Siri Chilazi on How to Make Work Fair

By Brigid Schulte

Siri Chilazi’s life’s work is to advance gender equality in the workplace.

And at a time when the Trump administration is attacking diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts and when many corporations are dropping or backing away from previous commitments to equity, Chilazi is surprisingly hopeful.

I had a chance to speak with Chilazi, a senior researcher at the Women and Public Policy Program at Harvard Kennedy School, about the new book, Make Work Fair: Data-Driven Design for Real Results, that she co-authored with Iris Bohnet, a behavioral economist and professor at Harvard Kennedy School of Government. (Bohnet wrote one of my favorite gender equality books of all time: What Works: Gender Equality by Design.)

Chilazi is touring the world, sharing the stories, research, and data in the behavioral science-focused book. Although she says the rhetoric of DEI is changing, the public’s commitment to fairness isn’t.

“The value and importance of fairness is broadly shared. My sense is that the number of people who care has not changed. And the intensity with which they care about fairness at work or in the world has not changed,” she told me. “What has changed is people's risk tolerance, for understandable reasons, and people's willingness to use their institutional position to make public statements or public acts around this.”

New research shows just how strongly Americans believe in fairness and yes, diversity, equity, and inclusion. Researchers surveyed more than 5,000 Americans from a variety of backgrounds and found that respondents overwhelmingly approved of equity and fairness. More than 82 percent of those surveyed agreed with statements like, “Racial diversity benefits the country.”

But here’s what’s critical: people also underestimated the support for diversity and inclusion among other Americans and overestimated anti-diversity sentiment. That gap between reality and expectation is what researchers call “pluralistic ignorance.” They found that when people were informed about the high levels of support for diversity, they were more likely to support diversity efforts as well.

“When people learn about the widespread support for diversity and inclusion, they change their own attitudes about these issues,” the researchers wrote in Scientific Reports. “After being exposed to actual survey data from national opinion polls, our participants scored higher on a variety of indicators related to diversity and inclusion. In other words, correcting people’s pluralistic ignorance has important beneficial effects.”

That’s why continuing to talk about fairness and to share real data about it is so important.

To Chilazi, fairness is fundamental. What needs to change is how we go about ensuring it. “It comes down to how we frame fairness. Do we talk about it as a quest for us all to make workplaces collectively better? Or do we inadvertently create some antagonistic dynamics? To me, if there were a little bit less talk and more action, even behind the scenes, quietly, just going about our daily business behind the scenes and getting it done, it really wouldn’t be a bad thing.”

The following is a transcript, edited for length and clarity, of our conversation at the cozy Wonderland Books, a newly opened independent bookstore in Bethesda, Maryland. Watch a video of the event here.

Brigid Schulte: Let’s start off with the question of fairness. What is fair at work? The question is key right now, as the Trump administration, with the backlash against Diversity Equity and Inclusion, or DEI, efforts, is trying to make the case that if you have a diverse workforce or diverse leadership, that implies you’re lowering standards, and that that’s not fair.

Siri Chilazi: I love that we're starting with this because I think this is exactly the conversation that we need to be having right now. We started writing this book two and a half years ago, and we’d already decided that we weren't going to call it anything about diversity, equity, or inclusion.

Why?

Because we wanted to get at what is really the goal of all of those efforts to begin with, right? Why are we doing all this work to try to level the playing field? What's the vision? For us, the vision is a world in which every single individual gets to be judged as an individual on their own merit and has an equal chance of succeeding. Everyone, in essence, gets an equal or level playing field to play on.

Here’s a simple analogy. Think about the 100-meter dash. You've got two sprinters who are about to embark on this dash. Is it fair that one of them needs to start 10 meters or 20 meters behind the other so that they have a longer race to run? Most of us would say, of course not, right? In order to accurately judge who's the fastest sprinter, they have to start at the same starting line, and then we'll see who winds up at the finish line first.

Or, if one of them is running on the track, and we put the other runner in the mud next to the track, and say, “Okay, go!” Who's going to finish first? We would probably look at that and say that's not fair either. So for Iris and me, fairness means that everyone really gets that equal shot to succeed to their fullest potential.

In the real world, of course, not all the sprinters are equally as fast. Not everybody wants to become the CEO. Not everybody wants to work 80 hours a week, right? And we need to honor those individual preferences. But everyone should at least be able to do their work to the best of their ability and get fairly rewarded for that.

