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make sure you shine a light on how things are going in different groups because scrutiny increases the social
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pressure people feel to make different kinds of hiring and promotion decisions and attend to a lack of diversity so
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scrutiny matters highlighting social norms when they're positive social norms
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meaning hey you're the only group in the company that hasn't yet promoted a woman
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to this a senior ranks that kind of scrutiny and those kinds of social norms matter
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welcome to the ripple effect the podcast that takes you on a journey through the
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minds of work and faculty I'm your host Dan Loney and in each episode we'll be
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diving deep into the inspiration behind the groundbreaking research that Wharton
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professors have conducted and exploring how their findings resonate with the world today we'll be covering a diverse
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range of topics bringing you the latest insights and knowledge that you can apply to your life into work so get
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ready to dive into new ideas with the ripple effect [Music] so you have done a lot of research
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around gender in the workplace and that's obviously a very important topic these days a lot of questions have been
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answered there are still a lot of unanswered questions out there what are some of those that have kind of inspired
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your research in this area yeah I think some of the important the most important questions are frankly how
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do we solve it how do we solve the issue that women are still underrepresented at
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the top of organizations and uh we are trying so many things is it that we need to
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eliminate bias and change the individuals and the organizations to be more open-minded about uh working with
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women and that's one possibility is it that we need to change the structure of
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organization so we can make them more accommodating to the different needs and preferences and strengths and challenges
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that women face is it that we need to eliminate the biases that women face not by changing the shape of the
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organization but the way decisions are made inside the organization so there's
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all these different possibilities in terms of what can fix what I think most people at this point agree is a real
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problem because enormous amount of talent is not being tapped to generate the best outcomes for
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organizations and we the truth is we still don't know we don't know the right
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combination of solutions but my research and the research of many who I collaborate with is trying to pick away
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at some of the big questions there and and get some answers so going back a few years you had done a
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study on the effectiveness of diversity training if you can't go back and take
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us through that study what were you setting out to do what did you learn and and really particularly about how these
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programs affect women thank you for the show and this is a really exciting project that I got to work on with a
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massive team at Wharton several years ago and it came about because at the time I was co-directing the Wharton
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people analytics initiative along with Adam Grant and Angela Duckworth and Kade Massey and others and the four of us in
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particular felt that one of the most pressing questions in people analytics that needed to be answered was whether
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or not these diversity trainings that so many organizations were pouring money into we're adding value and also you
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know could we build one that was really effective that was our real goal as well
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let's let's prove whether or not this works and let's build the best version
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of a diversity training we can given what we know about the science of discrimination and bias in organizations
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so we found first of all an incredibly Brave organizational partner it was a Fortune 500 company that was ready to
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team up with us and do this project and the reason I call them Brave is because it's a really challenging thing to do as
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an organization to open yourself up to to testing to see whether or not there's
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potential gender bias and if you can combat it in your organization it opens you up to lawsuits and a lot of
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organizations are not brave enough to team up with academics and do that kind of science so we found an amazing
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partner we had a at the time first year PhD student passionate about this topic Edward Chang at the Warren school now
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he's a professor at Harvard Business School we're very proud of having mentored him in the amazing work he did
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leading this and we built a roughly one hour online diversity training program was primarily focused on introducing
