The power of systems is everywhere on display, from Google walkouts to Financial Times bots. If your systems don’t align with your company’s gender objectives, they are most likely sabotaging them. Used well, they accelerate balance by nudging new behaviors. Ignored, or misaligned with changing realities, they can quickly unravel what companies have spent years building. Here are two examples of the good and bad use of systems.
Recently, the Financial Times introduced an alert that lets journalists know if too many of their sources and quotes are coming from men. Internal research has shown that this turns women off, and the paper is interested in expanding its male-dominated readership by gender balancing. A simple bot, introduced by Deputy Editor Roula Khalaf, flags if journalists continue their current habit of quoting 79% of men in their reporting.
This small example illustrates a systemic nudge used to shift a bigger cultural issue. Most journalists have networks of people they call upon regularly. They stick to sources developed over time, often reflecting their own gender. It took a new manager coming in and introducing a small system innovation to shift an automatic reflex and make journalists aware of a habit they had probably never thought about. This can have a big impact, as it did on The Atlantic journalist, Ed Yong, when he discovered he was doing the same thing. He stopped, and consciously reprogrammed his defaults, as will some of the FT’s journalists.
That’s how redesigning systems can help adapt cultures, as Harvard behavioral economist Iris Bohnet has illustrated in her book What Works. But in some companies systems have the opposite effect. They contradict or undermine what the company professes to be pushing. This brings me to the latest Google story.
Here’s a company that has been working on gender balance for years, under the enlightened leadership of Sundar Pichai. His Executive team is gender balanced, Google runs (and makes public) unconscious bias training company-wide. Pichai publicly fired James Damore for a diatribe against the company’s gender balancing push and seems committed to transparency and authenticity in building balance.
Yet years of effort have been upended by a global walkout of enraged employees discovering how slanted the systems underlying the picture were towards the dominant group’s interests. Particularly egregious was the forced arbitration clause that many employees hadn’t even realized was hidden deep within the contracts they’d signed.
In forced arbitration, a company requires employees to submit any dispute to binding arbitration - as a condition of employment. The employee waives their right to sue, participate in a class action lawsuit, or appeal. Forced arbitration is mandatory, the arbitrator’s decision is binding, and the results aren’t public. In sexual harassment cases, at the heart of the Google walkouts, it has the double whammy of silencing victims while protecting those who assaulted them. Google paid Andy Rubin, the creator of Android, a $90 million settlement while praising his genius, but hiding the harassment issue for which he was laid off. It was revealed by the New York Times and was the fuel that ignited a global walkout of 20,000 employees.
Forced arbitration is the antithesis of transparency. It is a system’s acknowledgment and willful cover-up of bad leadership and permits – even encourages - its self-replication. “The silencing of people’s voices has clearly had an impact in perpetuating sexual harassment,” Brad Smith, Microsoft’s president and chief legal officer said when Microsoft decided to drop the practice last year.
Google first responded to the outrage over the Rubin settlement by saying it fired 48 other executives on sexual harassment claims - without any compensation. But it wasn’t until employees took to the streets that the company addressed the underlying systemic issue of forced arbitration by eliminating the clause. This has led other companies, like Square, Airbnb and eBay to do the same. Microsoft was one of the first big companies to dump the practice and Uber followed shortly thereafter, as part of their efforts to better manage gender and harassment issues. Thankfully, many other companies never had them at all.
The idea that companies can preach gender balance on the one hand and insist on policies like forced arbitration clauses on the other is a good example of misalignment of leadership and systems. Until the one supports rather than contradicts the other, efforts at gender balancing are at risk of systemic failure.
Countries, like companies, are also shaped by the interplay of leadership, culture, and systems. Sadly, no one can accuse the U.S.’s misogynistic political leadership of not being aligned with systemic policy. Last May, just as leading companies were starting to eliminate forced arbitration in sexual harassment cases, the Supreme Court upheld companies’ rights to it. That’s “egregiously wrong,” said Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in her dissent, supported by all the other women on the court. The US is a daunting illustration of how powerful it can be when leadership and systems align for gender balance – or against it.
