1940: The Science of Making Work Fair

What It Covers

Siri Chilazi, senior researcher at Harvard Kennedy School's Women in Public Policy program, explains how workplace unfairness stems from flawed systems rather than individual bias. She presents evidence-based methods to redesign hiring, evaluation, promotion, and meeting processes to create equal opportunities, drawing from her book Make Work Fair.

Key Questions Answered

• •Transparent rejection feedback: An Australian employer closed the gender gap in leadership reapplications by adding one sentence to rejection emails informing candidates they ranked in the top 20 percent. Men previously reapplied at twice the rate of women, but transparency about competitive standing eliminated this disparity without any cost or policy change.
• •Skills-based hiring over resumes: Organizations should replace resume reviews with direct skill assessments like 30-minute writing exercises or customer service role-plays. This method shows the highest correlation between evaluation performance and actual job performance, especially critical as AI-generated resumes flood applicant pools with lower-quality information disconnected from real capabilities.
• •Meeting equity through structure: Send agendas in advance, conduct round-robin contributions giving each person two minutes, and use anonymous voting on post-it notes before finalizing decisions. These practices level the playing field between introverts and extroverts, ensuring prepared contributions rather than rewarding only those who think by talking or self-promote most aggressively.
• •Resume format redesign: List work experience with total years in each role rather than specific dates to eliminate bias against non-continuous work histories. This preserves all competence-relevant information while obscuring career gaps that cause hiring managers to penalize candidates for no performance-related reason, particularly affecting women and caregivers disproportionately.
• •Flexible work as fairness driver: Data from tech and finance sectors shows return-to-office mandates cause disproportionate talent drainage among women, senior employees, and high-skilled workers with options elsewhere. Organizations allowing self-selection into work arrangements retain top performers who choose settings matching their productivity patterns, whether remote or in-office.