Gender Bias in Human Resource Processes: How to Overcome It

Max Bazerman and his co-authors have written a new working paper examining how an organization might counteract gender biases in promotion decisions.   They found that stereotypes and biases are more prevalent when a manager evaluates an individual in isolation.  However, those biases fade away, and managers focus more on performance alone, when they are comparing multiple candidates as they make promotion decisions.  Here is their abstract:

We examine a new intervention to overcome gender biases in hiring, promotion, and job assignments: an "evaluation nudge," in which people are evaluated jointly rather than separately regarding their future performance. Evaluators are more likely to focus on individual performance in joint than in separate evaluation and on group stereotypes in separate than in joint evaluation, making joint evaluation the money-maximizing evaluation procedure. Our findings are compatible with a behavioral model of information processing and with the System 1/System 2 distinction in behavioral decision research where people have two distinct modes of thinking that are activated under certain conditions.