Siri Chilazi: Building a Fair Workplace for Everyone to Succeed

Episode recap:

Today’s guest is Siri Chilazi, a leading gender expert, Harvard researcher, and co-author of Make Work Fair: Data-Driven Design for Real Results. Marcel and Siri discussed gender equity in the workplace, highlighting progress made and challenges that remain in achieving fairness for all employees. They explored strategies for implementing gender equity, including the use of data-driven approaches, revising hiring practices, and adapting leadership criteria to reflect changing work environments. The conversation also touched on the impact of remote work, the importance of work-life balance, and the need for empathy and compassion in leadership to create more equitable workplaces.

Bio:

Siri Chilazi is a senior researcher at the Women and Public Policy Program at Harvard Kennedy School whose life’s work is to advance gender equality in the workplace. As a keynote speaker and strategic advisor, Siri collaborates with a wide range of organizations around the world. Her work regularly appears in leading media outlets. Siri has an MBA from Harvard Business School, a Master’s in Public Policy from Harvard Kennedy School, and a BA in Chemistry and Physics from Harvard College.

Quotes:

• "We should be all have the same chance to show what we can do and what we're made of."
• "Talent exists everywhere, and when we refuse to allow for the potential of talents based on things like ethnicity or extracurriculars that have nothing to do with the skills you bring to the table, we miss out on many really good people who could do excellent work in our organizations."

Takeaways:

• Track gender representation in your team's work by spending just two minutes after each project to count participation percentages.
• Redesign your hiring process using structured interviews with pre-determined questions and horizontal grading to reduce unconscious bias.
• Rotate administrative tasks like note-taking and meeting scheduling to prevent one gender from consistently handling "office housework"

Timestamps:

[00:00] Why Fairness Still Matters More Than Ever at Work

[02:53] How Siri Went from Lab Coat to Leadership

[06:19] What Fair Work Really Looks Like in 2025 and Beyond

[09:31] Surprising Ways Bias Still Shows Up in Hiring Today

[16:11] Why Most DEI Programs Fail Inside the Day-to-Day

[22:30] How Tracking the Right Data Closes Fairness Gaps

[27:16] Changing Behavior Beats Changing Minds at Work

[30:42] Fixing How We Hire and Promote Without Bias

[39:45] What Remote Work Really Means for Women’s Growth

[45:48] Making Parental Leave Equal Changes Everything

[50:01] What CEOs Can Actually Do to Make Work More Fair

[51:58] How Small Changes Build More Fair Workplaces Fast

Conclusion:

Workplaces still reflect deep-rooted inequalities, especially in how people are hired, promoted, and evaluated. These patterns often hold back women and other underrepresented groups. Instead of trying to shift personal beliefs, lasting change comes from fixing the systems themselves. Clear, consistent practices—like fair assessments, equal chances for growth, and shared responsibilities—can help build a more level playing field. When fairness is built into everyday processes, everyone benefits.

Links/Resources:

Website: https://sirichilazi.com/

Book: https://makeworkfair.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sirichilazi/

Transcript

Marcel Schwantes 00:00

Thank you. Hey, great to have you all back, and thank you for joining me for what I know is going to be a great conversation today. So I have been doing these podcast episodes, and I'm hoping that you've been enjoying these solo episodes where I talk about my book, and I've been reading excerpts from my new book, humane leadership. And by the way, if you want bonus content that did not make the book, otherwise that would have been a 350-page book, and my publisher would not have been kind to that. So go to my sub stack at marcelschwantes.substack.com and subscribe there to receive bonus book Content not available anywhere. 

Okay, all right, so here's how I want to set the table today for this conversation. Back in 1972 there were only about 400,000 women owned businesses in the US. So fast forward to today, and we should be elated that there are over 13 million. Okay, that that's definitely a victory there and on top of that, women also now lead more in Fortune 500 companies than ever before. So progress, absolutely, but let's be real. Okay, there's still a long way to go, folks, and because the gender gap is still a thing and leadership opportunities aren't equally shared, and too many well-meaning DEI efforts. They kind of fall flat there. A lot of them are driven by ideology, and they're not evidence or data. 

