Using design thinking to fight gender bias in the workplace
Design thinking’s human-centred approach can help IT organisations reduce implicit biases that affect the recruitment, retention, and advancement of women.
A creative, collaborative, and iterative approach to solving problems, design thinking is grounded in employing the experiences and perspectives of real people to help create a solution.
While classical music performed today may sound much as it did decades ago, its “composition” is very different. In the 1970s, only a very small percentage of musicians in top U.S. professional orchestras were female. Today, women hold more than 50 percent of the chairs in America’s 250 top orchestras.
Why the dramatic change? Many behavioural economists attribute it to a simple design choice: blind auditions. In the 1970s and 1980s, orchestras began putting a screen between auditioning musicians and selection committees, some even going so far as to ask applicants to remove their shoes to eliminate the distinctive sound of women’s footwear. After redesigning the environment to remove any knowledge of or reference to gender during the audition process, orchestras suddenly started to hire more women.
The lessons from this example extend far beyond the world of classical music, with direct applicability to the workplace. First, although progress has been made in combating deliberate gender discrimination at work, some women still face implicit biases that can subconsciously affect decision-making. Second, simple changes in the way a situation is designed—installing a screen, removing shoes—are not only possible to implement in the workplace, but can also mitigate implicit bias.
Using strategic changes to transform how a situation or environment is designed, design thinking can offer CIOs a powerful way to recognise and reduce the impact of implicit biases in IT, where women are consistently underrepresented. A creative, collaborative, and iterative approach to solving problems, design thinking is grounded in employing the experiences and perspectives of real people to help create a solution. It can help CIOs and other business leaders understand what facets of their culture and decision-making practices may be driving biased outcomes and implement design changes to counteract implicit biases, including those related to gender.
Designing Equality
In redesigning facets of the IT work environment that may be creating barriers for women, CIOs can apply the five stages of design thinking:
The organisation conducts “need finding,” or exploratory research, using methods such as interviews, focus groups, observation, and data analytics to unearth new insights about women employees, their experiences, and the possible biases that affect their journeys.
A team that includes women employees with diverse perspectives works to draw on explorato- ry research and identify drivers of gender bias, seeking to understand the unique challenges women may face in recruitment, retention, and advancement.
The team brainstorms ways to address the identified challenges and collectively develops a set of solutions.
Solutions are prototyped and tested through pilot programs with iterative employee feedback and participation.
The team collects gender-disaggregated data and feedback from employees to assess whether the solutions are mitigating bias and improving women’s advancement and experience. These ideas are iteratively improved or rejected, with the team returning to earlier stages as needed.
Addressing Barriers
Though not developed specifically as a method for addressing gender bias, design thinking possesses several characteristics that make it well-suited for untangling a complex problem of this nature. Not only is the approach grounded in employee experience, guided by information, iterative, and uservalidated, it also creates cus- tomised solutions tailorable to an organisation’s specific resources and needs. While the application of design thinking to the problem of implicit gender bias is still a novel concept, companies can use this approach to mitigate obstacles in three critical areas of women’s advancement:
Hiring. Research shows that certain hiring practices, such as unstructured interviews or gendered job descriptions, can lead to unequal employment of women. Companies can take steps such as: conducting surveys and interactive focus groups with job candidates to see if women experience the process differently than men; analysing interview and hiring data to determine whether there are meaningful gender differences in candidate evaluation and selection; and creating a persona-driven journey map to understand the interview process.
Retention. If internal research suggests implicit bias is a potential factor in women leaving the organisation, interviews or persona-driven exercises with women can help elucidate the underlying drivers of attrition. User-centred research techniques such as journey mapping or interactive focus groups can also help identify why women may be leaving. Solutions to test could include conducting joint evaluations, creating objective and measurable performance standards, and raising awareness about biased feedback.
Leadership. If organisational leaders see low representation of women among managers or executives, some might attribute this disparity to women’s personal choices. The exploratory stages of design thinking can enable organisations to test these assumptions and change the work environment accordingly, rather than blindly guessing the source of the problem and applying a blanket solution.
A design thinking approach— customisable to each individual organisation, its people, its resources, and its needs—can help companies better understand how implicit biases affect women’s work experiences and aid in the development of effective ways to counter them. With its user-centred focus on redesigning environments, this approach can be a powerful tool for addressing previously hidden obstacles to women’s recruitment, retention, and advancement, driving the growth of an inclusive workplace culture that empowers all employees.