How to Combat the Hidden Gender Biases that Can Make Your Culture Unfriendly to Women

Despite efforts to eliminate gender bias at work, women still face barriers their male colleagues don’t. How can companies today identify whether gender bias has crept into their organization and create cultures that are supportive of women?

On this episode of The Culture Kit, hosts Jenny Chatman and Sameer Srivastava are joined by Laura Kray, a professor at Berkeley Haas and the faculty director of the Center for Equity, Gender, and Leadership. Laura has been studying the psychological barriers that hold women back at work for decades. Her work sheds light on the hidden biases that persist today. 

Jenny, Sameer, and Laura chat about the perceived differences between male and female leaders in terms of power versus status, as well as how age plays into how women are perceived. Laura discusses her research debunking the notion that pay disparities between men and women come from differences in negotiation skills and shares strategies for business leaders to uncover and correct inequities.  

3 Main Takeaways from Jenny & Sameer’s interview with Laura Kray:

1. Be open minded to the possibility that gender bias may have crept into your company’s culture. 
2. Engage in systematic tracking and auditing of things like pay and performance reviews and adopt a data-driven approach to correcting inequities. 
3. Be a confronter rather than a bystander. You don’t need to be at the top of an organization to inspire change..Show Links:

• Laura Kray’s faculty profile at the Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley (https://haas.berkeley.edu/faculty/kra...)
• Center for Equity, Gender and Leadership (https://haas.berkeley.edu/equity/) at Berkeley Haas
• Not All Powerful People Are Created Equal: An Examination of Gender and Pathways to Social Hierarchy Through the Lens of Social Cognition, by Charlotte Townsend, Sonya Mishra, and Laura J. Kray. Psychological Science (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1...)
• From politicians to pop stars to professionals, gender stereotypes shape how we view power and status (https://newsroom.haas.berkeley.edu/re...) , Haas News
• A gender gap in managerial span of control: Implications for the gender pay gap (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science...) , by Maragaret Lee and Laura J. Kray, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes
• The pay gap for women starts with a responsibility gap (https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-pay-...) , by Laura Kray and Margaret Lee, The Wall Street Journal
• Now, women do ask: A call to update beliefs about the gender pay gap (https://journals.aom.org/doi/abs/10.5...) , by Laura J. Kray (https://journals.aom.org/doi/abs/10.5...) , Jessica A. Kennedy (https://journals.aom.org/doi/abs/10.5...) and Margaret Lee (https://journals.aom.org/doi/abs/10.5...) , Academy of Management Discoveries
• New research shatters outdated pay-gap myth that women don’t negotiate (https://newsroom.haas.berkeley.edu/re...) , by Laura Counts, 2024
• Agentic but not warm: Age-gender interactions and the consequences of stereotype incongruity perceptions for middle-aged professional women (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science...) , by Jennifer A. Chatman, Daron Sharps, Sonya Mishra, Laura J. Kray, Michael S. North. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes
• Creativity from constraint? How the political correctness norm influences creativity in mixed-sex work groups (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/...) , by Jack A. Goncalo, Jennifer A. Chatman, Michelle M. Duguid, and Jessica A. Kennedy, Administrative Science Quarterly
• Cultures of Genius at Work: Organizational Mindsets Predict Cultural Norms, Trust, and Commitment (https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2020-1...) , by Elizabeth A. Canning,  Mary C. Murphy, Katherine T. U. Emerson, Jennifer A. Chatman, Carol S. Dweck, and Laura J. Kray,  Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.



Do you have a vexing question about work that you want Jenny and Sameer to answer? Submit your “Fixit Ticket (https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1c6kS...) !” 

Learn more about the podcast and the Berkeley Center for Workplace Culture and Innovation at www.haas.org/culture-kit (http://www.haas.org/culture-kit) .

The Culture Kit with Jenny & Sameer is a production of UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business and the Berkeley Center for Workplace Culture and Innovation. It is produced by University FM.