Latest / The Bold Lounge / Siri Chilazi: Bold Moves, Equal Ground- Rewriting the Rules for Women

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Siri Chilazi: Bold Moves, Equal Ground- Rewriting the Rules for Women · The Bold Lounge

• 0:07
  Speaker 1: Welcome to the Bold Lounge podcast.
• 0:09
  Speaker 1: My name is Leigh Burgess and I will be your host.
• 0:12
  Speaker 1: If you're anything like me, you love hearing inspiring stories of people who have gone on bold journeys and made a positive impact in the world.
• 0:19
  Speaker 1: This podcast is all about those kinds of stories.
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: Every week, we'll hear from someone who has taken a leap or embarked on an extraordinary journey.
• 0:27
  Speaker 1: In addition to hearing their stories, we'll also learn about their bold growth mindset that they use to make things happen.
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: Whether they face challenges or doubts along the way, they persisted and ultimately achieved their goals.
• 0:40
  Speaker 1: These impactful stories will leave you feeling motivated and inspired to pursue your own bold journey.
• 0:46
  Speaker 1: I believe everyone has a bold story waiting to be freed.
• 0:49
  Speaker 1: Tune in and get ready to be inspired.
• 0:52
  Speaker 1: Welcome to the Bold Lounge.
• 1:00
  Speaker 1: Today I have Siri Chalazi.
• 1:02
  Speaker 1: Siri is a senior researcher at the Women in Public Policy program at Harvard Kennedy School whose life is to advance gender equality in the workplace.
• 1:11
  Speaker 1: As a keynote speaker and strategic advisor, siri collaborates with a wide range of organizations around the world.
• 1:17
  Speaker 1: Her work regularly appears in leading media outlets.
• 1:20
  Speaker 1: Siri has an MBA from Harvard Business School, a master's in public policy from Harvard Kennedy School and a BA in chemistry and physics from Harvard College.
• 1:29
  Speaker 1: Welcome to the Bold Loud, siri.
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: I'm excited to talk with you today.
• 1:33
  Speaker 1: Thank you, leigh, I'm thrilled to be here with you, so we're going to jump right into being bold.
• 1:39
  Speaker 1: What does bold look like for you?
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: What's your definition of bold?
• 1:45
  Speaker 2: I think that it's doing things that scare you anyway.
• 1:48
  Speaker 2: To me, being bold or brave is not the absence of fear.
• 1:51
  Speaker 2: Fear is normal.
• 1:52
  Speaker 2: It's important information.
• 1:54
  Speaker 2: When we get anxious and jittery in our bodies or nervous in a physical sense, you get the butterflies in your stomach or the tingles, or your heart rate or your blood pressure go up and you feel it.
• 2:03
  Speaker 2: That's always, to me, important information about wow, this is something that I care about.
• 2:11
  Speaker 2: This is an important moment.
• 2:11
  Speaker 2: I want to be at my best.
• 2:12
  Speaker 2: And then boldness is how do you move forward anyway and not let the jitters or the nerves of the fear overtake you, but go out there and do your best.
• 2:20
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 2:21
  Speaker 1: So is there a time in your life that you've lived that stepping through the fear, doing it anyway?
• 2:26
  Speaker 2: You know I can't think of one single big moment, sort of like a life or career defining single moment, but I think it's a lot of small moments every day.
• 2:39
  Speaker 2: Going up for a promotion, you know, putting yourself forward.
• 2:41
  Speaker 2: My very first job out of college was in management, consulting, before I became an academic, and looking back, I just had no idea about how anything worked right.
• 2:50
  Speaker 2: I just assumed that you put your head down and you do a good job and then eventually someone will notice and recognize you.
• 2:55
  Speaker 2: And I was very fortunate to have mentors and sponsors who helped me navigate the organization and say hey, no, actually you're supposed to ask for this, and here's the process and here's how you make sure that you actually get that promotion.
• 3:07
  Speaker 2: And that was a leap.
• 3:08
  Speaker 2: I didn't feel ready for it at the time, but I trusted the more senior people around me who had seen a lot more over the years of experience, and they said no, no, no, Siri, you can do this, Take the leap.
• 3:18
  Speaker 2: And so I did.
• 3:19
  Speaker 2: That's one example A lot of times on stage.
• 3:26
  Speaker 2: That's one example A lot of times on stage, speaking up in big conferences, presenting in front of a large audience the same thing.
• 3:29
  Speaker 2: You know, I always feel that little bit of jitteriness right before, but I take it as a sign of like this is good.
• 3:33
  Speaker 2: My mind and body are preparing to kind of really deliver peak performance and be as sharp as can be.
• 3:39
  Speaker 1: Yeah, the excitement of it all right, exactly so, when we're being bold and we're stepping through the fear and advocating for ourselves, would you have any tips for someone, especially women in the workplace, as they're thinking about advocating?
• 3:51
  Speaker 1: Because even I go back to the first time I did it and I remember how nervous I was and I was encouraged by someone to do it and I knew also that I needed to take some agency in my life because someone else isn't going to do it for you.
• 4:03
  Speaker 1: So any tips for someone who's kind of in that space right now?
• 4:07
  Speaker 1: I have two.
• 4:09
  Speaker 2: The first is repetition produces results.
• 4:12
  Speaker 2: Anything when you do it the first time is not easy, is hard, is challenging and may be scary.