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people to the idea of gender bias teaching them about the science showing that women are often
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facing backlash when they do things like negotiate for higher salaries that uh there are implicit biases that influence
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the way we judge other people even if we don't explicitly intend to discriminate
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that we have different associations with women we expect them to spend time in the home uh and it's easier for us to
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sort words that we associate with women with words we associate associate with doing work in the home
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um than it is for us to sort those words with with men it's easier for us to sort
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words related to Career with um men than it is for us to sort those words with women and there's speed tests
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called implicit Association tests that you can take that show you that even when you'd say I a hundred percent
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support women at work I do not hold any belief that women need to be at home as opposed to in the office uh in spite of
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that you'll still show these implicit associations because it's like smog it's
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been around your whole life and you absorb these stereotypes that are in the world so we had participants take one of
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these tests and then we armed them with tools that they could use to actually try to combat bias at work we uh pointed
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out to them for instance that one strategy that's been proven effective for reducing gender bias is say you're
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evaluating CVS and you're worried you might be giving priority to men rather than
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women who are otherwise equally qualified for a job just because of your implicit biases well one thing
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you can do is you can evaluate CVS without names associated with them it's called blinding that's a way that you
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can eliminate bias from that process so we gave them a series of tools of that sort and walked them through some
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scenarios so they could think about how to use them we're really proud of what we built
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so let me go back for a second because the company that you worked with Fortune 500 company and you call them Brave how
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did you convince them in the first place to do this study because this could be as you said some fairly sensitive areas
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that they would be going into yeah it's a really great question it was honestly
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a company that was really intrinsically motivated they care deeply about being a
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thought leader in this space and they were hopeful that if we could build something together and I should say they
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contributed a lot of insights because um ideally in my from my perspective and I know for my collaborators perspectives
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as well when we're trying to build something that can go in and improve organizations it's really helpful to
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have people inside those organizations thinking through these issues with you not just scientists who sit all day and
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read academic papers and teach but people who are on the front lines so they they wanted to contribute to
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building the best possible training that could exist and then proving out you know whether it added value and if it
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did they would they would be a thought leader in being able to share those insights with the world and say that
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that they were on the The Cutting Edge so that was the motivation with the recognition that there was a big risk if
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things didn't work or if things looked bad in the organization of of some kind
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of lawsuit ensuing so it was a it's a tricky balance to walk and I will say in
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the end I'm not allowed to say the name of the organization that we partnered
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with and that was one of the stipulations that we all agreed to to protect them when we started the project
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so when you're talking about diversity training programs are there downsides
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that that you see to that uh type of uh concept and are there limitations as well
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yeah well it's a fantastic question whether or not there may be some downsides to diversity trading programs
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and that's really what we set out to test by developing this partnership with
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the Fortune 500 company doing a randomized controlled trial to evaluate whether or not randomly assigning some
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people to complete a diversity training program and others to complete an unrelated program for an hour would
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produce benefits or not for women at the organization we did this with thousands
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of employees and we measured a number of different outcomes we looked first at attitudes at the end of both programs
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both the diversity training and uh I'll call it a placebo training program that
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focused on entirely unrelated material we asked people questions about their attitudes towards women in the