And this brings us to meritocracy and the relationship between meritocracy and fairness. I don't know about you, but I feel like meritocracy is a word that has recently sort of burst onto the scene and everybody's talking about it right and left all of a sudden. I had to, in fact, go look up the definition of meritocracy just to make sure I know what I'm talking about.

And the Merriam-Webster Dictionary tells us that meritocracy is a system where people advance or are given power according to their demonstrated abilities, their merit.

Then the question is, is that happening? And as a researcher, I can tell you definitively, it's not. There's a mountain of evidence to suggest that today, we are not running the race with everyone starting at the same starting line, but in fact, many people are starting way back.

Let me give you just one example. There are more than 300 studies, so-called audit studies, where researchers send two versions of the exact same resume with just one little detail changed. So maybe one resume has a woman's name at the top, and the other one has a man's. Or maybe one resume indicates that the person is 35 years old, and the other indicates through a college graduation date that they're 55. Or maybe one resume mentions being involved in the PTA, which indicates that this person is a parent, and the other has no such mention. But otherwise, everything on these two resumes is identical.

Now, if we lived in a true meritocracy, where people advance according to their demonstrated skills, these two candidates should have exactly the same chance of getting invited to an interview or getting hired because their demonstrated skills are exactly the same. But more than 300 studies show that that is actually not true.

Men are systematically more likely to get workplace opportunities than women. Ageism and discrimination against people with children is real. So it's just a fact that we don't live in a meritocracy yet today.

And while it remains a really worthwhile vision to strive for, the only way we'll get there is by evaluating people fairly, spotting talent, and nurturing it fairly, so that the best talent actually rises to the top.

Schulte: I love that. We spoke recently for a piece I wrote for U.S. News and World Report about how corporate America has spent billions of dollars on DEI efforts to make work fairer and yet doesn’t have much to show for it. Why haven’t those efforts led to fairer work?

Chilazi: In short, it's because as much as we've had great intentions, we've been spending money and time and effort on the wrong things.

Let's take just one example: diversity training and unconscious bias training. We've been studying it since the 1960s, and there's no evidence to suggest that diversity training changes behavior.

Yes, it can increase awareness in the short term. If you survey people after a training course, they'll say, “Oh my gosh, training was amazing. The facilitator was so inspiring, I learned a lot. I'm gonna go and tackle discrimination and bias in my work now.” And then when we follow up six, 12 and 18 months later to see if people are making different decisions or if anything is changing, we just don't see evidence of that.

So as much as we've been well-intentioned, we’ve focused on the wrong solutions that haven't yielded results. And a common feature of a lot of these approaches—trainings, employee resource groups like women's networks, speaker events, networking sessions—is that they’re an extra thing that you do on top of your everyday work.

It's that extra line item on the budget over and above what's part of your core business. So of course, when there's political pressure or a downturn in the market, what's the first and easiest thing to get cut? It's the line item. When your real work overwhelms your calendar, what's the easiest thing to skip? It's the extra training. It's the extra networking session.

So, if we're going to really make progress and see real results, to truly make work fair, we have to make the things that we're already doing more fair. So that instead of doing extra things and starting new programs, we continue to do our everyday work, but just better.

So, if you're running meetings, how could you run them better? If you're hiring people, if you're giving feedback, how would you do that in a more objective way? How would you tweak your evaluation criteria so that you're able to actually spot the best talent? That's the systemic approach that has been proven to work.

Schulte: I want to get to those practical strategies, but you also write in your book about DEI backlash, that some DEI trainings have actually had the opposite effect, and made work less fair. Can you explain that?

Chilazi: Yes. There are a lot of different flavors of that backlash. One flavor is that humans in general hate to be told what to do and especially how to think. So when trainings are mandatory, there's evidence that sometimes people leave the training and behave in even more biased ways afterward. Because they're kind of saying, “Nope, you're not going to tell me what to do. I'm going to have my own mind.”

The other flavor of backlash is the so-called moral licensing effect, which is that when you do something virtuous, you then feel like you have the license to go do something unvirtuous. I always like the analogy of going to a workout class, or going for a big run and saying, “Oof, I've earned myself a piece of cake.” And now you've undone all the good effects of your workout.

