Stefanie K. Johnson, David R. Hekman and Elsa T. Chan, If There’s Only One Woman in Your Candidate Pool, There’s Statistically No Chance She’ll Be Hired, Harvard Business Review, 26 April 2016
Despite the ever-growing business case for diversity, roughly 85% of board members and executives are white men. This doesn’t mean that companies haven’t tried to change. Many have started investing hundreds of millions of dollars on diversity initiatives each year. But the biggest challenge seems to be figuring out how to overcome unconscious biases that get in the way of these well-intentioned programs. We recently conducted research that suggests a potential solution …
We conducted three studies to examine what happens when you change the status quo among finalists for a job position …
The results from these studies were what we had predicted: When there were two minorities or women in the pool of finalists, the status quo changed, resulting in a woman or minority becoming the favoured candidate.