• 4:20
  Speaker 2: I think back to something that was scary initially and then, if you've done it 50 times since, then, it just becomes routine.
• 4:27
  Speaker 2: So I think when we remind ourselves that the reps count and they make us better at what we're doing, but they also make the process of it easier and more enjoyable, I think that's one mental reframe that has been really helpful for me.
• 4:43
  Speaker 2: The other one is we tend to be so much harsher on ourselves than we are on our loved ones, right.
• 4:50
  Speaker 2: So we judge ourselves very harshly.
• 4:52
  Speaker 2: We think, oh, I'm not ready, I can't do this, I don't this and that.
• 4:55
  Speaker 2: But if you were giving advice to your best friend or to your child or to your sibling or someone that you love and care about and that you think is amazing, you would probably 100% tell them yes, go for it, you can, here's how you're going to do it.
• 5:09
  Speaker 2: And so I try to do that sort of switch myself mentally into that position of how would I be advising someone else in this situation and then taking my own advice.
• 5:19
  Speaker 1: Right, sometimes we don't talk to ourselves as nice as we would talk to our friends, right, exactly Right.
• 5:23
  Speaker 1: Sometimes we don't talk to ourselves as nice as we would talk to our friends, right, exactly.
• 5:25
  Speaker 1: So I think also, just what is our tone with ourselves and how are we, you know, psyching ourselves up in a very positive way about what we could do or what is possible?
• 5:33
  Speaker 1: I think those are great pieces of advice.
• 5:36
  Speaker 1: So, from college to where you are now, did you always think that you were going to be a researcher in this particular area of gender equality, or how did you get drawn to this particular topic?
• 5:48
  Speaker 2: I did not at all.
• 5:49
  Speaker 2: I would say I've been drawn to the topic of gender equality, honestly, since childhood.
• 5:54
  Speaker 2: I just never understood why girls and boys, or women and men as they grow up, who are all fabulously capable, why some people would have less of an opportunity than others in society to work, to participate in decision making, to pursue their dreams in any field that they choose.
• 6:12
  Speaker 2: It just always felt so absurd to me.
• 6:15
  Speaker 2: But I didn't think that it would be possible to do that as a career until actually my first job.
• 6:23
  Speaker 2: That was the first time that I came into contact with some of these gender inequities that still persist in the workplace today firsthand, instead of just reading an article or hearing other people talk about these things.
• 6:36
  Speaker 2: It's things like the workforce at the entry level being 50-50, but then when you look to the top, only 10% of the partners are women, gender pay gaps, things like that.
• 6:45
  Speaker 2: And it was when I personally encountered those in the workplace and my friends did too, and we were all talking about these things and sharing stories.
• 6:53
  Speaker 2: It really brought it home for me how much work there remains to be done and it kind of galvanized me to say no, I care about this so much that I want to make it my life's work to contribute to fixing these issues.
• 7:04
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and so now you've co-written a book with Iris Bonet and it's called Make Work Fair, data-driven Design for Real Results.
• 7:13
  Speaker 1: What was the precipitating event that led to that, and how did you come together with Iris to come up with a topic and form it up to get it out into the world?
• 7:23
  Speaker 2: We've both been working on these issues and conducting research on how we can fix inequities in the workplace and how we can close the very well-documented gender gaps for years.
• 7:34
  Speaker 2: It was our shared passion for these topics that initially brought us together almost a decade ago, and we've been collaborating closely ever since then, and Iris actually published her first book, which is called what Works Gender Equality by Design back in 2016.
• 7:50
  Speaker 2: And at the time, that was, I think, really paradigm shifting, in the sense that the argument of what works was based on the evidence to focus on fixing systems instead of fixing individuals.
• 8:03
  Speaker 2: Their traditional discourse around advancing women at work has been you know, women need to lean in, women need to negotiate better, women need to be more like men, they need to be more assertive, they need to talk a certain way, dress a certain way.
• 8:15
  Speaker 2: So all of those solutions were aimed at fixing women to fit into a system or to succeed in a system that, frankly, wasn't designed from the first instance to support their success.
• 8:27
  Speaker 2: And we have so much data now, so much research done over decades that shows, for example, that even when women and men get exactly the same performance ratings at work, that translates to higher rewards, more money and faster advancement for men than it does for women.
• 8:44
  Speaker 2: That's not the women's problem, that's the system's problem.
• 8:47
  Speaker 2: Right, it's the managers in the organization that are being really unfair in how they compensate individuals.
• 8:52
  Speaker 2: Or, when women and men ask for the same things, kind of promote themselves and are advocating on their own behalf.
• 9:00
  Speaker 2: That's more positively received from men, that kind of behavior, than from women, because of prevailing societal stereotypes that encourage leadership and self-promotion and aggression in men but penalize it in women.
• 9:13
  Speaker 2: And again, that's not the fault of individual women or men.
• 9:17
  Speaker 2: That's a broader dynamic of social norms and stereotypes that needs to change.
• 9:22
  Speaker 2: So Iris and I have been doing this research for a long time.
• 9:26
  Speaker 2: We've also been interacting with practitioners for a long time consulting for companies, giving talks, doing workshops and one thing we always observe is there's somewhat of a disconnect between all the research that we have that tells us what works and what doesn't, and then the practices that organizations are deploying on the ground.