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organization and in general and and you know ways of supporting them we had some
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little scenario questions where we asked in this scenario you know how might you
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try to problem solve and the scenarios related to supporting women so those that's a simple sort of attitudinal or
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scenario-based way of evaluating whether the training had an impact but we also really cared about Downstream
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consequences would women be treated differently in the organization would people uh make more of an effort for
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instance when they had an opportunity to nominate women for awards would they be
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more willing to Mentor women when mentoring opportunities came up and so we had a number of different measures
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where we looked at exactly those kinds of outcomes mentoring sign ups Award nominations and even what we call
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an a little audit experiment where people an email went out and invited people to offer support and information
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to a new female employee at the company or male employee and we looked at was there a difference in the willingness to
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support new female versus male employees as a function of whether you'd been
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through the training or not okay so these are all different measures and the question is what did we find
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does it backfire does it work does the diversity training produce the outcomes we had hoped for all right I wish I had
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a really simple answer for you if I had to boil it down to one thing I would say
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diversity training wildly underperforms expectations but it's subtler than that
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so um on average we see that it has bigger effects on attitudes than on actions very little evidence of movement in
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terms of behavior in terms of the attitudinal lift though we do see that it's having an impact particularly on
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those who uh the subpopulation they belong to suggests they had more room for growth
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because the average attitudes in that subpopulation started out lower at Baseline
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um this means it's helping maybe change the attitudes a bit more for uh men in
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international settings uh in particular how about Behavior change what I think is really interesting about the behavior
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changes was actually the opposite so the people who whose Behavior was shifted most tended to be the people whose
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attitudes were most aligned to begin with with the training um in fact women and women are the the
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group that ended up changing their behaviors the most but one of the interesting things is that some of the
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behavior change we saw was not the kind we were expecting so we were expecting to lead more people to sign up to Mentor
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women if they'd gone through the training for instance and we do see that but we actually also saw women looking
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for mentorship themselves at a higher rate when they'd gone through the training which was really interesting so
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one of the key results and PS this also happens with minorities who go through the training is that we may through the
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training have made it more Salient to women and minorities that they needed sponsorship that there were threats to
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their success in the organization and they needed to look out for themselves and find other women and minorities to
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support them that's not normally what we think of as the goal of a diversity
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training right the goal of a diversity training is how do we ensure that our Workforce
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um particularly those in positions of Power are providing more support to women and minorities instead what we're
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doing is alerting women and minorities to look out for themselves so it's not
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necessarily a bad result that may be beneficial but it's not the intention of
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the program it's it's not the reason that billions of dollars are being poured
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into these kinds of uh programs at companies around the world so I guess there is part of this that a lot of
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people will think about the quote unquote fixing the people but I would think there's also have to be a focus to
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a degree on fixing the system as well correct yeah I think that's one of the most
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important takeaways from all the work that I have done and all of the work I have read in the last several decades of
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blossoming amount of research in this area of how do we increase diversity in organizations that when we try to fix
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people and say you know we're just going to make the managers better at treating
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women and minorities with respect or we're going to make the organization friendlier by by changing
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um the way that we talk about diversity these Solutions I'm put I should put Solutions
