Want to make the hiring and evaluation processes at your company more fair? Try giving your managers more status and holding them to higher standards, suggests a Yale researcher.
Tristan Botelho, assistant professor of organizational behavior at the Yale School of Management, along with co-author Marina Gertsberg of Monash University, drew their conclusions from an in-depth study of reviews on Yelp, a popular restaurant app.
The researchers found clear evidence of gender bias in a study of more than a million reviews. Evaluations specifying that a server was female were more likely to assign the worst ranking of one star and less likely to assign the top ranking of five stars.
But once reviewers earned the app’s “elite” label, the association between a server’s gender and the ranking nearly disappeared. The new title likely made the reviewers feel more scrutinized and accountable for their evaluations.
“The results suggest that when a reviewer gets a status-boosting award, the increased accountability may motivate them to judge women more fairly,” according to a Yale report on the study. “Workplaces could achieve a similar effect by subjecting managers’ hiring and promotion decisions to stronger scrutiny.”
Although offering rewards like higher-status titles to managers may not be practical, the professors said, other actions in the workplace could reduce implicit bias.
A manager who wants to reject a job applicant or deny a promotion could be required to justify their decision in a group meeting and identify a specific key performance indicator that the candidate failed to meet.
“Try to move them away from using indicators unrelated to the candidate’s quality,” Botelho said.
He said that raising the bar on accountability in decisions, “is not going to eliminate bias, but it’s going to start stripping away the likelihood that individual biases are going to creep in.”
Contact Liese Klein at lklein@newhavenbiz.com.