And that's where Iris Bohnet and Siri Chilazi come in. They are Harvard researchers and experts in gender equity, and they've teamed up to write a game changing book called Make Work fair, data driven design for real results. So instead of just calling for change, the authors show us exactly how to design fairness into the workplace. Well, there's a novel idea, right? So they use research, not wishful thinking. Okay, so their approach doesn't, you know, just try to change hearts and minds, although that's certainly part of the equation. I mean, it's kind of hard to do. Do that change hearts and minds of people that are so data driven, right? 

So instead, they focus on changing systems and behaviors. What actually works in real companies with real people. So whether you're a leader, you're a manager, you're, you know, the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, or a founder of a 50-person startup. Okay, if you are someone just trying to navigate the workplace more fairly, you're going to want to stick around for some really good and tested and practical ideas that you can put into action. So I am thrilled to welcome one of the authors of that book to this to the show, Siri Chilazi, and she's going to talk about fairness and what that really means why DEI programs often miss the mark, and how we can redesign work so that everyone is thriving. 

Siri is a senior researcher at the Women in Public Policy Program at Harvard Kennedy School whose life work is to advance gender equality in the workplace. She is a keynote speaker and strategic advisor to global companies. Siri has an MBA from Harvard Business School, a Master's in Public Policy from Harvard Kennedy School, and a BA in chemistry and physics from Harvard College. And Siri now joins us. Welcome to the Love in Action Podcast!

Siri Chilazi 04:05

I'm thrilled to be here. Marcel, thank you for having me. Thank you for that wonderful introduction.

Marcel Schwantes 04:10

Absolutely. So we start like this. For those not familiar with you ready? Let's do it. What's your story?

Siri Chilazi 04:20

The short story is that I was a science geek growing up. But as you mentioned in the intro, chemistry and physics, physical sciences, and when I entered my first full time workplace, my first full time job after college, it was in management consulting, which now feels like a prior life, that was the first time in my experience that I came face to face with a lot of the gender inequities that I had only heard talked about up until then. So things like at my firm at the entry level, that's 5050, women and men. When you look to the top 90% of the partners are men. I look around and see who's being promoted. Promoted. You know, among the people that I'm actually working with, and I can see how well they're doing at their job, I see a lot of mediocre men being promoted over super high performing women, or at least that's the way I perceive it. I found out that I was being paid less than male colleagues. 

So as soon as I encountered those things myself in the workplace, it kind of hit me in the face that, wow, we're in the 21st century, and we've been talking about these things for so long, and these are still real problems and real dynamics occurring on the ground. So that was a pivot point for me in my life and in my career, to say I care passionately about, passionately about creating a world where everyone has an equal opportunity to succeed to their full potential, right? Yeah, doesn't mean that everybody's going to become the CEO. Everybody winds up in the same job, but we should at least all have the same chance to show what we can do and what we're made of. And so then, as I came to graduate school after that first job, that was kind of my guiding light to say, how can I make this my life's work is helping create organizations and helping redesign workplaces in such a way that everyone actually has that equal opportunity to succeed.

Marcel Schwantes 06:10

That's great. That's that really speaks to your why in the world. Thank you for that. Okay, so we know this topic is not new. I have brought on guests from as far back as 2019 before COVID. Yeah, talk about gender equality, but we're sort of in a new era. So in your own words, what does it mean to make work fair, and why does it matter so much more now in year 2025, say than even five years ago, right?

Siri Chilazi 06:39

Right? Well, actually, I'm going to answer your question in one second, but I love that you brought in this historical perspective, because I think that's something that gives me a lot of hope in this moment. We're in a moment that feels very uncertain, and there's a lot going on. But if you look back in history to your point, Marcel, this effort to make a more equal society and a more equal workplace. It's been called affirmative action in the 1960s it's been called women's advancement in the 1990s it's been called diversity and inclusion, and then later, Diversity Equity and Inclusion in the last 1015, years. But the undercurrent is the same right, which is there's the shared human value globally around the idea of fairness that each of us deserves to have a level playing field on which to play on, and an equal opportunity to both show what we can do, but also grow and be developed. So I think of this with the analogy of a 100 meter dash at the Olympics, the sprint race. 