• 9:44
  Speaker 2: So one of the main reasons why we wrote this book is to provide practitioners and people in real organizations at all levels, whether they're the senior leaders or the most junior entry-level employees, to give folks an actionable roadmap and an evidence-based roadmap as to what can you do personally to make your own work more fair, to level the playing field for everyone.
• 10:08
  Speaker 2: And of course that looks a little bit different.
• 10:10
  Speaker 2: If you are a very junior person, you might only be able to control what you personally do.
• 10:14
  Speaker 2: If you're a senior leader at the very top, you might be able to control what a whole organization of hundreds or thousands or hundreds of thousands of people does.
• 10:23
  Speaker 2: But either way, there's always something that all of us can do to make our work more fair.
• 10:30
  Speaker 1: Yeah, well, let's start with the word fair.
• 10:31
  Speaker 1: So, in this sense, in this particular book, what does it look like to make, or what does it mean to make work fair?
• 10:40
  Speaker 2: It's such a great question.
• 10:41
  Speaker 2: I'm glad you asked, Lee.
• 10:42
  Speaker 2: I like to use the analogy of a 100 meter dash, the sprint at the Olympics.
• 10:48
  Speaker 2: Right?
• 10:49
  Speaker 2: If you've got two sprinters at the starting line and they are equally fast, which of them is going to finish the race first?
• 10:56
  Speaker 2: It's not a trick question.
• 10:58
  Speaker 2: They finish at the same time, right?
• 11:01
  Speaker 2: Yeah, they're going to be equally as fast.
• 11:03
  Speaker 2: But now what if we take one of those sprinters and move their starting line 20 meters behind, so that they have 120 meters to run in this race instead of 100?
• 11:14
  Speaker 2: Well, because they're still equally as fast, they're always going to finish second, and those fix the individual, or fix the women approaches that I was mentioning a moment ago.
• 11:25
  Speaker 2: They'd be akin to things like oh, let's change your running technique a little bit, or let me give you a more aerodynamic outfit or a fancier, newer pair of sneakers.
• 11:35
  Speaker 2: Right, we're trying to tell the second sprinter that there's somehow something at fault with them, when actually the reason they always finish second is because their starting line is 20 meters behind the other one.
• 11:46
  Speaker 2: And so, for us, making work fair and being fair is ensuring that everyone gets to start at the same starting line and that they then get the same resources and support to run the race, so that we don't make one person run barefoot while the other one gets to run in really fast sneakers.
• 12:05
  Speaker 2: Or we don't make one person run on that smooth track where someone else has to trudge through the mud right next to their track.
• 12:13
  Speaker 2: Right, Even they both ran 100 meters.
• 12:15
  Speaker 2: Most of us would look at that and say, yeah, it's not a fair race.
• 12:18
  Speaker 2: You can't really tell who's faster.
• 12:19
  Speaker 2: One person runs on the track and one person has to run next to them in the mud.
• 12:23
  Speaker 2: And so when we bring that analogy to the workplace setting, it's about making sure that we are as objective as possible and as fair as possible in both spotting talent, bringing that talent in the door and developing it to grow through things like feedback, access to stretch opportunities, access to mentorship and sponsorship, obviously, formal performance evaluations, promotions all these things that we do to help some people rise through the organization today faster than others.
• 12:58
  Speaker 2: Some people are getting more of that support to succeed than others.
• 13:01
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I think what's interesting, as you were talking, I was trying to think in my twenties, into my thirties did I notice it?
• 13:07
  Speaker 1: I know it was there.
• 13:08
  Speaker 1: So, like in college, I I worked multiple jobs at any point, but I was actually, uh, I was an unloader for UPS and then I got into the management track at UPS, which is a big deal, especially in college, because it helps you a lot and and you get kind of your first experience managing.
• 13:26
  Speaker 1: So I was managing a 25.
• 13:28
  Speaker 1: So think of 25 semi trucks.
• 13:30
  Speaker 1: So I was the woman at UPS managing all men unloading trucks and I had been an unloader before.
• 13:38
  Speaker 1: So I got promoted from within.
• 13:40
  Speaker 1: So that in itself you would think instantaneously, right there there would be some type of obvious, like you would feel it.
• 13:47
  Speaker 1: But I don't remember it and I don't know if it was like I just kept doing me and it didn't, like I didn't.
• 13:54
  Speaker 1: I didn't see it begin to feel like it wasn't all equal, like it wasn't.
• 14:03
  Speaker 1: You know, show up, be who you are, be as bad.
• 14:06
  Speaker 1: You know, do your best and you know you'll continue to grow and learn and evolve.
• 14:10
  Speaker 1: Do you think we notice?
• 14:17
  Speaker 2: it, or do we only notice it at certain times when we're set back the 20 meters?
• 14:19
  Speaker 2: I think there's several things going on.
• 14:20
  Speaker 2: I think it's.
• 14:21
  Speaker 2: I don't want to refute anybody's personal experience.
• 14:24
  Speaker 2: If someone says, listen, I've never encountered any bias, any discrimination.
• 14:28
  Speaker 2: I've never been treated differently from anyone in my entire life, honestly, that's wonderful.
• 14:33
  Speaker 1: I'm sure that happens sometimes.
• 14:35
  Speaker 1: Yes, exactly.
