497. Making Work Fair

Summary

The Brainy Business Podcast: Episode 497 - Making Work Fair

Release Date: May 15, 2025
Host: Melina Palmer
Guest: Siri Chalazi, Co-Author of Make Work Fair

---

Introduction

In Episode 497 of The Brainy Business Podcast, host Melina Palmer delves into the intricate psychology behind workplace fairness and gender equality with esteemed behavioral scientist Siri Chalazi. Drawing from their collaborative work in the book Make Work Fair, the conversation offers actionable insights rooted in behavioral economics to foster more inclusive and equitable workplaces.

---

Siri Chalazi’s Journey to Behavioral Science

Siri Chalazi shares her unexpected path into academia and her enduring passion for gender equality. "I wound up in academia by accident," she remarks at [02:51], highlighting her transition from management consulting to research. Her firsthand experiences with workplace inequities propelled her to study and implement strategies that address gender biases in hiring, performance evaluation, and promotion practices.

---

Making Work Fair: An Actionable Roadmap

Make Work Fair is designed as a comprehensive guide for individuals at all organizational levels to implement fairness. Siri emphasizes the book’s practical approach: “Often they’re costless, often they’re really quick to implement, but they’ve all been tested and proven to work to make a positive difference” ([07:04]).

---

Practical Examples of Promoting Fairness

1. Gender-Neutral Language:

Siri illustrates the impact of small language tweaks with her experience as a fitness instructor. At [07:04], she shares, “I caught myself often using gender terms like ladies or step queens,” which unintentionally excluded men in her classes. By adopting terms like “friends” or “everyone,” she ensured inclusivity, a change mirrored by Lufthansa’s shift from “ladies and gentlemen” to “dear passengers” ([09:14]).

2. Teaching Inclusivity with Technology:

Her co-author, Iris Bonette, used Harvard’s Teachly software to identify unconscious biases in classroom interactions. Siri explains, “The software helps bring our attention to those patterns and then correct those,” enabling Iris to balance engagement across all students ([10:27]).

---

Influence of Language in Job Descriptions

The conversation shifts to the profound effect of language in job postings. Siri discusses how gendered language can inadvertently narrow the applicant pool. “Studies around the world... have found that when job descriptions contain these masculine stereotyped words, disproportionately more men are likely to apply” ([16:00]). She advocates for either neutralizing such language or balancing masculine and feminine-coded words to attract a diverse range of candidates. Tools like Texteo can assist organizations in this transformation by flagging and suggesting alternative terms.

---

Effectiveness of Behaviorally Designed Diversity Training

Siri presents findings from a recent study published in Science where a behaviorally designed diversity training significantly increased the hiring of women and international candidates. “[The] training indeed helped to increase the shortlisting of women, female candidates, as well as non-national applicants” ([18:54]). This training was unique due to its timely delivery, specificity to hiring decisions, and endorsement by senior leaders, contrasting with traditional diversity trainings that often fail to produce long-term behavioral changes.

---

Setting Incremental Goals for Gender Equality

Melina and Siri discuss the importance of setting achievable, incremental goals to maintain motivation and drive progress. Siri recounts the UK's successful initiative to double women's representation on corporate boards from 12.5% to 25% within four years through a collaborative, multi-faceted approach ([26:45]). This strategy not only met but exceeded its goals by continuously raising the bar, demonstrating the power of committed, step-by-step goal setting.

---

Practical Tips for Enhancing Workplace Fairness

1. Comparative Evaluation:

Siri advises evaluating candidates comparatively rather than in isolation. “Evaluate them horizontally. So candidate one, candidate two, candidate three…, on the same dimension, calibrate them against each other” ([31:56]). This method enhances objectivity and reduces individual biases.

2. Resume Formatting to Minimize Career Gaps:

Another impactful tip involves redesigning resumes to focus on total work experience rather than specific dates, thereby reducing the emphasis on career gaps. “They’re about 15% more likely to get invited for an interview” ([34:45]). This subtle change helps employers focus on skills and competencies rather than fragmented career histories.

---

Conclusion and Further Resources

As the episode wraps up, Melina highlights the book’s numerous practical strategies and debunks common myths about fairness in the workplace. She encourages listeners to apply these insights to create more inclusive environments. Siri invites the audience to connect via LinkedIn and subscribe to their newsletter for ongoing updates and strategies.

