How to reverse gendered patterns and get more talent

Gendered bias – unconscious or not – impacts decisions. It impacts the decisions women make about themselves, and it impacts the decisions we make about women.

Despite these two sides to the story, most advice continues to focus on what women need to do to overcome the bias they have and experience.

If that’s as much as we are prepared to do, we’ll be stuck in this same echo-chambered gender-imbalance forever.

Sick of seeing how many years it's going to take to get to gender equality? So am I! To make systemic change, we need to dig into the way we – all of us - make decisions, identify where the bias seems to play out, and then tackle the bias in new and more impactful ways.

Bias won’t necessarily go away; the better the data we have about how it affects decisions and the more options we have for making better decisions, the better we can manage the bias.

Bias #1: Astoundingly, female CEOs are penalised when they use particular patterns of speech.

Some women (and a handful of men) uptalk and when they do, we downlisten.

Instead of expecting women to downtalk, which is the general tendency, we can step in and uplisten.

OK, I admit it, I made up these words, but feel free to use them!

Why do I think we need new words and just what is downlistening? Downlistening is what too often occurs when women ‘uptalk’. It takes two to tango here…..

‘Uptalking’ is a characteristic of some women’s speech – it’s the uplift at the end of a declarative statement that turns it into a question.

'Uptalking' is a speech characteristic that many women adopt (usually unconsciously), especially those in situations where women are scarce. They may have learnt that if they sound too firm or directive they will be seen as pushy or aggressive.

One of the penalties for adopting this speech style is that when women uptalk, their audience may downlisten; they are heard as uncertain and unconfident WHETHER OR NOT THEY ARE.

How to listen to women's results without ‘downlistening’

You can do women – and yourself – a big favour by NOT downlistening. Instead, listen past the tone to the results and allow them to speak for themselves. They are almost certainly better than we notice.

Consider this: financial analysts (those people who assess public companies’ earning announcements and thereby strongly influence stock price and company valuation) negatively assess CEO-led companies’ performance, based on gendered speech patterns.

NOT ON PERFORMANCE!

📌 Female CEOs who uptalk are penalised harshly: in the 7 days following their announcements their companies’ stock returns are -0.84%!!

📌 Just to be clear that this is gendered - male CEOs who uptalk do not get the same penalty.

📌 Female CEOs face vaguer, more negative and aggressive questions and are more likely to be interrupted by analysts.

📌 These evaluations and consequences are particularly harsh given that female CEOs and CFOs often provide MORE FREQUENT AND ACCURATE DISCLOSURES.

📌 The results are specific to female CEOs using uptalk and do not apply if female CEOs do not use an uptalk speech pattern.

Researchers Aharon Cohen Mohliver, Ananda Divakaruni and Laura Fritsch analysed recordings of almost 5,000 earnings calls and 753 CEO transitions to assess gendered speech patterns and the consequent grading of their US company’s stock by analysts.

This research is mind-blowing.  You can do something constructive about it. You can listen beyond the tone or inflection used when women provide information about their or their company’s performance: let’s make a shift to uplistening to understand what’s really going on.

Think of the circumstances when might you be able to uplisten and encourage others to do the same. Think of your team charter or your meeting protocols and add this to the mix.

Bias #2: Talented female candidates are penalised if job ad requirements are vague

Here’s another case where instead of expecting women to make the change, we can change our approach.

You’ll likely remember - perhaps have used - the argument that

women only apply for jobs when they are 100% qualified, while men do if they are only 60% qualified.

This data reportedly came from a Hewlett Packard internal report and is one of the most quoted statistics regarding gendered intentions to apply for promotions. At least a decade on, it’s still being quoted. Is it still the case?

Testing this data in 2014, Tania Sophia Mohr reported from her survey of 1,000 people that women and men gave very similar reasons for choosing not to apply for positions. Many men and women said they chose not to apply when they don’t think they met the criteria and so didn’t want to waste their time and energy.

Two areas where women differed was that they were more likely than men to not apply because they wanted to avoid failing to be chosen, and others because they were following the rules.

Her advice, keeping the onus on women, was that women should pay less attention to the rules, as men do, when deciding whether or not to apply.