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in air quotes there these Solutions generally if not lived up to expectations for instance our diversity training well
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I should say a key limitation of the research we did is that we're looking at
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a one-hour online training you might see something really different if you did a
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week of training with a trained facilitator and and you know really hammered these points differently so
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that's a limitation of the work but still every study I have seen points in the same direction of if we just try to
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you know fix attitudes change beliefs um try to change people the result it's
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just much harder to do that this is true not only when it comes to gender diversity issues in organizations
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which is what we're talking about now but any kind of human biases and I tend
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to study decision making more broadly I look at gender diversity but I also look
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at other biases and judgment besides biases against certain groups of people that
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can lead us to make mistakes they're incredibly hard to train away what we find in both situations is that works
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what works much better than training is changing systems so Systems Support better decisions
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and and that's really what we're finding time and again don't fix the person fix
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the system they're embedded in so the system is more is better structured to
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support the outcomes we want to see and I can talk more about what that means exactly if you'd like well and can you
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also uh talk about this concept of isolated Choice effect and and how that does work as well
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so this is an example of changing systems as opposed to changing people and it's a project that actually I just
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want to highlight we just talked about this wonderful doctoral student from Wharton who came in as a first year LED
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this amazing team um and in testing the value of diversity training his name is Edward Chang and
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Edward also is one of the co-lead authors on this work on isolated Choice effect along with another former Wharton
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PhD student Erica kyrgios who's now a professor at Chicago Booth so the folks
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who were training and doing this work are now thought leaders at all of our peer institutions which just makes us
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incredibly proud so um Edward and Erica LED this project along with Anish Rai and myself where what we were trying to
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do is figure out whether or not we could restructure the way that selection decisions are made to improve outcomes
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for women what do I mean by selection decision so you can think of a selection decision as
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who am I going to hire for this job or who am I going to put on this prestigious uh committee or panel or you
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know put up in front of my organization and highlight as a as a star so who is going to get selected for opportunities
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that are important and and one way we could make those kinds of selections is um normally when we think about
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promotions hires we can make those decisions one at a time right we have at the Wharton School we hire a bunch of
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new faculty every year and you know we often will have a separate search for each and every faculty hire you know now
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we're looking for someone in marketing now we're looking for somebody in
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operations and we're gonna look for one person this spring in operations another
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person in the fall so we isolate those choices one Higher at a time but another way you can make choices in
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hiring decisions is actually in sets you could say we're gonna have a cluster
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higher we're gonna hire five new faculty in this department right in the spring
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we're gonna hire um or we're gonna put five people in this award category as
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opposed to one at a time so we have options because any organization that is growing is you know
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it has opportunities and they can be clustered or not and what we hypothesized is that when people hire or
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promote or select people for opportunities one at a time they focus on just the attributes of the person in
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front of them and don't think globally about how that person is contributing to
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the diversity of the organization they're just looking at the one person that's their focus when they hire in
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sets our hypothesis was they're going to because of the nature of the set attend
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to what the group looks like right so if I hire five people in a row at the Wharton School one at a time I probably
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don't even notice how those five people look at it as a group because I'm zoomed in looking at
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the candidate set and choosing oh this is the person I think is best for this role this role and so on but if I hire