• 14:36
  Speaker 2: Good for you.
• 14:36
  Speaker 2: I'm thrilled there's at the other end of the spectrum, there's people who have just noticed these things from a very young age, right, and they've kind of always been faced with such frankly drastic or extreme inequities that it's been impossible not to notice them.
• 14:51
  Speaker 2: And I think many of us are in the middle, myself included, where, as a result of our life experiences over time, our eyes have slowly been opened to say wait a minute.
• 15:01
  Speaker 2: So one thing that I always think back to is when I was in college, as you mentioned earlier, I studied chemistry and physics.
• 15:07
  Speaker 2: That was my major, and often when you meet your classmates, one of the first questions people ask each other so what are you majoring?
• 15:13
  Speaker 2: And oftentimes, really very often, when I mentioned, oh, I do chemistry and physics, people would kind of pause and look back and go oh, interesting, I thought you'd be history or French literature or psychology, right, which at the time I just brushed off and said, well, no, I'm not psychology, I'm chemistry and physics.
• 15:33
  Speaker 2: How about you?
• 15:34
  Speaker 2: And I moved on and I didn't give it a second thought.
• 15:37
  Speaker 2: Later, when I became a scholar of human behavior, right, a behavioral scientist studying unconscious bias and how to mitigate its effects, I started to recognize those types of comments as manifestations of stereotypes.
• 15:50
  Speaker 2: Even still today, you know, between 20 and 40% of students in most STEM subjects science, technology, engineering and math are women.
• 16:01
  Speaker 2: So women are underrepresented in most of these fields other than biology.
• 16:05
  Speaker 2: So in our minds, the stereotypical STEM major is a man.
• 16:10
  Speaker 2: So when we encounter a woman doing this unexpected thing, it's natural for our brains to be startled a little bit and go well, wait a second.
• 16:17
  Speaker 2: You you know you're a very girly girl.
• 16:19
  Speaker 2: You're here in your makeup and your pink dress and your heels.
• 16:21
  Speaker 2: I thought you'd be doing something stereotypically feminine.
• 16:24
  Speaker 2: So that's an example where our perspective shifts over time as we become more aware.
• 16:30
  Speaker 2: As I became more aware, I learned to see this behavior differently and, frankly, it's not that being aware always makes your life better, right, the more you see these inequities surrounding you every day.
• 16:43
  Speaker 2: Actually, it can be stressful mentally and you get angry and you get so frustrated because you're like how is the world still like this in the year 2025?
• 16:51
  Speaker 2: So it's not like.
• 16:53
  Speaker 2: Awareness is always blissful.
• 16:54
  Speaker 2: Ignorance can be bliss too, but I will say it's impossible to fix something that you don't know exists, right, and that's the reason why awareness and data.
• 17:05
  Speaker 2: We talk in the book all about, you know, data and how.
• 17:10
  Speaker 2: These conversations should be data and evidence driven rather than ideology driven, because, in order to understand what's actually happening, what are the dynamics, where does unfairness exist we need data to tell us, to give us the roadmap.
• 17:22
  Speaker 1: So what are some of the key indicators or what are some of the metrics that we should look at within organizations?
• 17:29
  Speaker 2: So there's of course, the high level things like representation.
• 17:32
  Speaker 2: You know who is doing what kind of job at what level, and I think that's sort of the obvious metric to start with, but we can go so much deeper.
• 17:40
  Speaker 2: So one statistic that really strikes me is that among Fortune 500 CEOs, of which only about 11% are women so there's a huge disparity already there in representation the tenures differ.
• 17:55
  Speaker 2: The average tenure of a male CEO is around seven and a half years as a Fortune 500 CEO, and that's almost twice the average tenure of a female Fortune 500 CEO, which is just over four years.
• 18:08
  Speaker 2: So that kind of data point also tells you something about how are these CEOs set up for success and are they getting the same resources and support to succeed once they're in the job?
• 18:20
  Speaker 2: So, aside from CEOs at any level of the organization, in addition to looking at the representation at different levels, I would look at things like how long on average, do people spend at a given rank before they get promoted to the next level, and is there a difference between women and men, where men are promoted faster or men spend less time in a particular role before getting the next one?
• 18:43
  Speaker 2: Then, of course, we want to look at other indicators of support, things like do people have mentors or sponsors?
• 18:50
  Speaker 2: Who's working on the biggest and most high-profile projects in the organization versus who is getting relegated to the smaller and less sexy projects, so to speak?
• 19:00
  Speaker 2: You know, who's assigned to the biggest client accounts versus the smaller accounts?
• 19:05
  Speaker 2: There was actually a fascinating study by Janice Fanning Madden about a decade ago which looked at a stock brokerage firm and on the surface it seemed like the female stock brokers were generating less revenue than the men, so it appeared that their performance was worse.
• 19:21
  Speaker 2: But when the researchers dug deeper into the numbers, what they actually discovered was that the women's performance was exactly the same as men's on average.
• 19:31
  Speaker 2: And I always ask people think for a second.
• 19:33
  Speaker 2: How might that be possible that women are objectively bringing in less money and yet I'm telling you they're performing equally as well as men?
• 19:40
  Speaker 2: Well, the answer was that men tended to be assigned bigger accounts and historically better performing accounts, which means that women started off working from a lower base.
• 19:51
  Speaker 1: So controlling for the size exactly.