So similarly, people who have gone through trainings or attended events sometimes paradoxically, even unconsciously, then feel like they have license to make less fair decisions on an everyday basis.

And then there's the unfortunate fact that, again, despite good intentions, many of the recent efforts came across as wanting to lift up certain groups, perhaps at the expense of others, so that DEI wasn't actually inclusive for everybody.

I'm personally not surprised that that's generated some backlash. If we want to actually make the world fair and make work fair, then it's everybody's job. And also, everyone benefits, because we all want to be judged as individuals. We all want to have our work and our skills evaluated fairly. We want to get rewarded fairly, so that if you did equal work, you don't get paid less than somebody else. So the benefits accrue to all of us, but the work also has to be done by all of us. And that's not how it's been up until now.

Schulte: One of the things that I really love about your book is that you not only cite this wonderful research throughout, but you’re action oriented. Can you talk about some of the practical strategies workplaces can begin using that really do make work fairer for everyone?

Chislazi: Yes. I’ll start off with meetings.

There’s a great study done at Novartis, a global Swiss pharmaceutical company. The company's goal was to increase employees’ feelings of inclusion and psychological safety. So researchers looked at the one-on-one meetings that employees have with their managers and tested various guidelines for managers on how to conduct these meetings.

It turns out the most effective guideline was: Talk less. Listen more. Turn over control of this meeting to your employee and say, “What do you need? What are your aspirations? How can I help you?” That led both to team members feeling more included, and it also increased the frequency of meetings. So it's a tiny tweak to something that's already happening in most organizations.

Let’s talk about resumes. I'm sure everybody in the room has one. Most of yours are probably in the format where you list your past work experience with specific dates attached, right? So, management consultant, 2015 - 2020. Well, one of the things that this format does is make career gaps really obvious.

If you ever took time away from the workplace to care for children, to care for elderly family members, to go on a sabbatical, to work on a side hustle that didn't pan out that you now want to downplay, to take care of your mental health for any reason—you're going to have a gap that's now really obvious. And empirically, we have seen that employers tend to penalize applicants with career caps. In one study in the United Kingdom of more than 9, 000 firms, researchers made a small tweak. They listed the experience with the total amount of time. So management consultant, five years. Journalist, I don't know, 10 years, right?

Schulte: (laughing.) Oh, much longer.

Chilazi: You don't lose any information that's relevant to people's skills and their merits. Right? All you do is obscure the potential career gaps. This study found that it increased the likelihood of everybody, women and men, being called in for an interview and advancing in the hiring process. Because when companies were able to look past the career gaps, they were better able to focus on the actual skills that people brought to the job.

Now, promotions. In most of our organizations, the way you get promoted is you have to ask for it, or your manager has to ask for it. So part of what this process is testing is someone’s willingness or ability to self-promote, to be aggressive, to self-advocate, which may or may not be a mark of success or acquired skill in most jobs.

One solution that's been shown to level the playing field is moving from this kind of “opt-in” promotion system, where you have to actively raise your hand, to an “opt-out” system, where after a certain amount of time, all relevant employees are automatically considered for promotion.

Think about a lot of professional services firms—law, consulting—where people are typically an analyst for a couple of years before they may get promoted to associate. You could just say, “Okay, after two years as an analyst, we're going to review everybody for promotion.” It doesn't mean that everyone will get promoted, but we'll actually review them. That would be an example of an “opt-out” scheme that has been shown to really level the playing field.

Performance evaluations—the evaluation of humans in any context—is one of the processes that is most rife with bias. As a general rule, the more structure and formality you can introduce, the better. Whenever things are informal, and when there's ambiguity, room for interpretation, room for subjectivity, that's when we see bias flourish.

So, a couple of concrete things: One is that humans are very bad at remembering. If you're asked to evaluate someone once a year, and you're supposed to really accurately remember everything that they did over the last 12 months, that’s very difficult to do. So getting feedback more often along the way minimizes bias because people are just more likely to accurately remember what happened.

Asking broad, open-ended questions like, “Comment on this person's performance,” is much more likely to invite bias than asking more specific questions. So instead, ask, “What are this person's top two strengths? What is their one most critical development area?” And ask for specific examples of concrete behaviors to back up all that feedback. Way too many of our evaluations in organizations today rest on those subjective assessments that are also really difficult for others to verify.