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five at a time instead I'm thinking wow oh gosh how did I end up hiring five
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people who were all from the exact same University and the exact same have the exact same you know dissertation advisor
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uh they all look the same they all walk the same and talk the same I might notice if there's a lack of diversity
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because hiring in a set forces me to attend to that and that is what we found in study
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after study actually when we randomly assign people to make selection decisions one at a time versus in sets
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people select more diverse pools of candidates when they're choosing from exactly the same applicant pool for each
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hire they make more diverse Selections in sets than in Singletons the set forces a focus on the aggregate on
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whether you're creating a pool that has diversity that that supports your values
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that um that reflects the diversity you want to have in uh an effective organization but when you hire an
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isolation you don't have that so that's a structural change it's not I'm not
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changing the people who are making higher decisions hiring decisions I'm not training them I'm not suggesting to
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them to focus on diversity but what naturally happens when we look at sets is we think about diversity and when we
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look at Singletons we don't and PS this is something that's been known for a
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while when people make product choices right you're you're ordering snap you
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know you get to order five days of lunch for the week ahead all at once or you order Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday
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Friday people order more diverse menu sets if they're choosing all once because they're like oh I don't have
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salmon every day but if they're if they're ordering every day they pick the
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same dish every day in and day out because they're they're focusing just on
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that one choice so it's interesting that the same phenomenon that would lead to
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different behaviors when we're thinking about products also leads to these different patterns of hiring behavior
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that can be so important if you want to create a diverse organization you've also looked at how social norms
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uh affect a group composition and tend to contribute to underrepresentation of women what did you find happening there
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yeah yeah so you will laugh because yet who was leading this work my amazing former student Edward Chang who's now
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professor of the Harvard Business School so I I do a lot of work with doctoral students on this topic and Edward was an
00:20:03
incredibly productive um student who really is passionate about understanding gender diversity or
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in organizations and we had a great series of collaborations um this is actually though I have to say
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this is a project the idea came from my husband so I just have to give him a shout out he's a physics Professor here
00:20:20
at Penn and he said to me Katie I have noticed that it seems like when a physics department decides they
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lack gender diversity they panic they put a whole lot of effort into a higher finding stealing a woman from
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another top institution they get one and then they breathe a sigh of relief say our problem is solved and they never
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think about it or talk about it again and he said does that happen is it just like are people just trying to grab
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tokens and then they they put a check box and they quit and I said you know that's a really interesting question I
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have this amazing new doctoral student his name is Edward Chang let me see if we can come up with a way to test your
00:21:00
hypothesis but in a setting that we think might be more consequential even than academic physics departments
00:21:06
um we decided to take it to the boardroom and what we wanted to do and this is Joint work I should say with um midupak
00:21:12
andola of Colombia and Dolly chug of NYU is we grabbed the universe of data on who sits on corporate boards at Fortune
00:21:22
500 companies we actually also looked at for the fortune 1500 in the study but we
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zoomed in particularly on the Fortune 500 and some of the analyzes and um we looked for at the distribution of
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the number of women on boards and we realized that if there were cliffs in that distribution meaning if there was a
00:21:42
point at which you could clearly see a giant discontinuity in the representation of women that might
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suggest something about organizations satisficing trying to sort of reach a specific point and then quitting on
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their efforts to achieve diversity in the boardroom along the lines of my husband's hypothesis in physics
00:22:02
departments so um we actually did something that I'm very proud of we created this little
00:22:08
simulator it's like taking all the board directors and and all the fortune 1500
00:22:13
companies and playing musical chairs with them and we'll say you know imagine
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there's no these are the people who are on boards and well even you know people
00:22:21
are on multiple boards will keep them on multiple boards but we're going to Resort them and reshuffle and we'll do
