Since Donald Trump took office, he has blamed DEI — workplace initiatives to improve diversity, equity and inclusion — for everything from inflation to the Washington plane crash.
Business professor Iris Bohnet has a more measured view than the US president on how such initiatives could evolve.
“We could throw the baby out with the bathwater, and say DEI is, for whatever reason, not what we should be doing now,” she says. “Or we could take this moment and revisit DEI and think about a different path forward that still creates equal opportunities . . . but might not do the things that haven’t been working in the past.”
Research by Bohnet, a Harvard professor and co-director of the Kennedy School’s Women and Public Policy Program, and others could play a role in deciding the route many companies now take as they grapple with the Trump-fuelled backlash against so-called woke human resources policies.
The Swiss business professor gained wide public recognition with her first book, What Works. Published in 2016, it laid out ways in which organisations could use the data-driven findings of behavioural science to redesign processes to reduce gender bias. Among other things, she pointed out that diversity training, while well intentioned, rarely changed behaviour and could be counterproductive, whereas initiatives such as “blind” recruitment could reduce bias.
Bohnet remains convinced that companies and policymakers should not just try to “fix the women” — for instance, by assuming their struggle to achieve work-life balance is the problem — but examine the data and change the system to make it fairer, by, say, tackling a general culture of overwork. But as the culture wars have intensified, critics of “wokeism”, such as conservative think-tank The Heritage Foundation, have started to pick up on some of her findings to attack the whole concept of what became known as DEI, and the overarching case for environmental, social and governance (ESG) initiatives.
Interviewed last month, just ahead of Trump’s inauguration, Bohnet says she looks back to 2016 as a more “innocent” time. “I am frustrated that [the discussion] has become so political.”
Even so, both she and her co-author, Harvard’s Siri Chilazi, are excited about the message of their new book, Make Work Fair. Since 2016, more organisations have acted on the suggestions in What Works. The new book builds on that practical evidence to show how best to design fairness into work.
The choice of fairness as an objective is deliberate — and timely, given the spreading allergic reaction to DEI. When they talked to senior corporate leaders, mainly men, about their research, Bohnet and Chilazi found “very few people are against fairness”.
“If you have a session that’s titled ‘Gender Equality’ or ‘Women’s Advancement’, who’s going to come in the room? It’s the choir. It’s the women, who already understand there’s a problem with women’s advancement,” explains Chilazi in the interview. “But when you talk about managing or running or leading fair, high-performing organisations, that’s always something that has captured every leader’s attention regardless of who they are.”
Chilazi worries DEI has been channelled into its own silo, separate from day-to-day, revenue-generating activities. Instead, it should be “a component of everything that you’re already doing, not something extra to be done on top of your daily job if there’s time, if there’s budget, if the macroeconomic conditions or the political winds are favourable”.
Since the interview, not only has Trump issued an executive order to “end radical and wasteful government DEI programs”, but big companies including Accenture and Deloitte US have scrapped diversity and inclusion goals. “We are not concerned about doing away with things that have not worked,” Bohnet and Chilazi wrote in a follow-up email. “But we are very concerned when we give up on fairness altogether. Favouritism and cronyism have never served the world well.”
The duo advocate strongly for system-wide changes — such as paid, gender-neutral, transferable parental leave, or alterations in the tax system. But they also point to cheap, bottom-up techniques to achieve fairness. “Given that we come from behavioural economics, we also go for the low-hanging fruit,” says Bohnet. She cites her study of an Australian company that found that among narrowly unsuccessful job candidates, men were nearly twice as likely as women to reapply for similar leadership posts later. When the company added a sentence in its communication with unsuccessful candidates telling them they had been among the top 20 per cent of applicants for the first role, this gender gap disappeared.
Another approach that can make work fairer is “norm entrepreneurship”, coined by legal scholar and behavioural economics expert Cass Sunstein for activists who influence social norms and behaviour by spreading a message of change. Chilazi and Bohnet provide examples such as Tarana Burke, who first used the phrase “Me Too” to raise awareness of sexual abuse, and Ros Atkins, a BBC journalist who set a goal for 50-50 representation of men and women among contributors to his programme. (The Financial Times is part of the wider 50:50 Equality Project that his entrepreneurial initiative started.)
Norm entrepreneurship can be a double-edged sword, though. “Most concerningly, demagogues across the world have mastered the use of social influence,” write Bohnet and Chilazi, reminding readers that early research into social norms focused on how Adolf Hitler managed to change what many Germans thought was acceptable.
Similarly, the researchers offer evidence for the power of role models. One French study brought female scientists into high schools to talk about their life and work. Bohnet says she was “floored” by the impact of this low-cost intervention. Among female teenagers who listened to the hour-long talks, the share enrolling in undergraduate maths, physics, computer science and engineering programmes increased by between 20 and 28 per cent. “It’s powerful,” she says, but that “also makes it dangerous” if the wrong role models are presented — a risk at a time of political polarisation.
Business leaders often ask “what is the one thing I should do” to advance fairness at work, says Chilazi. In reality, “role models are one component. Norm entrepreneurship is a component. Tweaking our systems and processes, one component. Taking a data-driven approach is one component . . . Some [tools] will fit me in this moment. And because of the political conditions right now, some of them may not be the right tools. But the point is, you have a whole toolbox.”
Bohnet has always resisted oversimplification and generalisation. In What Works, for example, she pointed out that for certain projects, particularly involving implementation of existing solutions, homogeneous teams are more effective. Complex problems may be better solved with a more gender-diverse team, but only if a critical mass of the minority group is involved.
Such nuances are one reason why she and Chilazi decline to make “the business case” for fairness. Another reason, according to Bohnet, is that the business case “has always been a little loosey-goosey on ESG, in the sense that it’s ‘good for the company, but we can’t quite prove it’”. “Bad research” purported to show that greater gender diversity on boards improved corporate performance. But, Bohnet says, “it’s just not true. And it’s incredibly hard to prove that there’s a correlation, even just a correlation — we’re not even talking about causation.”
There is a still more important point. Chilazi and Bohnet write in Make Work Fair that relying only on the business case for fairness raises a disconcerting question: “If data emerged suggesting that including women or people of colour harmed a company’s profitability, could that be used as an excuse to exclude them even further from the workplace?”
“I couldn’t have written this book if it was just about the business case” for diversity, adds Bohnet. “It is a human right.”
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