One strategy that some companies have tried is having a norm champion in the room, or a devil's advocate, or a fairness officer in the room who's listening in to [evaluation or promotions] conversations. And when two candidates are treated differently, or talked about differently, or when gendered language or stereotypical assessments are being made, they flag it and say, “Hey, wait a second, we didn't say that about Bob five minutes ago. Why are we now saying that about Jenna?”

There has to be some way to enforce that accountability. Tech can play that role too, by the way. There's software that will flag gendered words.

Schulte: That’s all so interesting. And these strategies are so doable! One of the things that’s a big theme in both your book, as well as my recent book, Over Work, is how in so many work cultures, we tend to think of these as individual problems or individual issues, and they're really systems issues. You write a lot about using behavioral science, which is all about understanding how systems and our environment shape our thoughts and actions. Can you talk more about that?

Chilazi: That's the underpinning insight of the whole book and of this whole field, which is that we actually know so much about how human brains work, from psychology, neurobiology, sociology, and many other fields. And one of the things we know is that our brains naturally process really large amounts of information every single second by resorting to mental shortcuts, heuristics, and patterns. And that's actually what we call unconscious bias.

There is no evidence to suggest that we can somehow take this bias out of human brains. It's likely not possible. It's built into how our brains work. So all these efforts to de-bias humans, to get our brains to fundamentally function differently, are almost doomed to fail. It's a lot of wasted effort.

But what behavioral science has shown is that our environments—our physical environments, the processes and systems that surround us at work, what we think fellow humans believe, and norms, or the shared but often unspoken understandings of what's acceptable or expected in a given context—those types of systemic factors shape our behavior to an immensely large degree that we don't even realize.

Let me give you one quick example, from the United Kingdom again. At Santander Bank, researchers asked the men at this bank, “How many of you support flexible work and would be willing to work flexibly yourself?” What proportion of the male employees at Santander were fans of flexibility?

Schulte: 100 percent?

Chilazi: You're so close! 99 percent! Now here's the real kicker. When they were then asked, “What percentage of other men, your peers working here, do you think are supportive? What do you think they said?

Schulte: I’m wondering if it’s like the DEI studies that show people underestimate support for diversity and flexibility. I'd guess it was 20 percent?

Chilazi: 65 percent! That’s still a big gap between what men believed themselves and what they thought other men believed.

So they ran an experiment where some of these men were informed, “Listen, actually, everybody agrees with you. Flexible work should be normalized and you should be doing it.” Their intentions to take parental leave and work flexibly themselves increased dramatically—13 percent at Santander and 50 percent at another U.K. bank.

So it just goes to show you that we don't always behave fully in accordance with our beliefs and values. Because our peers, our surrounding systems, what we think our bosses will think, what we think our organization values, those types of things, shape what we actually do. So, changing the system, not the individuals, is the most efficient way to get humans to behave differently.

Schulte: In addition to using behavioral science, you also write that using data is key to making work fair.

Chilazi: Data is central to this work. And so I'm very concerned, [with the anti-DEI backlash], if we don't have the ability to collect data, report on it, even internally, or even to the relevant stakeholders. Could you run a business without data? If you were developing a new product and taking it to market, could you be successful by saying, “Oh, let's just develop what we think is awesome, and let's not even have a deadline. Let's just release this product whenever it's ready, and then when it's out on the market, let's just see how it does.”

Except, “Oh, wait a second, we won’t have correct sales data, and we can't track profitability numbers, so I guess we'll just trust that people are loving this thing, and we'll keep manufacturing more of it.” We'd never ever run our businesses this way. In fact, one of the other core messages of the book is that, to achieve real results and move from a world of a lot of talk to measurable outcomes we have to approach fairness the same way we approach our core business, with the same seriousness but also the same tools, including data.

I will say though, that I think in this moment, less [DEI] talk is not necessarily a bad thing. Because there's been a lot of talk in the last few years, and it wasn't always backed up by action or real results. So, I wouldn't be too sad if organizations stopped the flashy events and the big budget announcements, “Ooh, we're spending a hundred million dollars on this and committing blah blah blah millions to that.” And instead, organizations said, “We're just going to change how we run meetings. We're going to change how we hire. We're going to re-evaluate our performance evaluation criteria. We're going to run a pay audit to ensure that there's no favoritism and no undue gaps.”

