Stereotypes and bias are still significant barriers for women to progress in their careers. It can also prevent them from assuming leadership positions.
There’s lots of evidence to show that inclusive organisations outperform less inclusive organisations. So, it makes good business sense to become more diverse at all levels of the organisation. But there’s no one size fits all approach, when it comes to breaking bias in the workplace. There are plenty of organisations can, and should, be doing to break the cycle of gender bias.
What causes gender bias?
If we don’t work as one to address the underlying causes of gender bias, they’ll continue to exist from one generation to the next. In the workplace gender bias can present itself in a number of ways. Some of these include:
- Male candidates being preferentially hired over female candidates with equivalent experience. This can result in there being more males in the talent pipeline.
- Women who are recent or soon-to-be mothers being overlooked for high-profile promotions.
- Ideas advanced by men given more attention than ideas advanced by women.
- Women being paid less than men in the same roles.
- Unfair interview questions – most commonly questions related to childcare.
- Being deprived of a promotion due to negative perceptions around ‘ability to commit to the job’ because of caring commitments.
Creating change at an operational level
But it’s not all bad news. It’s more than possible to make positive change that can break bias in the workplace. It simply just needs an organisation to be dedicated to recognising and accepting where there are failings and committed to fixing these issues.
Acknowledging bias is the first step in overcoming it. Once we’ve acknowledged that bias exists in our workplaces, we can begin to do the work to tackle it.
There are many ways to do this:
- Collect data to reveal any trends across the workforce and then act upon any disparities.
- Commit to training to help people understand gender bias and promote actions to overcome bias in the workplace.
- Implement inclusive recruitment.
- Implement Family friendly working practices
- Create fair and transparent promotion processes.
- Have a zero-tolerance approach to bullying and harassment with robust policies and procedures to support women experiencing sexual harassment in the workplace.
- Develop gender focused employee resource groups which provide a chance for colleagues to come together and discuss and promote gender equality in the workplace.
- Provide support for new parents returning to work.
- Analyse the gender pay gap and the root causes of the gap - at Abri, we will be using software to enable us to analyse this better.
Supporting women
It’s not just operational change that’s needed. There needs to support and opportunities in place to directly help women progress in their careers. At Abri, Housing Professionals of the Future is designed to give colleagues the tools and information to progress into different roles. Each colleague also has a Personal Development Plan as well as a monthly 1 to 1, to discuss career progression, training needs and development. These sessions provide a regular opportunity to raise concerns.
We’re also:
- Making more roles open to flexible working. Naturally, depending on the role, the level of flexibility can differ, but it’s important that all efforts are made to make a role as flexible as possible.
- Offering reverse or reciprocal mentoring.
- Applying an EDI lens to all policies and process to address any potential for gender bias and other forms of bias.
- Raising awareness of how to recognise and tackle imposter syndrome.
- Creating facilitated discussions on subjects such as banter in the workplace.
- Using our Peakon Engagement survey to regularly gather colleagues’ perceptions of the workplace. And this survey now also helps us to understand if there are gendered differences.
Encouraging all colleagues to call out gender bias, discrimination and stereotyping
Without the support of every colleague, breaking gender bias can only go so far. A robust plan to break the bias should always include your colleagues. They need to feel confident in recognising gender bias, they need to understand its impact, and feel empowered to call it out when they see it.
We talk a lot about being an ally. This is all about lending your voice to those whose voices are sometimes not heard. Running workshops and training is an important part of this. For example, we’ve recently run a Bystander Get Curious session, designed to help men and women in our organisation know what to do if they see bias treatment happening. It encourages them to be an ‘upstander’ rather than a ‘bystander’.