Notable Quotes:

• Siri Chalazi [07:04]: “Making Work Fair is very intentional because we wanted it to be an actionable roadmap for people at all levels of organizations.”
• Siri Chalazi [16:00]: “We can either get rid of the explicitly gendered words, or we could consciously balance out the feminine and masculine coded words that we use.”
• Siri Chalazi [18:54]: “This training indeed helped to increase the shortlisting of women, female candidates, as well as non-national applicants.”

---

Takeaways

• Small Changes, Big Impact: Simple language adjustments and process tweaks can significantly enhance workplace fairness and inclusivity.
• Behaviorally Designed Interventions: Timely, specific diversity trainings led by respected leaders can effectively change hiring behaviors.
• Incremental Goal Setting: Setting achievable, step-by-step goals ensures sustained progress towards gender equality.
• Data-Driven Approaches: Measuring and analyzing organizational data is crucial for identifying biases and tracking improvements.

For a deeper dive into these strategies and more, readers are encouraged to explore Make Work Fair by Siri Chalazi and Iris Bonette.

---

Connect with Siri Chalazi:

• LinkedIn: sirishelazi
• Newsletter: makeworkfair.com

More Resources: Visit thebrainybusiness.com/497 for show notes, related episodes, and additional materials.

Transcript

[Melina Palmer]

Welcome to episode 497 of the Brainy Business Understanding the Psychology of why People Buy. In today's episode, I'm excited to introduce you to Siri Chalazi, co author of Make Work Fair. Ready? Let's get started. You are listening to the Brainy Business Podcast where we dig into the psychology of why people buy and help you incorporate behavioral economics into your business, making it more brain friendly.

[Siri Chalazi]

Now, here's your host, Melina Palmer.

[Melina Palmer]

Hello. Hello everyone. My name is Melina Palmer and I want to welcome you to the Brainy Business Podcast. What does it mean to have work be fair? How would you go about determining what it means to be fair? And if you are misaligned, where to start in making things more fair? It may feel like only a CEO or the head of HR can do that, where anyone else in an organization is just sort of subject to the policies of others. But it doesn't have to be that way. In fact, there are small things that anyone can do to help make work more fair for everyone. It can be as simple as the way you frame a resume to the words you use in a job description, or the order in which you review interview responses, and so much more. We are going to get into the details of all that in today's conversation where I'm joined by Siri Chalazi. Siri is a senior researcher at the Women and Public Policy Program at Harvard Kennedy School, whose life's work is to advance gender equality in the workplace. As a keynote speaker and strategic advisor, Siri collaborates with a wide range of organizations around the world. She has an MBA from Harvard Business School, a Master's in Public Policy from Harvard Kennedy School, and a BA in Chemistry and Physics from Harvard College. Her work regularly appears in leading media outlets and she's recently co authored a book with Iris Bonette called Make Work Fair, which is the central focus of our conversation today. Really quickly, before we get into that conversation, I want to be sure you know that there are links in the show, notes for my top related past episodes and books, ways to get in touch with Siri and myself, and more. It's all within the app you're listening to and at the brainy business.com 497. Now let's jump right in. Siri Chalazi, welcome to the Brainy Business Podcast.

[Siri Chalazi]

Thank you, Melina. It's so great to be here.

[Melina Palmer]

Yes, I'm very excited to be chatting with you today. We've had a little bit of back and forth talking about, you know, backgrounds and rooms and trees and plants and the spaces and things like that. So I feel like we're fast friends already. But for everyone who doesn't yet know you, can you share a little bit about yourself and the work that you do?

[Siri Chalazi]

I am a behavioral scientist and I study gender equality in the workplace and fairness more broadly in the workplace at Harvard Kennedy School at a research center called the Women in Public Policy Program. Most of my research is running large scale randomized control trials in real organizations in actual workplaces to identify and test solutions that will close well documented gender gaps. So, for example, we know that a lot of the traditional ways we hire people or evaluate their performance or promote people are very prone to bias. So my colleagues and I that I frequently collaborate with try to see, okay, what if we tweaked our hiring practices a little bit? What if we promote it differently? Would that yield different outcomes in what cases and with what effect?

[Melina Palmer]

Yeah. And so much fascinating information in your book, and of course we'll be talking about that a lot throughout the show today. But I'm also interested, you know, what drew you to that space, you know, in particular, what's kind of the background that got you interested in that aspect of human behavior?