• 19:54
  Speaker 2: They started 20 meters behind.
• 19:55
  Speaker 2: So controlling for the size of account, they actually did equally well.
• 19:58
  Speaker 2: So that's a really nice example.
• 20:00
  Speaker 2: Right of data points us to where's the actual problem.
• 20:03
  Speaker 2: It's not with the women and the men.
• 20:05
  Speaker 2: It's actually in the process whereby managers choose who works on which account or which deal, and then, once you've pinpointed that problem, you can fix it, because you can change the process whereby stockbrokers are allocated to accounts.
• 20:20
  Speaker 1: Yeah, so why haven't we fixed it or move the needle?
• 20:24
  Speaker 1: Are there things that we could do more of or less of to help us just gain some speed on addressing this?
• 20:31
  Speaker 1: Because I feel like I know organizations that I worked in.
• 20:35
  Speaker 1: You know they put efforts towards it, they put things, resources and you know finances behind it, and we still haven't moved the needle.
• 20:42
  Speaker 1: I mean even as much, you know finances behind it and we still haven't moved the needle.
• 20:44
  Speaker 1: I mean even as much you know, within one institution versus another.
• 20:49
  Speaker 1: It just doesn't seem to be making any inroads.
• 20:51
  Speaker 1: Thoughts that you have on that.
• 20:54
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a.
• 20:54
  Speaker 2: It's a big question.
• 20:55
  Speaker 2: It's a complicated issue.
• 20:56
  Speaker 2: I do think evidence points to at least some of the main reasons why we haven't made more progress.
• 21:02
  Speaker 2: One of those reasons is that we haven't approached advancing fairness with the same rigorously data-driven approach as we take to managing our core business.
• 21:14
  Speaker 2: So you would never launch a new product by saying, listen, I have this idea, let's develop this product, let's take our time, it'll be ready.
• 21:22
  Speaker 2: Whenever it's ready, we'll just put it out in the market and let's see how well it performs.
• 21:27
  Speaker 2: We would never do that right.
• 21:28
  Speaker 2: We would start with some market testing to identify a need.
• 21:32
  Speaker 2: Then we develop this product.
• 21:34
  Speaker 2: We do rigorous user testing along the way to make sure that the product actually has a likelihood of succeeding.
• 21:40
  Speaker 2: We'd have internal deadlines for completion Before we launch it out there.
• 21:44
  Speaker 2: We'd have revenue targets, profitability targets We've had all these financial plans market share targets and then, once the product is out, we would rigorously track all those numbers to see if we're performing against our expectations and, if not, we'd make some tweaks to pivot our approach.
• 22:01
  Speaker 2: So if this is how we achieve results, measurable results in our core business, then this is exactly the same approach we have to take to managing fairness as well, and the reality is, companies have spent a lot of well-intentioned time and money on activities that they've never measured, they've never actually tested.
• 22:21
  Speaker 2: If I spend $10 million putting all my people through a two-hour unconscious bias training workshops, does anything change as a result of those workshops, and what changes?
• 22:32
  Speaker 2: Right and does do the workshops actually accomplish the goal that we have?
• 22:37
  Speaker 2: Do they make the changes that we want them to make?
• 22:39
  Speaker 2: So I think that's one part of the answer is we just haven't measured and tested enough, which has then allowed us to keep putting money and time behind things that haven't actually generated real results.
• 22:50
  Speaker 2: Another factor that I want to highlight is that a lot of our activities in the fairness space, or, as some people call it, diversity, equity and inclusion space, the EI have been very programmatic in nature and very separated from your everyday work in the core business.
• 23:06
  Speaker 1: Very true, they're not intertwined or integrated.
• 23:09
  Speaker 1: It's like it's over here and then here's the work, right?
• 23:12
  Speaker 1: At least that's what it's felt like.
• 23:14
  Speaker 2: Exactly, it's the one-off training, it's the once a quarter, you know, women's network session or some leadership training or something like that, that when your calendar gets really busy it's easy to skip.
• 23:27
  Speaker 2: Or if there's a downturn in the economy for the organization, it's very easy to strike that discrete line item because, oh, here's an easy way to spend boom, strike that training or strike those networks or whatever.
• 23:38
  Speaker 2: And the research is quite clear that the much better way to achieve measurable results is actually change all the things that we're already doing instead of adding new things onto our plate.
• 23:52
  Speaker 2: So if you think about how you spend your every day, you're probably writing emails.
• 23:55
  Speaker 2: You might be participating in meetings, maybe hosting meetings.
• 23:58
  Speaker 2: You might be giving colleagues feedback.
• 24:00
  Speaker 2: You might be involved in hiring.
• 24:01
  Speaker 2: You might be involved in promotion decisions.
• 24:03
  Speaker 2: You're certainly making many decisions related to the actual business that you're running.
• 24:07
  Speaker 2: It's those everyday decisions and activities.
• 24:11
  Speaker 2: We need to tackle and tweak them ever so slightly to make them more fair, instead of adding new stuff onto people's plates that no one has time for.
• 24:21
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 24:21
  Speaker 1: I think the integration of it is key in the sense of how we see it too, as as leaders within an organization or even, you know, as the people within it actually participating.
• 24:30
  Speaker 1: And then I think the longevity, that it isn't a one and done or, like you said at one time in the year, that it's just really part of your culture, it's part of how you operate, and I think some institutions do that very well and some maybe not so well.