All of that can happen without any kind of public proclamation, without having any separate line item in the budget, without it having any title related to DEI. It's just you running your business in the smartest, most effective way. So I think that is the way forward. And I'm optimistic that it can actually yield better results than the approaches that we've tried so far.

Schulte: So you're hopeful?

Chilazi: I am hopeful. I'm a little bit concerned, too. But I'm very hopeful that if we maximize this moment, we can use it for something good. Because out of the ashes can rise the phoenix. So if we can be the phoenix and take this to a better place, there's actually a lot of upside ahead of us.

Schulte: I hope so. To get to that better place, you have lots of great stories and examples of organizations showing the way, changing systems to make work fairer. Can you share one or two that have really stuck with you?

Chilazi: Let me share the story of Ros Atkins, a journalist at the BBC. I particularly love this story because Ros Atkins is a journalist who doesn't work in HR. He isn't a senior leader of the organization. He’s in no position of authority or power to compel anyone to do anything, but he manages to ignite a global movement nonetheless.

I'm going to give you the takeaway up front before I tell you the story, because the takeaway is that all of us can do this. All of us can do something small in our own work that can have unbelievable ripple effects down the road. So Ros knew that his journalism would be more powerful if it were reflective of the world that it actually serves. But he realized that he had no data to know whether that was the case.

At the time, he was the presenter on an hour-long nightly prime-time news show. He said, “We don't have the data, but we're gonna generate it. Let's start counting.” With his production team, every night, after the end of their show, they took two minutes and they said, “Who did we feature on screen during our one hour? And were they women or men?” So they generated this data for a month and found out that only 39 percent of the people on screen on their program were women, which was a lot lower than what they thought.

So they said, “We've got room to improve. Let's set ourselves a goal of getting to 50 percent.” Ros Atkins and his production team got there within four months, and then they kept it up for as the program was on the air. So this is already a huge success story of how one show changed the face of journalism. But what's really remarkable is that Ros didn't stop there. He then said, “Some of my fellow journalists might find this valuable too, because I know they, like me, care about high-impact, high-representative journalism. And I know they, like me, are super busy and overwhelmed. But we figured out a simple system to build this into what we already do. To make work fair. Not a new program, just doing what you're already doing, but doing it better.”

So he started sharing the approach with other programs. And long story short, eventually more than 750 content-creating teams all around the BBC globally joined, as well as more than 150 external partner organizations. This methodology spread to other news organizations, journalism schools, and corporations.

And the most remarkable thing, I think, is that audiences have noticed. BBC does regular surveys of their target market, and people noticed more diversity in the content, and people reported enjoying the content more when it became more representative.

Schulte: I love that one person can ignite a global movement for change. A few years ago, I wrote for the BBC, and the editors told me about the 50 percent rule before I even started reporting. I really appreciated that.

Last question. You’re saying we can all be change agents. Have you made changes in your own life, either personally or professionally to promote fairness as a result of this work?

Chilazi: One anecdote that I share in the book is that, in addition to being an academic researcher, I have a second career as a fitness instructor. Often in my classes, I'd see the sea of women, so I'd say, “Hello, ladies, welcome!” And there was one time I was teaching class, and I'd been saying “ladies, ladies, ladies” all along. Then I realized there were a couple of gentlemen lurking in the back row. So, I made a really concerted effort to change my speech patterns towards words that are more gender-neutral, so that whoever is in the room can always feel like they belong.

So, now, I use words like, “Folks, friends, everyone, beautiful people, fabulous rock stars.” It took me a little bit of focused practice for a couple months. I wrote down a list of gender neutral words for myself. But in a few months, I changed my speech pattern. Now, it’s just how I speak naturally.

In fact, Lufthansa, the Germany-based airline, has done something similar. In all their announcements, they don't say, “Ladies and gentlemen.” They just say, “Dear passengers.” Because some passengers are kids, some may not identify as a lady or a gentleman, and there's really no harm in being a little bit more inclusive.

Schulte: So do you have a call to action for us?

Chilazi: My call to action for all of us is to think about what we're already doing on a daily basis, at work or at home. These don't have to be huge, big things. Pick one small tweak that you could make to something to make it fairer. Then do it.