[Siri Chalazi]

You know, I always like to say I wound up in academia by accident. I've had a longstanding interest in issues of gender equality, I mean, really since childhood. And they really came to the fore when I got my first full time job after college in a management consulting firm that I would say was the first time in my life that I personally came face to face with a lot of these inequities that still still exist today that I had up until then only read about in a more abstract sense. I knew that I wanted to dedicate my life to advancing gender equality in society, but I didn't know how exactly. And of course, 10, 12 years ago, the field also was in a very different place than it is today. So I had the opportunity when I was finishing graduate school to work with Professor Kathleen McGinn from Harvard Business School and Jessica Lee Porter on a really fascinating one year long research project. And even though I hadn't planned to go into research, I was familiar with their work, was a great admirer of theirs. So I said, this is an opportunity that I just can't pass up. Of course I'll, I'll jump on for a year. And it was really that project studying the manifestations of gender inequality at the most senior levels of a very large global tech company and doing this applied social science style research that made me realize that the intersection of research and practice was exactly where I wanted to be. For me, it's incredibly important to generate all these insights about what works and what doesn't and to grow the knowledge base. But for me, it's equally important to ensure that those insights wind up in the hands of practitioners, real people on the front lines in actual organizations who can actually make a difference on the ground with those insights. Because we, as in academia, aren't really in that position to implement things, to change actual processes. So I love serving as a bridge of sorts of, if you will, between academia and the world of practice.

[Melina Palmer]

Oh, definitely. And I think that really came through in the book. And as far as. So often we would read about, you know, with a title like Make Work Fair, that it's easy to just talk about what isn't fair and maybe why it's not fair. But then here are some things you can actually do, and this is what it can look like. I know we talked a little bit about recruiting practices as something for a specific application, which we'll get to in, in a minute, because I also love that really early on in the book, you give a couple of examples of these sort of little things that can be making it to where, you know, you may seem biased, or you could be cutting people out and not even realize it just based on something that other people might not know either. So there was a really great example both from you in teaching some fitness classes and something that you changed. And Iris, your co author of the way that she's favoring one side of the room when she teaches and being able to learn about that, can you share a little bit about those kind of personal experiences and just showing, as I think, an example of a little thing that you can do to help be more inclusive.

[Siri Chalazi]

Yeah, that was actually Iris and my. One of our main motivations in writing the book and is the title. Make Work Fair is very intentional because we wanted it to be an actionable roadmap for people at all levels of organizations, whether you're the CEO or the head of HR or the most junior intern, you know, summer intern on the team, to equip folks with really concrete and actionable strategies. Often they're costless, often they're really quick to implement, but they've all been tested and. And proven to work to make a positive difference. So my example in the introduction that I provide is, as you mentioned, I have a second career of sorts as a fitness instructor and fitness presenter. And I caught myself often using gender terms like ladies or step queens. Hi, ladies. Welcome to today's kickboxing class. And then halfway through the class, I, you know, dozens of people in there, I'd realize that there's a couple of gentlemen in the back row and I've been unintentionally excluding them by talking to ladies. So I really made a conscious effort, and it took me several months of focused practice to change my speech patterns and start using more gender neutral words that could be used to refer to any groups, right? Whoever walks into my class, if I say, hello, friends, everyone, people, folks, fabulous humans, I know that everyone can feel like I'm speaking to them, regardless of whether they're a woman or a man or they identify their gender as something else. And it was, once you change your habit and once that becomes a new way of speaking. It's so simple. In fact, Lufthansa, the airline based in Germany, is another example of an organization that's taken the same practice to heart. So they changed their onboard announcements a few years ago from saying ladies and gentlemen, which is the typical greeting in most customer service settings, welcome, ladies and gentlemen. To saying dear passengers or welcome passengers. And why wouldn't we do that, right? It's so small, you know, kids might not identify themselves as a lady or a gentleman either. So why wouldn't we just use a small, different word to make sure that everyone feels like, yes, they're speaking to me. I'm welcomed here. I belong here. The example that my co author, Iris gave is she doesn't hear well in one of her ears. In our classrooms, which are auditorium style seating, she found herself gravitating to the side of the room and calling people on the one side of the room where she expected to hear them better unconsciously. Because our colleagues at Harvard Kennedy School developed a technology called Teachly, which is a software tracking tool that helps us keep track as instructors of whom we call on and whether there are any unintentional patterns by people's gender, ethnicity, whether they speak English as a first or second language, or some other variables that we track. The software helps bring our attention to those patterns and then correct those. And so the software helped Iris notice that she was unintentionally gravitating to one side of the brain room. Once she figured that out, she was able to better balance. And Iris likes to share that with her students, too, to say, listen, this is my natural tendency now. I'm aware of it. Please help me make sure that I'm calling evenly on people from all sides of the room.

