal to challenge and safe for people to voice uncomfortable truths and raise difficult issues, the organisation has a chance to confront difficult situations that don’t have easy, off the shelf answers. 

Creating a culture of trust which gives people the courage to challenge is crucial when something the leader themselves or the organisation are doing is positively intentioned – but isn’t actually having the desired effect.

Equally women who want to progress can overcome some of the challenges they will face by finding a mentor or coach that they trust implicitly to give them difficult feedback when a behaviour or part of their style is holding them back. 

Invest in the right support

Unfortunately, there is mixed evidence that unconscious bias training works, despite a McKinsey estimate that about $8bn is spent on diversity training annually in the US alone. The UK Civil Service halted their unconscious bias training in 2020 after carefully reviewing evidence which concluded amongst other things that implicit bias training had little effect on the growth of women in management. 

A ‘tick-box’ training day might highlight unconscious bias exists, but it can do more harm than good if people think that in undertaking it, the problem is solved. Tackling unconscious bias will always be deeply uncomfortable because our brains are wired to resist challenges to our existing patterns. It’s therefore naïve to expect that lasting change can result from simple ‘tick-box’ training days. Any training that can even begin to unravel such complex and deep-rooted neurological wiring will need to be deep, thoughtful and ongoing.

An investment in training that helps both male and female understand how to build trust by being authentic and empathetic and then using that trust to provide positive and proactive challenge that people can hear is likely to have more positive impact and better long-term return on investment.

Coaching or specific female focused training can have an impact by improving resilience, confidence, and by enabling women to flex their style. However, if this is not being done within an environment where their endeavours will be supported back in the organisation in the layers above them, it’s likely to be a wasted investment, the best women will either leave with their newfound knowledge or revert to role modelling the behaviour that exists already in the successful people around them – which is over-represented with middle class white males.

Unconscious bias being part of, but not the sole focus of, personal development can show significant return on investment. Learning about the research and science into authenticity and diversity in mixed groups can be hugely beneficial. Becoming an authentic leader who people can trust necessarily involves understanding your limiting beliefs and unhelpful innate biases. There is huge power in understanding the importance of dialling up the qualities you might naturally possess that help others to trust you even though you may be unaware of the impact they have. Equally, without truthful feedback we can’t dial down the things we are doing with positive intent but are not aware that are getting in the way. 

Start with yourself

If you are a woman in business challenge your own bias about what you can and cannot do. Of
course, it makes sense to focus on your strengths but try to identify when you are telling yourself or
others something that has no basis in fact but does have some truth in the way that gender is
perceived – for example “I’m no good with numbers” or “I’m useless with technology”. Question
whether you have tried to get better at numbers or whether you are investing enough time in
getting up to speed with the technology relevant to your marketplace.

Are you perpetuating some of the myths that exist in your organisation with your own words and
actions? Question yourself and others around you when you hear limiting beliefs about
presenteeism such as “I can’t really commit to the hours a more senior job needs” or over-
apologising for being a parent when inevitable difficulties arise “I’m so sorry, I feel terrible, but I
need to fetch my son from school because he is ill”.

It can be frustrating when an organisational process is getting in the way of your personal
development. It is also undoubtably ‘unfair’ that the same behaviour in a man can be perceived as
‘strong’ and in a woman as ‘aggressive’. However, investing too much thinking power and airtime on
things that you can’t control or influence can distract you from investing your precious brain fuel and
limited time on the things you can. Are you better spending hours railing at the injustice that if you
were a man that your work persona would be perceived differently? Or taking that unpalatable truth
as unfair but out for your control for now, and finding a smart, slightly different but still wholly
authentic way to present your ideas that gets people on board.

Lisa Wilcox 2020. Women Count 2020. The Pipeline p.16.