• 24:45
  Speaker 1: You know, it feels very surface level, potentially depending on where you've been and I've been in both.
• 24:49
  Speaker 1: What is it that?
• 24:51
  Speaker 1: An organization that is really looking at fairness within roles and within the organization?
• 24:57
  Speaker 1: What does it feel like?
• 24:59
  Speaker 1: What does it look like?
• 25:00
  Speaker 1: You know, how would you describe it to someone who hasn't seen it yet?
• 25:09
  Speaker 2: That's such an excellent question, and I think this is also one of the places where many organizations have stumbled is because they've never actually defined the goal.
• 25:15
  Speaker 2: And what does success look like?
• 25:16
  Speaker 2: Right?
• 25:17
  Speaker 2: If you don't know where you're going, you'll never be able to tell if you got there.
• 25:21
  Speaker 2: Like, if you don't, if you're sitting in the car driving and you don't know your destination, you could just keep driving forever, and I haven't seen, at least publicly, a lot of organizations defining.
• 25:32
  Speaker 2: How are we going to know when we have a more fair workplace or a fair workplace?
• 25:39
  Speaker 2: So I think this is where data comes in.
• 25:41
  Speaker 2: Again, you know, we have to have a.
• 25:43
  Speaker 2: I'll give you one example, something that my co-authors and I call the gender proportionality principle, which is the idea that when we're promoting research, a bunch of research shows that men get promoted faster than women and that the disparity emerges starting from the very first promotion to manager.
• 26:01
  Speaker 2: It's been termed the broken rung phenomenon.
• 26:03
  Speaker 2: So one of the goals that we encourage organizations to set for themselves is to equalize promotion rates.
• 26:10
  Speaker 2: Well, what does equalizing mean?
• 26:12
  Speaker 2: You know, in some organizations, like in a tech organization, your entry-level workforce might only be 20% women to start with.
• 26:20
  Speaker 2: So is it reasonable to expect that 50% of promotions from entry level to manager are women?
• 26:26
  Speaker 2: Probably not, because that's not their representation in your pool, in the entry level from which you're promoting.
• 26:34
  Speaker 2: So we put forth this idea with the gender proportionality principle, that one goal that is feasible for all organizations to strive towards is to promote people in proportion to their representation at the feeder level.
• 26:47
  Speaker 2: So if, for example, at your entry level you've got 40% women, then among all those people that are promoted from the entry level to first level manager, at least 40% should be women.
• 26:59
  Speaker 2: And it should be doable because they're right there in your pool already.
• 27:03
  Speaker 2: You can't use the pipeline argument of oh, I just love to promote more women but I don't have them.
• 27:07
  Speaker 2: And of course, over time, if you follow this proportionality principle level by level, then you'll be able to pull the sort of increasing gender diversity that exists at the lower levels ultimately all the way up to the top of the pyramid, to the highest levels of the organization.
• 27:23
  Speaker 2: So that's one example of a really concrete data point to track and a sort of concrete intervention to do to help you move the needle.
• 27:33
  Speaker 1: Okay, so in that sense, as people are thinking about where to measure, where to start or what would be a good metric to use, are there any things that you've seen that have worked well within organizations in the sense of, like, having it integrated, or doing things over time, or making it so it isn't a one and done or dependent on X, like it is just part of what we do and this is something we don't cut?
• 27:58
  Speaker 1: Have you seen a best practice that helps organizations keep a steady state?
• 28:03
  Speaker 1: Because I think, at least observationally, it feels like because it's a one and done, or it goes and comes back.
• 28:10
  Speaker 1: Or you know, I know, even I have been in organizations within the last five years that don't even have someone that's focusing on that, whether it's a manager, director or someone in the C-suite.
• 28:20
  Speaker 1: They don't even have someone who's focusing particularly, or they've added it as one more thing for the CHRO to do, right.
• 28:26
  Speaker 1: So for me, like, are there just like base best practices that an organization can understand around creating a fair workplace?
• 28:34
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head when you said it's just the way we do things around here, right?
• 28:40
  Speaker 2: That's the process goal, when things have become truly embedded into our ways of working, our operations.
• 28:46
  Speaker 2: It's just the way we do things around here, and that's when we know we've succeeded.
• 28:51
  Speaker 2: A wonderful example of this is the BBC, the global media company headquartered in the UK, where one of their career journalists, Roz Atkins.
• 29:00
  Speaker 2: Some years ago, he was the host of a nightly primetime news show and he knew that in order for his journalism to be the highest quality and most impactful it could be, it needed to accurately reflect the world that he was reporting on.
• 29:14
  Speaker 2: But Roz realized that he actually didn't have any data to know whether that was happening.
• 29:21
  Speaker 2: Right, he said I know, you know, the world is roughly 50-50 in terms of women and men, but I actually have no idea if I'm reflecting the world that way.
• 29:29
  Speaker 2: So he decided to generate the data himself and, together with his team, they started spending two minutes at the end of each night's show when they were doing their debrief, counting by hand on Post-its during our hour on air how many women did we feature on screen and how many men?
• 29:48
  Speaker 2: Very, very simple, very quick, because Roz also knew that journalists are very busy and things are shifting all the time.