[Melina Palmer]

Yeah, And I think one that software or whatever would say from teachly, super helpful and being able to kind of uncover that unconscious bias that exists that we're not even realizing that we're doing, that's really helpful for people. And then like you said, Iris is able to say, oh, this is why. And I can't learn to hear better in my other ear. Right. I can't change that, but what could I do? I can let people know why this might happen. So maybe we shuffle where people sit in the room also to help so that it's not that these people are always on one side if they know to call on me, if they're, you know, whatever it is, to be able to help with that discussion, to help it be more inclusive just in the way that the conversation is opened up as well, and showing that, you know, I'm not trying to ignore you and so help me, you know, kind of to not, but in a more open way. I think that's really helpful. And in your example too, like you said, it's easy to say it's just a habit. And I. I just say ladies because it's mostly ladies and it should be okay. They should know what I mean. You know, that's an easy thing to say in any way, right? Even with. It's like, well, we just say, hey, guys, because that's what we've always said. Right. But you didn't, like, you weren't born saying that. So you've created some sort of habit over time, and it may take some conscious effort to change it into something else. But it doesn't have to be that difficult if you focus on it a little bit. And like you said, set up the plan of what are all the things I could say instead of that? And then you have now a plan, you know, a go to that you can be using instead.

[Siri Chalazi]

Exactly. And I love how you mentioned the fact that none of us were born saying any particular thing. Right. These are all learned from the environment because they become norms. Those unspoken but shared understandings of what do we say, what do we not say? How is it okay to behave and what kind of behavior will not be tolerated. Those are all learned from our environments. We humans are incredibly attuned to norms. We pick them up super, super quickly, but they are malleable. They can be changed. And just in a few years, you know, if airline passengers get used to hearing dear passengers instead of ladies and gentlemen, well, now that becomes the new norm. And then that can influence their behavior in context. Even aside from traveling, that's the power of norms.

[Melina Palmer]

Oh, yes, definitely. I'm trying to remember. I believe there was. So there's an example in the book, and it was something that when you changed the. And there were multiple of these, so you potentially will pick up on something different. But it was. When a role was framed in a certain way, women were less likely to get the job. I know there's been some of. When it's actually so through Texas A and M University, where I teach, there's been some research on, you know, when the title was CEO, women were less likely to get the job because we think of like, what is a CEO? It's an older white gentleman.

[Siri Chalazi]

Perhaps that's the stereotype, at least. Yeah, yeah.

[Melina Palmer]

But if we change the. Just even what the title is, then more are more. Women are likely to get hired as well as apply. And there was a lot of really interesting research about getting people to apply for jobs and things. But potentially, you know, the. The study I'm talking about already, you already have something that you're ready to go with, so I'll stop. Yes.

[Siri Chalazi]

So language is gendered on multiple levels. There's the obvious level of words like chairman, fireman, policeman. Right. That are really reinforcing the default, not the correct one, that these jobs are for men. And I'm happy to report that a lot of that is actually changing. Right. So these days we talk about firefighters, police officers, chairs, or chairpersons instead. But language is also gendered on a more under the surface, subtle level. Words like leader, strong, independent, assertive, aggressive. Which gender do you think they're associated with? Women or men?

[Melina Palmer]

Men.

[Siri Chalazi]

Exactly. None of us need to be social scientists to know this. Right.

[Melina Palmer]

When I'm in front of a group.

[Siri Chalazi]

Of live humans and I ask, okay, so what words do you think are associated with women? Just off the top of their heads, they come up with exactly the ones that research has shown to be feminine, stereotyped, warm, communal, caring, collaborative, empathetic listening. It's not at all to suggest that women are those things or that men are more strong or independent or leader like. It's just the steer the cultural stereotypes that have been attached to these words. And it turns out that because we're consciously or most often unconsciously aware of those stereotypes, they influence our actual behaviors to quite a large degree. So studies around the world, including Canada, the United States and India, have found that when job descriptions or job advertisements contain these masculine stereotyped words, disproportionately, proportionately more men are likely to apply for those jobs. And if you have an advertisement for a kindergarten teacher that's looking for that warm, caring and nurturing teacher to work in a collaborative environment, that type of job ad is disproportionately going to appeal to female job seekers. So organizations are often unwittingly and unintentionally closing off their talent pool, limiting their talent pool by their choice of words in job advertisements, whereas in actuality, they're just trying to look for the broadest pool possible and the best talent to apply. And as often with these behavioral science things, the fix is surprisingly simple, surprisingly low cost. We can either get rid of the explicitly gendered words, or we could consciously balance out the feminine and masculine coded words that we use to help appeal to the broadest possible talent pool. The research is out there that all of us can rely on quite literally the word lists of what's feminine and masculine. And now there's also wonderful software tools like Texteo that help companies do this automatically. You just feed in a job description, It'll flag the gendered words, it'll suggest alternatives and help you make your job description more compelling.

