Abstract
“Get the girl to check the numbers,” said John Glenn prior to his historic 1962 Project Mercury flight. To whom was he referring? Katherine Johnson.
Born in 1918 in the town of White Sulphur Spring, West Virginia, Katherine Johnson played a pivotal role at NASA. Even as a child, Katherine had a talent for mathematics. She was just 15 when she enrolled at West Virginia State College, a historically Black college (HBCU). There she studied under Dr. William Schieffelin Claytor, one of the first Black men in the United States to earn a PhD in mathematics. Dr. Schieffelin designed advanced courses just for Johnson, telling her, “You would make a great research mathematician.”
When Johnson joined the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NASA’s predecessor) in the all-Black, all-female West Area Computing Unit led by Dorothy Vaughan, NACA was segregated. There were no diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. At NACA, Johnson demanded to be included in meetings with the White men engineers who would otherwise be discussing her calculations without her. Rather than wait for an invitation, she followed the engineers into the meetings. She stated, “I just ignored the barriers and did the work.” Indeed, her work was so respected that engineers, and eventually the astronauts themselves, began to request to work with her.
why de&i programs?
The United States has a long history of treating racial and ethnic minorities and women as “less than” and putting them in precarious, economically disadvantaged work environments like the West Area Computing Unit. One of the goals of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs is to create systems and processes that ensure that people, regardless of their race, ethnicity, gender, nationality, and other factors, are treated equally. For NASA and other organizations, these efforts are not about being benevolent or charitable. They are about promoting and advancing the best people for the benefit of their organizations and society. Imagine how many more contributions Katherine Johnson could have made to NASA if she had been included earlier and more fully. (Over the last few years NASA created a “Mission Equity” plan and noted that “DE&IA [diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility] is critical to innovation, excellence, and mission success.”)
Resistance to DE&I today is often based on an argument that these practices stand in opposition to hiring based on merit. Merit refers to selecting a person who deserves to be hired or promoted based on talent. But social scientific studies indicate that, in the absence of DE&I efforts, fair and impartial treatment just doesn’t exist. For example, researchers Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan reported in a 2004 study titled, “Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination” that managers who evaluate a nearly identical resume under a “White-sounding” name are significantly more likely to call the person back than they are when it’s submitted under a “Black-sounding” name. Even with no substantive differences in their experiences or accomplishments, Black applicants are judged less suitable for hire than identically qualified White applicants. Similar studies show that, in science and engineering fields, a resume with a man’s name on it is evaluated more positively than the identical resume with a woman’s name on it. This is not a relic of the past. These biases continue today, even among well established, highly regarded Fortune 100 companies (for more, see The New York Times’ Upshot report “What Researchers Discovered When They Sent 80,000 Fake Résumés to U.S. Jobs”). DE&I hiring practices are designed to remove these biases, thereby ensuring that all applicants are treated fairly.
During talent reviews, more time was spent discussing men, which led men to receive higher ratings than women.
GoDaddy monitored the amount of time discussing each employee to ensure that everyone received equal discussion time.
All employees (across genders) received higher levels of feedback than prior to intervention.
People were evaluated in comparable ways regardless of gender.
DE&I policies facilitate racial, gender, and other forms of equality. When implemented correctly, DE&I can help produce more equitable and talent-rich workplaces.
iStockPhoto // Paperkites
de&i hiring in action
One example of such a DE&I program was implemented by GoDaddy. GoDaddy, one of the world’s largest internet domain registrars, is a private technology company with headquarters in Tempe, Arizona and around 6,000 employees. In 2015, after facing critiques that its previous years’ Superbowl commercials were sexist and objectified women, the leadership at GoDaddy dropped its Superbowl campaigns and set out to develop an internal DE&I program. Specifically, leadership decided that they did not want to simply roll out a one-time training effort around unconscious bias. Instead, they wanted to remove any biases that might exist in their promotion and feedback systems. Because performance ratings affected their employees’ pay, benefits, and workplace responsibilities, they decided the effort was important to the employees’ lives and livelihoods.
GoDaddy worked with researchers from the Stanford VMware Women’s Leadership Innovation Lab who identified ways to reduce bias in the promotion process (see table one at right for an overview). The Stanford researchers analyzed employee engagement surveys, conducted focus groups, fielded an original survey, analyzed approximately 60 performance evaluations, and observed talent review sessions. What did they find? Where men were described with active, agentic language, such as “taking charge” and “driving change,” women were discussed in ways that discounted their actions, such as saying she “helped lead” instead of “she led.” In other words, the researchers noticed that assessments lined up with stereotypes about women being more collaborative and men being more agentic. Researchers further observed that more time was spent discussing men’s performance. As a result, some high-performing women were being passed over for promotion.
Over several months, the then-Chief People Officer at GoDaddy, Monica Bailey, worked with the researchers to improve their promotion process in three key areas: reducing the number of competencies upon which people would be evaluated by narrowing in on the most important ones; training managers on how to evaluate employees fairly; and putting communication tools like evaluation dashboards in place to track progress to improve consistency and transparency. Over time, these changes led to greater levels of equality in the promotions of women and men. It also led to higher quality feedback for all employees across the company, regardless of gender identity. In other words, the DE&I new processes worked better and more fairly. As a direct result, GoDaddy became recognized as one of the best workplaces for women in technology.
de&i going forward
Will DE&I survive going forward in businesses? We believe the answer is yes, the essential qualities of DE&I programs will continue. This is because DE&I policies not only facilitate racial, gender, and other forms of equality, they also ensure that organizations are accurately assessing talent in order to hire and promote the best people, as we saw in the GoDaddy example above.
We also believe the essential elements of DE&I will survive because they are good for teams and decision-making in workplaces. In businesses, increasingly, critical work is being done by teams and not by individuals. By including a wider range of skills and perspectives, diversity and inclusion enhance team performance. For example, research by the late workplace expert Katherine Phillips found that greater team diversity led people to do a better job preparing to work together and led teams to demonstrate a higher level of problem-solving. In diverse teams, individuals tended to avoid “group think,” or converging on a solution too quickly without considering alternatives that might be better.
The impetus to reduce discrimination, treat people fairly, and ensure that our workplaces are fully drawing on all of the talent in our society has a long history.
In conclusion, where we stand today with DE&I is part of a broader arc that can be traced back to the days when Katherine Johnson worked at NASA and to decades prior to her time there. The impetus to reduce discrimination, treat people fairly, and in so doing, ensure that our workplaces are fully drawing on all of the talent in our society, has a long history. DE&I, when implemented correctly, can help produce more equitable and talent-rich workplaces. It is important to give DE&I programs time to do so.