More recent research conducted by Katherine Coffman and her colleagues likewise sought to test the proposition that women are less likely to apply.

For more advanced, higher-paying positions they confirmed that women don’t apply if they decide they are not qualified enough, while men are less worried about whether their qualifications match the specification.

They found that TALENTED FEMALE CANDIDATES SELF-SELECTED OUT.

We need to reverse the thinking here too – what’s the downlistening that’s going on and how can we shift to uplistening? It shouldn't matter whether women think they’re suitable or not.

It compounds the problem if we reiterate the narrative and expect women to somehow change what they do. CEOs, there’s more talent available to you than you know!!

Instead of having candidates self-select out, let’s proactively select them in.

Stop being vague if you want to attract better talent

Coffman’s research provides clear direction about what’s required to get a better talent pool, and it’s this simple – don’t use vague language to describe the skills and experiences candidates need.

To help women self-select in for roles, be precise and specific about what you seek.

Their research found that when the language in ads was relatively generic, eg ‘management experience’, ‘strong writing and communication skills’, women were much less likely to apply than men.

When the ad language was detailed, eg ‘candidates with test scores above x’ women were much more likely to apply.

Read a summary of the article here.

What both prescriptive and detailed job ads do is to reduce the ambiguity of requirements. This helps prospective candidates to assess their likelihood of success if they apply.

This is particularly important for women, who tend to underestimate their likely success. When they understand where the bar is for success, they are much more likely to attempt it.

Actually, this applies across genders; the upshot is if you are more detailed you have enriched your whole applicant pool and you are more likely to select a more talented candidate.

It’s not about hiring more women - OK, it is - it’s about hiring more talent.

There’s no concern that by taking this action you’ll end up with candidates who aren’t capable enough. On the contrary, you’ll end up with a better pool of candidates and that increases the chances of selecting a more talented candidate.

Do you need great people with great skills and experiences on your team?

YES, YOU DO!

Change the game, notice talent and help capable women to self-select in.

How do you change the game?

📌 Avoid vague criteria, such as ‘several years in the field’ or ‘demonstrated excellence’.

📌 State actual criteria, making them concrete, specific and objective, such as the exact number of years in the field that are required, or better yet describe excellence in work activities or results.

📌 Select women in – because your best candidates may self-select out, actively find them and support them to apply. Applying isn’t about confidence or assertiveness. It’s about helping women, and talented men, to see how their skills match the requirements of the role. And getting great candidates into the bargain.

What changes could you make to your hiring process to make job requirements clearer and enrich your candidate pool?  

Bias #3: Leaders are more like to be promoted for social capital not capability and that penalises women

This is an proposition I've been putting forward for more years than I care to recount! I've argued most recently that there are four critical myths that impact on the selection of people for leadership roles:

• Leadership selection is meritocratic: it is not
• It is not easy to pick the right leaders: it is
• Leadership depends on the situation: it does not
• Leaders need to be confident to succeed: they do not

And it is these myths that contribute to this bias, and to the under-selection of women for leadership roles. As Dr Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic argues, repeatedly:

There is robust evidence on the critical drivers of effective leadership performance: the ability to build and maintain high-performing teams, mostly by persuading a group of people to set aside their selfish and individualistic agendas in order to collaborate with others to achieve something they wouldn't achieve by themselves, and outperform other teams.

Women outperform men on many of the capabilities, both soft and hard, that are required to do this, while men outperform women on dark side personality traits such as narcissism and psychopathy which are detrimental to leading.

A recipe for increasing talent

If you can identify if and where these three biases play out in your organisation, you can set in place practices to mitigate their impact.

If you need to, you can reduce the chances of 'frightening the horses'. If your organisation is open to these conversations, then go right ahead. But if you expect or experience backlash when 'gender', 'women' and 'bias' are raised, you might avoid the angst simply by focusing on the right capabilities, making sure they are articulated clearly and specifically, and ensure that those involved in recruitment processes are capable of uplistening. You don't necessarily need to talk about gender, you don't need to mention bias to get the point across.

Hire for leadership capability and other skills required to be effective in the role, use clear and specific criteria, and uplisten when people discuss their accomplishments and performance.

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