• 29:55
  Speaker 2: The world of news is a super fast-paced world, so this couldn't be some super burdensome, time-consuming initiative.
• 30:00
  Speaker 2: It needed to be fast, it needed to be easy and simple.
• 30:03
  Speaker 2: So the team did this every night.
• 30:05
  Speaker 2: They tallied up the data across a month and initially, initially, they discovered that they were only at 39% women in their content, so far below the 50 that they had kind of thought they were at.
• 30:15
  Speaker 2: So they set themselves a goal.
• 30:16
  Speaker 2: They sat down as a team and said, hey, I think we should be able to get to 50-50, because that's the talent pool.
• 30:22
  Speaker 2: Ultimately, Within four months they got there and then they stayed there for nearly a decade that the show was on air.
• 30:29
  Speaker 2: But then the next part of what happened is actually even more remarkable.
• 30:33
  Speaker 2: This first part is about how do you make your own work fair and change something that you can control.
• 30:38
  Speaker 2: Right, Because Ross could control the people that they featured as expert contributors on air.
• 30:44
  Speaker 2: But then he said well, I've stumbled upon a method that really works for me to make my own work more fair.
• 30:49
  Speaker 2: My fellow journalists might benefit from this too, because they, like me, care about the quality of their journalism.
• 30:56
  Speaker 2: So he started sharing this simple counting methodology and said hey, we set ourselves a goal of 50-50.
• 31:02
  Speaker 2: We got there in a couple of months.
• 31:03
  Speaker 2: We literally just spent two minutes a day counting.
• 31:05
  Speaker 2: This is very simple and you might find this helpful too.
• 31:09
  Speaker 2: And slowly the methodology started spreading to more teams, then more divisions.
• 31:15
  Speaker 2: After a couple years it attracted the attention of the BBC senior leadership because until then it had been a fully grassroots initiative from the bottom up.
• 31:23
  Speaker 2: Raz had no budget, he had no power or authority to force anyone else to do anything.
• 31:28
  Speaker 2: He was just leveraging his networks, his relationships and kind of the role modeling effect of saying listen, I have a proof of concept because I did this myself and it worked.
• 31:39
  Speaker 2: And fast forward to today, it's become a global movement called 50-50, the Equality Project.
• 31:44
  Speaker 2: It's spread to more than 750 content, creating teams across the BBC globally, and it's even been adopted by more than 150 external partner organizations.
• 31:55
  Speaker 2: And, to your point, Lee, it's become just the way we do work around here.
• 32:00
  Speaker 2: And a remarkable test of that was in COVID, when the whole world was upside down right, the 50-50 project still kept going and while there were some little fluctuations in the data.
• 32:13
  Speaker 2: The overall trend line continues to point upward, precisely because that data-driven counting and tracking had become so embedded in their ways of working that they were able to keep it up even in the midst of this massive upheaval in the world.
• 32:28
  Speaker 1: It was the right thing to do and they kept doing the right thing.
• 32:30
  Speaker 1: You know exactly.
• 32:31
  Speaker 1: I think also where he started.
• 32:33
  Speaker 1: It sounds like he didn't do it because he was told to do it.
• 32:35
  Speaker 1: He didn't do it because X, y or Z he was.
• 32:38
  Speaker 1: He was curious and wondered and thought it was.
• 32:41
  Speaker 1: You know he should be doing that and I think that's a wonderful example.
• 32:45
  Speaker 2: So I know the question you asked me was you know what could people do?
• 32:48
  Speaker 2: Right Is?
• 32:55
  Speaker 2: I would advise listeners to follow Roz's example and think about your own work and identify one thing that you could count or track.
• 32:59
  Speaker 2: Maybe there is data already.
• 33:00
  Speaker 2: Maybe through HR you can get the stats on how people are paid or who's getting promoted or who's getting access to the special opportunities.
• 33:08
  Speaker 2: But if that data doesn't exist, see if there's a way you can generate it yourself and start keeping track of something that you feel contributes to the fairness of your work and your organization's work.
• 33:20
  Speaker 1: Got it.
• 33:21
  Speaker 1: So, as we're closing out, I think one of the things that, as I was in different organizations, that there weren't a lot of women actually applying for some of the VP or the senior VP roles and I had to encourage them or say, did you know?
• 33:36
  Speaker 1: We had this role open and it felt like women were waiting to have and we've heard this women wait to have like a hundred percent of the skill sets, where men will go at 50% and I don't know if that's the right numbers, but I know it feels like women are like waiting to check every box of being eligible to even apply, versus men who are like, oh, I can learn that.
• 33:56
  Speaker 1: So what advice or what guidance would you give women who are looking for that next role or want to apply?
• 34:03
  Speaker 1: Because as a leader, I wanted to hire more women but I think there weren't enough actually in the pool at times for us.
• 34:11
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that's such a great example of where there's the fix, the women side of things, which is us telling women to just be bold and go for it and apply.
• 34:21
  Speaker 2: I think that's really absolutely a component of this.
• 34:24
  Speaker 2: The reason data shows why women often haven't done that is because they accurately fear the social backlash that they sometimes get Because, again, men are rewarded for those types of self-promotional and agentic actions.
• 34:44
  Speaker 2: You don't meet this criteria and why are you even applying?
• 34:48
  Speaker 2: Oh, she's so self-promotional, she's so aggressive, and when we talk about women, that's said as a negative.
