WAGES-Classroom (Workshop Activity for Gender Equity Simulation): Using Pedagogical Frameworks to Address Challenges of Bias Interventions

Abstract

Implementing interventions to address gender bias can backfire and thwart information processing and learning goals by threatening self-views and provoking defensiveness. To confront these and other challenges with bias interventions, we drew from the pedagogical frameworks of experiential learning theory and intersectional pedagogy to develop the Workshop Activity for Gender Equity Simulation-Classroom (WAGES-Classroom), a game that teaches about gender bias in the workplace and facilitates strategies for interrupting bias. We employed three longitudinal studies, including two laboratory studies (Studies 1 and 2) and one field study (Study 3), to assess WAGES-Classroom. Consistent with hypotheses, WAGES-Classroom outperformed no intervention conditions (Studies 1 and 3) on knowledge acquisition and taking social action to address gender bias. WAGES-Classroom outperformed passive interventions on knowledge application (Study 2) and, to some extent, taking social action to address gender bias (Studies 1 and 2). WAGES-Classroom's superior outcomes were mediated by its ability to raise concern about bias (compared to no intervention) and its engaging nature (compared to passive methods). This research makes practical contributions by identifying successful strategies for facilitating action to address bias, as well as theoretical contributions by empirically testing underlying mechanisms to understand why the strategies are successful. Additional online materials for this article are available on PWQ's website at http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/suppl/10.1177/03616843251349696