[Melina Palmer]

Oh, perfect. And so is there a recommendation then to say it should be to try to eliminate those words or to balance them? I would think that there's, you know, kind of the other problem of like, then does no one apply because they don't see themselves in the ad? Or it feels like I'm only half of this and so I shouldn't apply. Is there one way that's better for those who are creating those ads?

[Siri Chalazi]

It's a really good question and a topic for future research. As far as I'm aware that that study hasn't been run of which approach would be better. So, you know, let's use a. We'll start with a job description. Let's, let's say feminine by default. And then treatment one is we make it totally neutral. And treatment two would be that we balance masculine and feminine coded words. And how would those three job descriptions compare? So I'd love to run that study. If there's anybody else, researchers out there listening, you know, that's why, that's why research and testing is so important. Because as much as we already know, and we really do know a lot, there's always opportunities to build on that knowledge and drill down even further, like you just did in this example, to say, okay, how do we take the next step? How do we hone in on an even more precise solution?

[Melina Palmer]

Yeah, well, and as with everything, it, I'm it sure, I'm sure, it depends. Right. So if it's a more traditionally gendered type of job, is it better to have incorporate a mix of the words or not? Whereas if it's a more neutral job, does it make any difference and how do those things go together? So lots of studies and things to test and look at there. You do work with organizations and so you can't always name a specific organization or anything along those lines, which we get. But can you give some of those, like real on the job type of tips for people? Everybody loves when there's a real case study and saying this happened. Right, Exactly.

[Siri Chalazi]

Our book is packed with those because as much as people say, say they want data, actually they remember and learn from the stories. This is how. This has been a big learning for me over the last decade as a researcher who's obsessed with data. Well, let me share one study that my co authors and I just published in the journal Science a few weeks ago and this looked at diversity training. So as you may know, as listeners may know, we've been studying diversity and unconscious bias trainings for more than half a century. And in general, they have not been found to result in behavior change. Yes, they can sometimes raise short term awareness. Yes. Right after taking a training, people often report that they learned a lot of new things and that they're now more motivated to tackle bias or discrimination. But then when we follow up with them six or 12 or 18 months later to see if anything has actually changed about what they do, we just haven't been able to document that. And yet organizations have really doubled down, especially in the last few years, on various different types of diversity trainings. So we wanted to test if there was a training that leveraged everything we know from behavioral science that could be more effective than the traditional types of trainings that are out there. So in partnership with a large telecommunications and engineering firm with a global presence in more than 100 countries, we tested a behaviorally designed diversity training, which was a seven minute video shown to managers who had raised an open job but had not yet seen the applications. So basically, managers received this video right before they were to gain access to the submitted applications. What did this video do? Why is it behaviorally designed? Well, the first aspect is it was timely. Most normal diversity trainings take place on a predetermined cadence. So maybe you go through a module as part of onboarding, or once a year you have to do this hour long training. In this case, we had managers engage with the training right before they were about to make this consequential hiring decision, which is what we were trying to influence. The second piece is that a lot of behavioral, pardon me, a lot of diversity training is not specific to the activities that people are doing as part of their everyday work. So we're talking about these high level concepts of unconscious bias and this and that, but it's not clear how that would apply to your everyday work. So our video was really specific to the hiring decision. It talked about the importance, it talked about how managers should think about filling out and rounding out the skills that are on their team. So the video encouraged managers to reflect on what skills, backgrounds and perspectives were currently missing on their existing teams and how that new incoming person could help to add more diversity. And then lastly, more diversity trainings are often delivered by external consultants or professional facilitators, people who aren't really known to employees. So in our training intervention we had the company's most senior leaders known, well respected individuals, both from the business side and from hr be the faces of this training. And long story short, what we found was that the training indeed helped to increase the shortlisting of women, female candidates, as well as non national applicants who are people whose country of nationality was different from the country of the job that they were applying to to. Because this being a global firm, they wanted to make sure that it wasn't just French people being employed in France and Swedes being employed in Sweden and Indians in India. They actually wanted global talent to be present in all of the company's offices. So we found that this pretty costless, short intervention, timed, delivered by authority figures really specific to the decision at hand, actually help to increase diversity in who people hired. And we hope that this will be a promising roadmap forward for organizations that still choose to invest in some type of diversity training. We also hope that this serves as a reminder of the importance of testing and evaluating because that's been another real challenge with a lot of the trainings that are out there that companies are spending money and time on, is they never actually measure any behavioral outcomes of those trainings.

