By Eva
Schoenwald and Iakov Frizis
Recent years have
seen significant improvements in female representation in the workplace. Information
campaigns, feminist associations, female employment quotas and a rising number of
female role models all contribute to an improved gender balance in Western
European and US workplaces.
Despite this
progress, we remain far from achieving gender balance in the workplace. A
significant contributor to the reform slowdown is the emergence of diversity
fatigue and inclusion
backlash among many companies trying to implement more gender inclusion in the
workplace. It becomes increasingly clear that we need to find a way to redefine
popular gender discourse if we wish to deliver more inclusion.
According to the
2018
Global Gender Gap Report, current projections place the closing of the
gender gap at 108 years from now. Yet success stories of female economists such
as Esther Duflo, Christine Lagarde and Laurence Boone make it easy to cast data
aside. They often let us forget about the existence of glass cliffs, implicit
gender bias in recruitment and publication processes, pregnancy discrimination,
sexual harassment, office favouritism, lack of role models, and restroom gossip,
just to name a few. As compelling as success stories might be, they seem not to
be bellwethers for reform.
In the fight
against gender discrimination, we face an elusive enemy. A recent International
Labour Organisation survey
found discrimination and unconscious gender bias to be among the five main
challenges for women holding leadership positions. Unconscious bias stems from
social norms, values, and experiences that contribute
to decision-making. Such bias often manifests itself in an overall masculine
corporate culture, along with preconceptions related to social roles and
abilities of men and women, and the masculine nature of management positions.
Limited
reflection on the
effect of unconscious bias towards women in the workplace risks understating
the urgency to push for more equality, allowing for a feeling of diversity
fatigue to set in. Cundiff and
Vescio (2016) show that individuals with strong gender stereotypes are less
prone to attribute workplace gender disparities to discrimination. In 2017,
James Damore, a google engineer, unintentionally sided publicly with Cundiff
and Vescio when he sued his employer on the grounds of intolerance against
individuals holding unpopular political beliefs. The lawsuit came as a response
to Google terminating the contract of Mr. Damore, following his drafting of an internal
memo in which he argued that female underrepresentation in the tech
industry is due to abilities, rather than flagrant discrimination.
The Google case describes
too well the feeling of exhaustion towards diversity and inclusion issues that
motivates us to take action. The recent gender inclusion backlash points to a
need to revisit how we discuss gender. We should both question the validity of
the design of inclusion programmes and acknowledge that we still have a long
way to go until we reach equality of opportunity between genders.
We need to
reinvent the way we discuss gender by taking the focus away from high-level gender
policies and fairness approaches. Instead, we propose to address gender
stereotypes and to develop a strong performance-oriented approach to discussing
inclusion. Only by acknowledging that our profession has a gender issue will we
be able to revisit this old problem through a new perspective – one that brings
together practitioners across both genders, to work towards a more inclusive
workplace.
