They could also collect and analyse data on their hiring procedures to see whether these are as gender neutral as they think. MIT did this, and their analysis of over thirty years of data found that women were disadvantaged by ‘usual departmental hiring processes’, and that ‘exceptional women candidates might very well not be found by conventional departmental search committee methods’.72 Unless search committees specifically asked department heads for names of outstanding female candidates, they may not put women forward. Many women who were eventually hired when special efforts were made to specifically find female candidates would not have applied for the job without encouragement. In line with the LSE findings, the paper also found that standards were not lowered during periods when special effort was made to hire women: in fact, if anything, the women that were hired ‘are somewhat more successful than their male peers’.
The good news is that when organisations do look at the data and attempt to act on it, the results can be dramatic. When a European company advertised for a technical position using a stock photo of a man alongside copy that emphasised ‘aggressiveness and competitiveness’ only 5% of the applicants were women. When they changed the ad to a stock photo of a woman and focused the text on enthusiasm and innovation, the number of women applying shot up to 40%.73 Digital design company Made by Many found a similar shift when they changed the wording of their ad for a senior design role to focus more on teamwork and user experience and less on bombastic single-minded egotism.74 The role was the same, but the framing was different – and the number of female applicants more than doubled.
These are just two anecdotes, but there is plenty of evidence that the wording of an ad can impact on women’s likelihood to apply for a job. A study of 4,000 job ads found that women were put off from applying for jobs that used wording associated with masculine stereotypes such as ‘aggressive’, ‘ambitious’ or ‘persistent’.75 Significantly, women didn’t consciously note the language or realise it was having this impact on them. They rationalised the lack of appeal, putting it down to personal reasons – which goes to show that you don’t have to realise you’re being discriminated against to in fact be discriminated against.
Several tech start-ups have also taken a leaf out of the New York Philharmonic’s book and developed blind recruitment systems.76 GapJumpers gives job applicants mini assignments designed for a specific post, and the top-performing applicants are sent to hiring managers without any identifying information. The result? Around 60% of those selected end up coming from under-represented backgrounds. Tech recruiter Speak with a Geek found a similarly dramatic result when they presented the same 5,000 candidates to the same group of employers on two different occasions. The first time, details like names, experience and background were provided; 5% selected for interviews were women. The second time, those details were suppressed. The proportion of women selected for interview was 54%.
While blind recruitment might work for the initial hiring process, it is less easy to see how it could be incorporated into promotions. But there is a solution here too: accountability and transparency. One tech company made managers truly accountable for their decisions on salary increases by collecting data on all their decisions and, crucially, appointing a committee to monitor this data.77 Five years after adopting this system, the pay gap had all but disappeared.
CHAPTER 5
The Henry Higgins Effect
When Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg got pregnant for the first time she was working at Google. ‘My pregnancy was not easy,’ she wrote in her bestselling book Lean In. She had morning sickness for the whole nine months. She didn’t just develop a bump, her whole body was swollen. Her feet went up two sizes ‘turning into odd-shaped lumps I could see only when they were propped up on a coffee table’.
It was 2014, and Google was already a huge company, with a huge car park – one that Sandberg found increasingly difficult to walk across in her swollen state. After months of struggling she finally went to one of Google’s founders, Sergey Brin, and ‘announced that we needed pregnancy parking [at the front of the building], preferably sooner rather than later’. Brin agreed immediately, ‘noting that he had never thought about it before’. Sandberg herself was ‘embarrassed’ she hadn’t realised ‘that pregnant women needed reserved parking until I experienced my own aching feet’.
What Google had suffered from until Sandberg became pregnant was a data gap: neither Google’s male founders nor Sandberg had ever been pregnant before. As soon as one of them did get pregnant, that data gap was filled. And all the women who got pregnant at the company after that would benefit from it.
It shouldn’t have taken a senior woman getting pregnant for Google to fill this data gap: there had been pregnant women working at the company before. Google could – and should – have been proactive in searching that data out. But the reality is that it usually does take a senior woman for problems like this to be fixed. And so, because business leadership is still so dominated by men, modern workplaces are riddled with these kind of gaps, from doors that are too heavy for the average woman to open with ease, to glass stairs and lobby floors that mean anyone below can see up your skirt, to paving that’s exactly the right size to catch your heels. Small, niggling issues that aren’t the end of the world, granted, but that nevertheless irritate.
Then there’s the standard office temperature. The formula to determine standard office temperature was developed in the 1960s around the metabolic resting rate of the average forty-year-old, 70 kg man.1 But a recent study found that ‘the metabolic rate of young adult females performing light office work is significantly lower’ than the standard values for men doing the same type of activity. In fact, the formula may overestimate female metabolic rate by as much as 35%, meaning that current offices are on average five degrees too cold for women. Which leads to the odd sight of female office workers wrapped up in blankets in the New York summer while their male colleagues wander around in summer clothes.2
These data gaps are all inequitable, not to mention being bad business sense – an uncomfortable workforce is an unproductive workforce. But workplace data gaps lead to a lot worse than simple discomfort and consequent inefficiency. Sometimes they lead to chronic illness. Sometimes, they mean women die.
Over the past hundred years workplaces have, on the whole, got considerably safer. In the early 1900s around 4,400 people in the UK died at work every year.3 By 2016, that figure had fallen to 137.4 In the US, around 23,000 people (out of a workforce of 38 million) died at work in 1913.5 In 2016, 5,190 people died out of a workforce of 163 million.6 This significant decrease in fatal accidents has largely been the result of unions pressuring employers and governments to improve safety standards; since the 1974 Health and Safety at Work Act, workplace fatalities in the UK have dropped by 85%. But there is a caveat to this good news story. While serious injuries at work have been decreasing for men, there is evidence that they have been increasing among women.7
The rise in serious injuries among female workers is linked to the gender data gap: with occupational research traditionally having been focused on male-dominated industries, our knowledge of how to prevent injuries in women is patchy to say the least. We know all about heavy lifting in construction – what the weight limits should be, how it can be done safely. But when it comes to heavy lifting in care work, well, that’s just women’s work, and who needs training for that?