[Melina Palmer]

Right. Because we just have a gut feeling for it. Right. I can tell that it was good.

[Siri Chalazi]

Or we just liked it. It was a great session, you know, 10 out of 10 feedback. Well, that's lovely. But was that the end goal?

[Melina Palmer]

Right? Yes, yes, it was. That was it. That was our whole goal. No. Well, and I think with that point you're making there too, when it comes to a lot of, whether it's diversity training or some things, something along those lines, and you do touch on this, on in the book. But that really, that kind of cognitive dissonance of people not wanting to be associated with whatever the bad thing is. And so it's easy to say, well, that doesn't, like, I don't. I'm not that bad. That's not a me thing. Like, so it's good to know and I'll keep an eye out for it, but I don't need to change. Right? We're able to disassociate in that way. Whereas, like you said, having that priming of the video right when you're going to go in and do something can help, you know, whether you consciously recognize it or not, that it's going to help impact that behavior.

[Siri Chalazi]

I can't tell you how often I get that reaction when talking to people of, oh, well, that sounds like an interesting study, but that wasn't done in my sector or not in my country or certainly at my firm, we wouldn't have this. Right. And you know, I mean, the honest answer is, unless we test or unless we study your particular firm, we don't know. But I think this is where organization specific data can be so powerful because so many of these studies have been replicated in so many contexts around the world. We do. Humans are humans, after all. When you put them in groups in organizations, certain dynamics emerge pretty consistently and predictably. But being able to show data specific to your organization to say, look, here's what our hiring numbers are, here's what our career progression numbers are. You know, managers are 40% women, but of the people promoted from manager to director, only 20% are women. There's a gap there. What's going on. Making it personal is one important way. This is why data is so critical, to really jolt people into action and say, oh, this is not just some theoretical dynamic that's out there in other organizations, but this is exactly what we're also encountering here in our company.

[Melina Palmer]

Oh, definitely. Well, and to the point that you're making there about measuring and setting those goals, one of the things that I thought was so helpful in the book is talking about the incremental steps that may be needing to happen. And so where we realize, wow, we're really far off from what this is like, maybe we want to get to 50, 50. And right now we're at 12% or something that are women in these roles or in a traditionally, you know, female job, perhaps you have men in the role or whatever this happens to be. And so in that way, we're way off. And if we say we will not rest until we're at 50, 50 and we are at 12. That feels really demotivating versus being able to say, hey, we want to get from 12, we're shooting for 20, right. Or we want to get to 15 and then we can look to the next step. Step, you know, being able to break it up in a way that you can be proud of. A smaller goal to help keep people motivated I thought was such a valuable insight within the book.

[Siri Chalazi]

