Why we should give up trying to make people less sexist

Discrimination is surprisingly difficult to root out. Implicit association tests reveal prejudice lingering in our subconscious. Just informing people about their biases won't necessarily stop them from committing the same mistakes over and over again.

As Taylor Swift put it, "haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate."

Prejudice operates like muscle memory. It takes constant vigilance to catch our often inadvertent moments of sexism or racism. It takes practice.

"Put bluntly, changing behavior means work that the vast majority of us are not motivated to do," writes Harvard professor Iris Bohnet in her new book, "What Works: Gender Equality by Design."

Every year, Bohnet says, companies spend $8 billion on diversity training despite scant evidence that these programs do any good. They might even backfire - worsening discrimination by activating stereotypes or by making people complacent about their prejudices.

What if we gave up trying to change people's minds? Bohnet, a behavioral economist at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, makes a provocative proposal: Instead of striving to make everyone less sexist, we should change the system so it's harder for sexism to thrive.

To prevent discrimination in hiring, why not hide the names of applicants? If female employees are reluctant to ask for flexible work schedules, why not make flex time the default for everyone? And if women are hesitant to guess on standardized tests, why not eliminate the penalty for guessing?

Bohnet's book is a collection of these ideas and the research that underpins them. Recently, we had a chat about why it's important to fix our institutions, and why that might be easier than trying to fix our bias-prone minds.

Q. Tell me more about why you wrote this book.

Iris Bohnet: I am a behavioral economist, and that's really where the thinking started for the book. Behavioral scientists for a very long time have been trying to understand biases. And not just biases related to demographic characteristics like gender -- cognitive biases in general.

What we've found is that biases are very stubborn. They are very hard to overcome simply by trying to change mindsets.

For instance, people tend to interpret information in a self-serving way. It's called the "self-serving bias." A number of researchers have been trying to tackle this bias, which often leads people to be too optimistic about their own bargaining positions. Often it causes negotiations to end in an impasse. When I taught negotiation [at Harvard], I was struck by how difficult it was to get people to understand this.

Informing people that this bias exists does very little. If it does anything -- and this tells us something about the human mind -- it backfires. People become more aware of the bias in others. They say "Oh, now I see why my counterpart was negotiating so assertively." But they don't recognize the problem in themselves.

Simple awareness itself doesn't do the trick. Researchers have tried a number of different things. What eventually worked was for people to force themselves to write down counterarguments to their own beliefs. You have to have a little bit of your brain always playing the devil's advocate. Write down five reasons you might be wrong. That helps people de-bias themselves the best. It's super hard to do and only works if people are extremely conscious of the kinds of tricks their minds play.

Q. The argument you make in the book is that we should change the world so it's harder for our biases to harm other people.

Bohnet: Yes, so one intervention that has huge potential for organizations are blinded evaluations. We have very good evidence that they work.

In the 1970s, the major symphony orchestras in the United States began making musicians audition behind a curtain. They found that this made women 50 percent more likely to advance to later rounds. It contributed to an increase of female musicians in major orchestras in the U.S., from 5 percent in the 1970s to almost 40 percent today.

This example is important to me for two reasons. First, it drives home the idea of unconscious bias. These weren't bad selection committees. They were convinced that they cared only about the music, not whether somebody looked the part. Still, they fell prey to their biases.

Second, the curtain represents a design innovation. It doesn't try to change people's mindsets. It just makes it easier for our biased minds to get things right.

It would be very easy for most organizations to blind themselves to people's demographic characteristics, at least in the early rounds of hiring. They could really focus on people's abilities, their performance and their potential to do the job well.

To me, this is a low-hanging fruit. Blind evaluations are powerful innovation that wouldn't be expensive to implement but could have huge benefits.

This story was originally published March 15, 2016 at 5:24 PM with the headline "Why we should give up trying to make people less sexist."