• 34:54
  Speaker 2: So I think there's very rational and reasonable reasons why women haven't been doing that as much in the past.
• 35:00
  Speaker 2: So the systemic side of how to fix this, then, is what are companies doing to ensure that these opportunities are actually equally available to everybody and equally advertised?
• 35:12
  Speaker 2: I'll give you two quick examples.
• 35:14
  Speaker 2: One is a study of Ericsson, the global telecommunications company, where they observed in their data a gender gap where women were less likely to apply for some of these internal mobility roles, especially roles that were in a different function or geography or division, and they tested four different messages to close the gender gap.
• 35:35
  Speaker 2: One was just the basic, you know.
• 35:37
  Speaker 2: Here's the internal mobility site.
• 35:39
  Speaker 2: Please go, explore roles and apply.
• 35:41
  Speaker 2: And then there were three other messages, and the one of them actually that was most successful in closing the gender gap was the message that said you do not need to meet all the criteria to apply.
• 35:51
  Speaker 2: There was another message where a female senior leader was talking about her own experience in doing internal mobility.
• 35:56
  Speaker 2: And then there was the third message was one that talked about how many other colleagues were also exploring these opportunities, that this is the norm.
• 36:05
  Speaker 2: You know, join thousands of other colleagues around the world that are exploring these opportunities.
• 36:09
  Speaker 2: Those last two messages with the female senior leader and the social norms, they actually exacerbated the gender gap because they made men more likely to apply for internal mobility than women.
• 36:20
  Speaker 2: So the message of the story here is to also always test and track the data to see if what you're doing is actually working as intended.
• 36:31
  Speaker 2: But they did find that the message of you don't need to be 100% qualified was the most effective at getting more women to apply.
• 36:38
  Speaker 2: In Australia there was another study done with one of the country's largest employers where they also observed a gender gap in re-applications.
• 36:45
  Speaker 2: So when folks had applied to a senior position, all the candidates that weren't chosen.
• 36:50
  Speaker 2: The company, of course, wanted them to apply for other positions in the future because they had already been vetted.
• 36:56
  Speaker 2: They'd been made it into the finalist pool.
• 36:58
  Speaker 2: These are clearly high potential people, but women were almost half as likely as men to apply, so significantly less likely and this organization tested again a super small tweak into how they work, which is in that rejection email.
• 37:14
  Speaker 2: We're so sorry, you didn't get the job this time.
• 37:16
  Speaker 2: They added one sentence that informed the top 20% of the candidates, the finalists, that they were in fact in the top 20%, and giving women this additional information and reducing ambiguity closed the gender gap in reapplications and made women over the next 12 months equally as likely as men to reapply for another senior position.
• 37:37
  Speaker 2: Such as changing the messaging in your emails right is much more effective at actually leveling the playing field than trying to change the behavior of individual women or making it seem like something is wrong with them.
• 37:57
  Speaker 1: Yeah, no, I love that Giving more information, more data.
• 38:00
  Speaker 1: I think sometimes a lot of us are driven by it, so it's like, oh, wow, it's in the top 20%.
• 38:06
  Speaker 1: Then, yeah, heck, yeah, I'm going to go after it again.
• 38:07
  Speaker 1: So I could see that actually, even with me personally, being something that I would want to do.
• 38:12
  Speaker 1: Right, and I think just sharing information that can be shared transparently, I think, is also.
• 38:19
  Speaker 1: I used to always ask, I used to always do the follow-up, which I don't think a lot of people do.
• 38:23
  Speaker 1: I don't even know if people do that these days, but, like, when you're not chosen, like I just wanted some feedback on what I could do differently, or what maybe are skill sets that I, you know, need to learn, that I didn't have, or something like that, you know, not in a bad way, but just in a really like, how do I grow, how do I learn from this?
• 38:39
  Speaker 1: Because I also looked at interviews as practice, right?
• 38:44
  Speaker 1: So, like, every time you do it, you're getting like the repetition, like you're getting better at it advocating answering the questions and, like you know, you start to get into a good groove of of how to really, you know, talk about your skill sets or be able to have those conversations that can be, you know, a little nerve wracking every now and then.
• 39:01
  Speaker 1: So I always encourage that to the earlier you can start, the better, I think that's such a great approach and really good advice for sure.
• 39:09
  Speaker 1: Well, thank you so much for being on the Bold Lounge Could talk for a long time about this.
• 39:12
  Speaker 1: Thank you, leigh, absolutely.
• 39:16
  Speaker 1: Please pick up.
• 39:16
  Speaker 1: Make Work Fair, data-driven Design for Rural Results and I'm so excited for this to get in the hands of many.
• 39:22
  Speaker 1: Thank you, leigh.
• 39:23
  Speaker 2: Thanks for having me.
• 39:30
  Speaker 1: And thank you so much for listening.
• 39:32
  Speaker 1: Thank you for listening to the Bold Lounge podcast.
• 39:33
  Speaker 1: Through the continuum of bold stories vulnerability to taking a leap you will meet more extraordinary people making a positive impact for others through their unique and important story.
• 39:41
  Speaker 1: By highlighting these stories, we hope to inspire others and share the journey of those with a bold mindset.
• 39:46
  Speaker 1: We hope you've enjoyed this podcast and look forward to sharing the next bold journey with you.