It is, and it applies to advancing fairness at work, but it also applies to anything else that you want to accomplish. Right. If you don't read at all and you say, I'm going to go from reading zero books ever to reading a book a week, I mean, it's just not going to happen. It's so unlikely to happen. And then once the first couple of weeks pass and you still haven't read a page, you're more likely to get discouraged and give up on the goal entirely than to get back on track. Whereas if you said, okay, how about 10 pages a week? And then once you've established the habit, you can build up to one chapter a week, one book a month, whatever makes sense. There's a lot of goals are another topic that have been extensively studied for decades. And the evidence is pretty clear that goals need to be stretching because if they don't require any behavior change, then there's sort of no point in having them at all. But to your point, if they're overly ambitious, they can become demotivating because you just don't see a path of how to ever get there. I'm thinking of one beautiful example of this in the real world is the efforts that in the UK to increase women's representation on corporate boards. That was achieved through a voluntary goal based approach. So not quotas, not legislative mandates. But the government of the UK came together with the largest companies, with the media, with academics, with search firms, which are key stakeholder because they're often the ones who concretely place people onto boards. And in 2011, they came together at the point when women were only 12.5% of corporate directors on the 100 largest companies in the UK to say, let's set ourselves a goal of getting from 12.5% to 25% in four years. That was actually really ambitious. It was doubling the share of women in four years. But they brought together this coalition where everybody was kind of doing their part and pushing from different angles. So the media journalists were writing articles about this, raising the profile of the issue, calling out both companies that were doing particularly well, but also the companies that were lagging behind to create, to start to shift norms, to create social pressure. Academics were pumping out more studies and data about what's actually happening, case studies from different countries. The government put its weight behind the initiative and said, we're watching carefully and we expect to see progress. And by the way, in fact this is back when the UK was still part of the eu. There started to be conversations in the EU about potentially instituting quotas. So the government hopefully had that specter hanging in the background saying, well, it's nice to start with a voluntary goals led approach, let's see how you do. And if not, we may have to institute quotas down the line. And then the 30% club, which was founded by Helena Morrissey, an advocacy organization, took a really leading on the ground role in going one by one to the chairman of the 100 largest companies. And at the time, 99 of the hundred were in fact men, to persuade them one by one and to have them influence each other. And as a result of this multi pronged approach, they met the goal on time in 2015. So then what did they do? I think this is the most powerful, important part of all. They said let's raise the goal from 25% to 33% for the next five years and let's include more companies in our scope. So they started, they went from the FTSE 100 to the FTSE 350, the 350 largest companies in the UK. Five years later, 2020, they've again met their goal. So now they say let's keep raising the bar, let's lift the goal up to 40% and let's also extend the goal not just to board directors, but the C suite roles within these companies, which are often feeder roles to corporate boards. The latest numbers are about to be released very soon because we're in 2025, the end of the next five year plan, but they've already exceeded that goal as well. The UK is the number two country in the world in terms of women's representation on corporate boats, behind only France.

[Melina Palmer]

So it works absolutely. And just keeping dedicated to something and having, showing how much effort has to go behind it. And this is why, you know, when it gets to goals and things, if we have too many things we're trying to do and we're too ambitious in all of them, we won't get anything done. And so being able to prioritize, focus on the right things being really important there as I could of course talk to you all day about all the things. But as we go to close out our conversation today, one of the things that I was really thinking about has to do with some of those practical tips, examples of some things that people can go and do. You know, one that stands out for me has to do with in the way that we review, you know, answers from applicants. And we may think, well, we look at each person one at a time and evaluate them. But maybe there's some advice to do that in a. In a different way. How. How could we look at reviewing candidates for positions? And if you have any other examples you want to put out there for. For some of these practical tips.

[Siri Chalazi]

Yeah, this is actually a broader tip that applies to evaluation in any settings. It could be when you're picking people for a project or evaluating performance or promoting someone, or, as you said, evaluating candidates for a new job. And it derives from this insight from behavioral science that human brains are naturally comparative. So when you're looking at one person in isolation, you know, on a scale of one to five, how good was their answer to question one? Well, it's kind of hard, actually, to put an absolute value on it. But if you interviewed five people and you compare all of their answers to question one, now it's much easier to say, oh, candidate one was really more of a four. Candidate two was more of a three. Candidate three really hit it out of the park. Their answer was a five. So that would be the advice is look at all the components that you're evaluating. It could be five questions in an interview, or it could be maybe they submitted a cover letter in a resume, and those are the two components that you're evaluating. Evaluate them horizontally. So candidate one, candidate two, candidate three, and so forth on the same dimension, calibrate them against each other, and then turn to the next dimension. So that's one great tip. You mentioned hiring earlier, so I wanted to give another tip. And that requires, and this relates to the design of our resumes, the formatting of our resumes. The typical resume format lists your experience, your work, and then the associated dates. So 2010 to 2013. Management consultant. But what this format also does inadvertently is it makes career gaps very salient. So if someone took time off for whatever reason, to get cured from a disease, to go take a sabbatical, take care of kids, elderly parents, work on a side hustle that didn't pan out that they don't want to mention on their resumes. Right. Those gaps are really glaring. And empirically, we know that employers tend to penalize candidates who have a non continuous work history. So a recent study from the UK looked at a slight reframing where we still list all of our experiences, but just with the total amount of time. So management consultant, three years. Right. Instead of the specific dates. And it turns out this small reframe helped both women and men be about 15% more likely to get invited for an interview for a range of jobs from software engineer and financial analyst to caretaker and customer service representative in a call center. And it's because companies were better able to look beyond irrelevant factors like career gaps, focus on the actual skills and competencies that candidates brought, and then make better matches between those skills and the jobs that they were looking to fill. So sometimes it's something as small and simple as changing a resume format or changing how you assess candidates answers to interview questions.

