The test all dads with daughters should take
The headhea of St Paul’s Girls’ school wants fathers tot reveal their hidden prejudices abouta womenw at work, says Harry Wallop
Back in the mid‑Fifties, the Boston Symphony Orchestra was 90 per cent male and just 10 per cent female. It th then introduced what, at the time time, was considered a radical ide idea: blind auditions. Musicians would have to play from behi behind a screen to ensure the judgin judging panel would not be influence influenced by the performer’s gender. W Within a few years, the orchestra had become about 35 per cent f female. The po policy was not only adopted b by most other leading orchestra orchestras in the United States ove over the next couple of decades, b but is cited as a key early exper experiment to prove how both men a and women are prey to unconsciou unconscious gender bias. Today, on one of the country’s leading girls’ schools has cchallengedchallenged fathersfat to take their own ununconscious unconscious bi bias test, to prove that it is still a scourg scourge in Britain’s offices – one of the main reasons why even talented women often do not make it to the top, and why just a quarter of executive directorsdire of FTSE 100 companies are female.fe March 15 is th the first annual Dads4Daughte Dads4Daughters day, following the launch of a cam campaign 12 months ago by St Paul’s Girls’Gi School in west London (the a alma mater of actress Rachel Weisz and politician Harriet Harman) to re recruit fathers of the school’s pupi pupils to help smash the glass ceiling in their workplace by the time thei their children start work. There is al already some robust scien science to back up the idea that dad dads with daughters think different differently. A 2015 Harvard University study looking at the decisions made b by 224 US Courts of Appeal judges foundfo that those men with daughters c consistently voted in a more feminist f fashion on gender issues than judge judges who had just sons. St Paul’s says thatt it was inspired by the HeForShe initiative launched by the United Na Nations and promoted by the actress Em Emma Watson, which attempted to eng engage men in the struggle for betterbette gender equality.
“We are constantly struck by the anecdotal evidence from our former pupils about the continuing inequality in the workplace,” says Liza Coutts, a history and politics teacher at the school. She points out that a survey of alumni, aged between 24 and 35, found that 71 per cent had witnessed or experienced it themselves.
“We were also struck how many of the fathers were in a position of influence. And we thought, let’s engage the other 50 per cent.”
Theresa May recently credited her father, Hubert Brasier, for pushing her into politics: “He always encouraged me to see no boundaries, no barriers, just go out there and do the best that you can and aim high.” And Barack Obama, the father of two teenage daughters, openly identifies as a feminist: “In my household there’s no choice.”
But however enlightened a dad may believe himself to be, most psychologists agree that we all still suffer from hidden prejudices – which are what the campaign wants to get out in the open. So far, 50 other private schools have joined St Paul’s, along with big City firms EY, UBS, Aviva and Accenture. The hope is that it will eventually become a national initiative, embraced by the state sector, too.
One of the fathers who has signed up is William Alexander, 52, global practice leader at Spencer Stuart, the headhunter. He has three daughters, Rachel, 19, Grace, 17, and Isla, 13, and is married to Fiona, an accountant. He jokes that there is a certain Jane Austen vibe to his west London home; even the cat, Scout, is female.
“You can’t change unconscious bias, because it is unconscious. But you can be more aware of it. You can pick yourself up, and pick others up
‘You can’t change unconscious bias but you can be more aware of it’
‘Men are in more positions of power. That is something we need to challenge’
when you see it,” he says. “A very simple example is: this week, one of the executive assistants was chasing me for a report that I was supposed to write. She said, ‘Look, I’m really sorry to be such a nag’. And I said she wasn’t – she was being disciplined. But she expressed it in terms of ‘nagging’, which is something I don’t think you’d use with reference to a man.
“I think language is central to the whole issue. People will say a female executive is ‘bossy’ or ‘strident’, and they’ll call a male executive ‘a good leader’ and ‘decisive’.”
Grace, his middle daughter, is in her final year at St Paul’s. She already has an offer to read design engineering at Imperial College, London. “I know it sounds cheesy but I want to make a difference,” she says. “I’m really interested in biomechanical engineering – building artificial limbs. I like problem-solving and the creative side of making things.”
It is a field that is heavily maledominated, as she knows: only 19 per cent of engineering and technology undergraduates are female. “It bothers me that I might be judged on my gender, not on my merit,” she says.
Her father says because he is surrounded by women at home, it doesn’t cross his mind that their gender will be a barrier to success. Possibly as a result, he came out as better than average when he took the Dads4Daughters test, which uses fast-response questions to measure unwitting bias in terms of the jobs and qualities associated with men and women.
I also did the test. And despite having a nine-year-old daughter, as well as three sons, I came out mostly very badly: “You may strongly believe men make better surgeons, pilots and politicians,” it concluded. It also said I “may strongly believe men make better decisions in the workplace”.
I maintain this is because I am bad at pressing buttons quickly, not because I am a sexist pig. Paul Barrow, director at Blinc Partnership, who designed the test along neuroscientists at Split Second, says I am deluding myself. The test is a version of the famous Harvard Implicit Association Test, designed to elicit hidden racial, sexual or gender biases and used quite often in the social science and corporate world.
“Nobody’s perfect,” Mr Barrow tries to reassure me. “We all like to think we’re enlightened liberals. Through millennia of evolving, there are very good reasons why unconscious bias is there. The challenge of Dads4Daughters is that we can start to chip away at all this.”
He insists the test is impossible to get wrong. “People think they can play the game, but there’s no game to play. It’s just measuring your response rate, and that is too short a time to mess about with.” You could argue that getting fathers to fight their daughters’ battles is in itself quite oldfashioned – even, dare I say it, patronising. Do men really need to have a daughter to empathise with female inequality? Mr Alexander disagrees: “It’s wrong to belittle an initiative for trying to personalise an issue, because that’s the way you make people change. You need to tell stories, to strike a chord, to make them effective.” Will McDonald, chairman of the Fatherhood Institute, a think tank that is supporting the campaign, says: “There is a really interesting relationship that dads have with their daughters, which is different from the one mothers have with their daughters. I think it’s a great idea to tap into that.” Importantly, perhaps, most of the girls involved do not see it as patronising. Cecily Brem, 16, at St Paul’s says: “The sad truth is that, now, men are in more positions of corporate power. This is something which we need to challenge, and are. But in order to effect change, it needs to come from within. Cynically, this is about exploiting the power our fathers already have in these positions.” Her father, Andrew Brem, is chief digital officer at Aviva, the insurance company, and is getting his team at work to take the test. She says she is “very proud” of him for doing it, then adds: “The scheme should perhaps be thought of more as Dads with Daughters than Dads4Daughters.”