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it a thousand times and we'll figure out what would the distribution of women
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look like if this is how boards were created with no attention to the uh diversity just taking the people who are
00:22:37
available and and shuffling them randomly and then we're going to compare that random shuffle to what we actually
00:22:44
see and see if it looks like there's any contortions any Cliffs suggesting a
00:22:49
magic number above which boards stop making an effort to achieve women and when we compare the two distributions
00:22:54
the musical chairs that's gender neutral and the reality we see a huge gap the
00:23:00
huge gap is actually not at the magic number one it's at the magic number two
00:23:05
so boards you can see this giant discontinuity boards are racing to get exactly two women and then they stop
00:23:10
trying there's a a giant drop off relative to what you'd expect if they were just you know seeding women uh at
00:23:18
the same rate as as any other member of the population that's out there and available for board seats
00:23:24
um and interestingly when we do a historical analysis we can go back in time with our time machine because
00:23:30
boards the seed who's Seated on boards has been tracked for ages we can actually see that there was a transition
00:23:35
point from tokenism it used to be the ones where the magic number when boards quit to tucanism
00:23:41
um about a little over a decade ago uh so um what's going on you might be asking
00:23:49
it turns out the social Norm at this point is most boards have two of them that's the average number and if you
00:23:55
have less uh you are deviating from all the others and you might be called out in the media and uh you might be you
00:24:03
know labeled the kind of company that's not supporting women and putting them on
00:24:07
your boards and so we actually see that um companies that tend to be more scrutinized seem to show this Cliff to a
00:24:14
greater degree companies of the Fortune 500 which are particularly under the microscope more than the 1500 show a
00:24:20
greater degree of this bias and we ran little experiments where we showed um when you're choosing who to add to a
00:24:27
group outside of the boardroom right just any sort of selection decision social Norm information is very Salient
00:24:35
and leads to these kinds of clustering effects nobody wants to be the outlier has fewer women than usual because they
00:24:41
worry that that will yield you know negative repercussions so I think this is another really interesting finding
00:24:48
and what's important about it to me is what it shows is the power of scrutiny
00:24:52
that one of the reasons that organizations especially at the highest levels are attending to diversity and
00:24:58
and making an effort is they don't want to be called out and that gives us power
00:25:02
because if we as a as a community we is a society want to see greater diversity then we need to continue to point out
00:25:13
when organizations aren't achieving it and that is highly motivating and leads
00:25:17
them to better Behavior now does that mean that we're going to see some bizarre
00:25:22
actions as a result like clustering and sort of everybody else has two so we're
00:25:26
okay if we have two yeah it does um but net net it means that the pressure and the scrutiny are working
00:25:33
and we're seeing this upward pressure continue and the number of women on boards the average keeps creeping up and
00:25:38
just as we saw a Tipping Point where eventually um tokenism gave way to tokenism hopefully we'll get to the
00:25:44
point where it's humiliating to have a board with uh less than three women and
00:25:48
we need to put the same pressure I should say in terms of board diversity in my opinion on um on on minority
00:25:55
representation uh so I think we're doing better with gender representation and
00:26:00
creating that scrutiny right now than than we have with um creating scrutiny around minority
00:26:05
representation so what then should organizations do uh in terms of confronting gender bias what are the
00:26:13
recommendations that you believe they should consider few recommendations so one thing I want
00:26:19
to start with is I don't think you should use diversity training as your solution that is not going to fix your
00:26:25
problem um to a thing that you can do is make sure you shine a light on how things are
00:26:33
going in different groups because scrutiny increases the social pressure people feel to make different kinds of
00:26:40
hiring and promotion decisions and attend to a lack of diversity so scrutiny matters highlighting social
00:26:46
norms when they're positive social norms meaning hey you're the only group in the
00:26:49
company that hasn't yet promoted a woman to this a senior ranks that kind of
00:26:54
scrutiny and those kinds of social norms matter um third when you can hire in sets
00:26:59
rather than in Singletons that is going to lead to Greater diversity in your hiring pool because only when we hire in
00:27:05
sets do we seem to really attend to these issues of diversity and then a final Point that's unrelated to my
00:27:11
research but I think an incredibly important finding that should be used more here is that there's been some
00:27:16
really wonderful research done led by um Joyce he of UCLA and Sonia Kang of the University of Toronto showing that
00:27:23
uh women because of probably stereotypes and the backlash they sometimes face when they
00:27:33
um self-nominate for things like promotions are very much less likely to put their hand up when it's time to be
00:27:41
promoted even when they've performed at the same level as others and this this
00:27:46
is research also by Muriel neederly of Stanford showing women under compete relative to men when they have the same
00:27:50
credentials so what Sonia and Joyce did is they they experimented with changing organizational defaults meaning in most
00:28:00
organizations if you want a promotion you have to say I would like to apply for this promotion but what if you
00:28:06
flipped the structure and you said everyone who has met a certain qualification threshold is going
00:28:12
to be considered for a promotion you you're welcome to opt out if you really don't
00:28:17
want to be leveled up in this organization there may be personal reasons you really don't but but you
00:28:22
will be considered unless you request that you not be considered and guess what women
00:28:28
ended up being in the consideration set and therefore promoted dramatically more
00:28:32
in the second system where the default the the situation is that you'll be considered whether you volunteer or not