[Melina Palmer]

Yes, I love that. And I know in reading in the book too, and of course where people, you know, were able to come back from whatever that gap was typically better, stronger, calmer, more centered, you know, whatever it was. And so it was usually a positive when it could be framed that way if someone was ever given the chance to kind of talk about the value of that. But I love that just tiny reframe that can have such a huge impact for so many people. And to realize, like, I know, you know, the gap might have been eight months because they were, you know, they, they had saved up enough and they got to go have their, you know, eat, pray, love experience or something like, why would we penalize someone for that's valuable that they were able to do that.

[Siri Chalazi]

Exactly. And I think that's the mechanism too, whereby we can break down some of these stereotypes in the long term is now we still know employers penalize career gaps, but maybe if with the help of a resume redesign, we get more people with career gaps into the workforce and employers actually see to your point that those have been growthful experiences and these are actually, these make people better workers. Then over time, that preference for people with continuous work histories might actually disappear. But until it does, while it's still there, we have to find a way to design our processes in such a way that people aren't unnecessarily penalized.

[Melina Palmer]

Yeah, definitely. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show and for sharing insights. Barely, barely, barely scratched the surface of all the amazing things within the book. And I know you know, your overarching span of work. There's so much we could have talked about. So thank you for, for joining and talking about this. And everyone, of course, should go get their own copy of Make Work Fair so they can learn more about these. So many more tips, so many more stories and pieces of research for people who are now so excited to learn more about you and to follow you and you know, get the book and things. You know, what's their best path to go do so I'm very active on.

[Siri Chalazi]

LinkedIn sirishelazi, so I would love to connect there. We also have a newsletter that goes out not too often. You can sign [e-mail] where we share the latest insights from behavioral science on what we all can do to make our workplaces more fair. So would love to stay in touch with you there as well. Thank you so much for having me Melina. And thank you all for listening.

[Melina Palmer]

Awesome. Yes, thank you so much for joining. We'll put links in the show notes for everyone to make it easy. And yeah, thanks again. It was really great to chat with you you today.

[Siri Chalazi]

Likewise.

[Melina Palmer]

Thank you again to Siri Chalazi for joining me on the show today. What got your brain buzzing in today's conversation? For me, I love the simple reframes that make such a huge difference and ones that don't have to be gender specific, like that one about the gaps between job roles. I've talked before on the show and in my books about the simple reframe for the nail salon near me that said, it was rated best in the South Sound in 2009, 2010 and 2011, and I was seeing that in 2017 or 2018. While the accomplishment hasn't changed, the big gap in time can make someone read that and wonder what happened or that they must have gone way downhill since then. If it just said that they had won Best in the South Sound three years in a row, it would have felt completely different. Along those same lines, it's still true to say that you worked for a company for three years and then the next role was two or five or whatever. And by eliminating the exact years, it helps to make it so the gap where you took a sabbatical or took care of an elderly parent, or wrote a book doesn't have to keep you from being asked for the interview knowing that both men and women were 15% more likely to move forward in the process when this little tweak was made is amazing. There are so many other concrete, specific and useful examples throughout the book. Tips you can apply in your own work, whether you're an applicant, a manager, or setting up corporate policies in Make Work Fair, they also share a bunch of myths like the need to debias individuals or that your gain has to equal my loss and that fairness requires a different approach than other business goals. Fairness can be measured. This book talks about how it can show up in the way you set goals, the data you track, the way you hire, the words you use, and so many little things that can help every company and individual to be a little more fair. And I think we can all benefit from that, don't you? As we close out the show, don't forget about those show notes, which include links to my top related past episodes and books including Make Work Fair, ways to get in touch with Siri and myself, and more. It's all within the app you're listening to and@the brainybusiness.com 497 and thank you again to Siri Chalazi for joining me on the show today. It was a delight to chat with and learn from you. Join me Tuesday for another brainy episode of the Brainy Business Podcast. It's going to be a lot of fun. You you don't want to miss it. Until then, thanks again for listening and learning with me and remember to be thoughtful. Thank you for listening to the Brainy Business Podcast.

[Siri Chalazi]

Melina offers virtual strategy sessions, workshops and other services to help businesses be more brain friendly.

[Melina Palmer]

For more free resources, visit thebrainybusiness.com.