00:28:39
so thinking about the fact that women may be more hesitant to put their name forward they may be less willing to
00:28:45
compete and creating structures where it's easier because the friction is in
00:28:49
the other direction where everyone's going to compete and you have to actually exert some energy to avoid it
00:28:55
that can create a More Level Playing Field as for women in the workplace what you
00:29:01
think they can do to try and level that playing field well one thing that I think is really
00:29:09
important is having a strong group of mentors we know that's important and that women tend to have weaker networks
00:29:16
than men um because uh frankly we we uh we know about homophily which is a tendency to
00:29:23
affiliate with others who are like ourselves and if you're at the top of an organization and you're a woman you'll
00:29:27
find fewer people who are like you you can affiliate with and chat with at the water cooler so that's a challenge
00:29:33
um and and recognizing that and actually making extra efforts to to look out for
00:29:38
opportunities to connect with others to make sure you have strong networks and strong bonds and that's really important
00:29:47
um I actually have a group in my own life that is a no club and this is based on Research that was done by Linda
00:29:55
Babcock at Carnegie Mellon University and collaborators showing that women are too willing to say yes to non-promotable
00:30:02
tasks at work we're too quick to do sort of the office housework taking those
00:30:07
votes in a meeting organizing the holiday party the kinds of things that aren't ultimately rewarded but can be
00:30:12
very time consuming and um Linda and her collaborators their solution to this and they've written a
00:30:18
wonderful book by the way called the no Club was to create a group of women who were at a similar career stage who
00:30:24
helped support each other in saying no when it was necessary because interestingly even though we're bad at
00:30:29
saying no for ourselves women are are just as good at men as saying no for others recognizing when others should
00:30:34
make a certain decision um we're very good at arguing for other people so uh and we're good at arguing for
00:30:42
ourselves too when we're comfortable doing it it's just there's a lot of
00:30:46
pressure against it and often we conform or or fold in the face of that pressure
00:30:51
so I actually have a no Club in my life it includes a couple of other female academics at a similar career phase and
00:30:58
when we Face challenges about things that we're not sure is this a yes or isn't a no and frankly advice in general
00:31:04
we reach out to each other and it has been the most amazing resource for a few reasons
00:31:09
um one is the expected I expected it would be a great resource because they'd
00:31:13
give me wisdom and sort of Consulting from brilliant people it also creates social connection and makes me enjoy my
00:31:21
work more to have these awesome supporters in in my camp and to be supporting these other terrific women
00:31:27
um but the third reason which I didn't anticipate but his really been there too
00:31:32
is that every time they ask me for advice I'm learning so they will face a challenge they will need to figure out
00:31:41
you know should I do this or not and from an arm's length View and when it's
00:31:43
not me I Can See Clearly what the answer is and then once I've said oh no you
00:31:48
should definitely say no to that opportunity I'm confident that this is the wrong thing for you when I face a
00:31:53
similar challenge it's built my confidence and competence to respond and handle that situation myself and what's
00:31:59
really interesting actually is I've gotten to be involved in some research led by Lauren s Chris Winkler now at
00:32:04
Kellogg former Wharton postdoc showing that when we give advice to others it actually improves our own outcomes not
00:32:11
just in the domain of you know this no club that I'm describing where a lot of
00:32:16
the decisions have to do with gender and work but you know high school students who we randomly assign to give advice to
00:32:22
their younger peers get better grades because they just coach someone else on how to get good grades and when you
00:32:27
coach you learn so I think a really interesting thing that women can do is actually build these kinds of advice
00:32:32
clubs so that they have stronger networks stronger social connections they're benefiting from others who can
00:32:38
see clearly in places where they can't how to not conform to stereotypes but
00:32:42
make those decisions that are better for their career and in advising others they're going to gain benefits to
00:32:48
competence confidence and social support so I would advise all women to have advice clubs and PS men should have them
00:32:56
as well but this may be a particularly useful tool for women who can't say no
00:33:00
where do you think that the gender equality question ends up taking us let's say a
00:33:07
decade from now honestly I'm such an optimist especially after doing for instance the work we
00:33:15
discussed on toucanism and corporate boards and seeing how things have evolved now
00:33:21
they've evolved slowly I wish they'd evolved a lot faster but we're seeing
00:33:25
progress in the right direction and I think the pressure and scrutiny have accelerated
00:33:32
um so I'm hopeful I'm feeling very hopeful that things are going to continue to get better and there's
00:33:38
certainly a lot of scientific attention on this question when I was a graduate student first starting to do some
00:33:44
research related to race and gender bias and and how can we solve it it was not a
00:33:49
very popular area and I think as it's become easier and easier to collect massive data sets as a b testing has
00:33:57
become more straightforward to do in organizations and more accepted maybe in part because of the you know Tech being
00:34:02
such a a big part of um the corporate world and and so much a b testing there it's becoming more part
00:34:08
of the culture we're accelerating insights about what works and as those insights become more widely adopted I
00:34:16
think a along with the increased attention to these issues and desire for equality I'm optimistic that we can use
00:34:24
science to get where we want to be [Music] Katie thanks very much for your time today all the best
00:34:31
thank you so much for the great questions and for having me on the show thank you Katie Milkman who's a
00:34:36
professor of operations information and decisions here at the Wharton School thank you for listening to the ripple
00:34:43
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