Yeah, the reason we can use that race to crown the world's fastest sprinter is because we have the eight sprinters lining up at the same starting line. They finish the race at the same finish line, and in between they encounter the same track, right? So they're running with very similar outfits. They're all running with sneakers, and they're running on the same track. If we change this race so that some of the people had to run in the grass next to the track while other people got to run on that fast, performing track, we would all see that it's not a fair race anymore, because it's, of course, slower to run in the grass. Or if we took the shoes off of some people and said, yep, yep, we're gonna get ready to race for the Olympic event, I'll go, but the person next to you is running in sneakers. Everybody's going to look at that and say, Hey, wait a second. This is not an accurate way of determining who the fastest sprinter is. 

Or even more egregiously, if some people start line is move 20 meters behind the others, of course, they're going to finish the race last not because they're not competitive in terms of their speed, but because they have to run a race that's 20% longer. Yeah, so that real world analogy in the workplace to all of this, right, is evidence actually shows that that's kind of the situation where we're in today is some people's start lines are moved behind others, and they're not getting the sneakers they're not getting to run on the fast part of the track, all the resources and support that we give people in our organizations to succeed. So fairness, quite simply, means that everyone has an equal shot at appearing at the same starting line, and then once they're in the workplace, they get the same resources and opportunities and support to actually do their best work, so that we can accurately determine who should we promote? Who is the best person, who has the most potential?

Marcel Schwantes 09:31

Yeah, so, okay, speak from the heart. How unfair would you say the workplace is right now in the year 2025?

Siri Chilazi 09:40

So I'll speak from the heart, but I'll back up what I'm going to say with data, because I am a social scientist, after all, so my heart beats for the evidence. So the sad truth of the matter is that we're not in that situation where everyone in the workplace gets to start on at the same starting line. I'll give you one. Example, and this looks at recruitment and hiring around the world. More than 300 studies have been conducted where researchers send two identical resumes to real job openings with only one difference. So maybe one of the resumes has a woman's name at the top, and the other one has a man's name, or one of the resumes mentions in the personal section that I'm involved in the PTA, the Parent Teacher Association, which indicates that I might be a parent. The second resume is identical in every way, except it doesn't have the mention of the PTA. 

So you get the picture, and then we send these resumes to real world job openings and see what happens, who advances in the process, who gets called in for an interview, and what more than 300 studies around the world have shown really consistently is that if you are a counter stereotypical applicant, so for example, a woman applying to a software engineering job, or a man applying to be a kindergarten teacher, you have less of a chance of getting called in than the same resume of someone who's stereotypical. Discrimination against parents is very real in hiring. Ageism is very real in hiring. 

All of things have been proved. All of these things have been proven by the evidence, and that, to me, is such a clear indication that we don't live in a meritocracy, a system where people advance purely based on their skills and their demonstrated capabilities. Because remember, all the skills and educational background and work experiences on these two resumes are absolutely identical. So if we were actually in a two meritocracy, these two candidates should have an equal likelihood of getting called in for an interview, but they just don't. So that's one of the many things that we have yet to fix. 

Marcel Schwantes 11:46

Yeah, to ageism. Your example of ageism. Okay, so I my first original job before I went into leadership development and became a coach and all that, I was a recruiter. And so this is pre this predates applicant tracking systems and hiring platforms and all the AI stuff going on, okay, but I remember that I actually had to coach my job candidates who had maybe 20 years plus to actually shave their resumes and do not show more than two or three jobs in in on the resume. Otherwise, I knew they were not going to get their foot in the door. I had to be dishonest in trying to pitch a resume to my clients by coaching them to coaching those candidates that that were 40 plus. This is back in the 90s, this stuff was going on back then. To say, No, you know, I know you want to showcase your work history going back to 1979 please don't, because you're just going to shoot yourself in the foot. So you're saying this is still pretty much prevalent even today, right? Because you have, you have applicant tracking systems that are now searching for keywords, and they're, you know.

Siri Chilazi 13:06

Yeah, we've baked all those human biases that we have right, against people who are older, against people with non-continuous work histories, folks who have gaps on their resume for whatever reason. Yeah, maybe they took some time off to care for kids or elderly parents. They went on a sabbatical to a yoga retreat in India, or, you know, they tried their hand at a startup that didn't pan out. Whatever it is that's another bias that's very much still around and baked into a lot of the systems that we use. Yeah, but what I think was so interesting about that story that you mentioned too, is, historically, our approach has been to try to help individuals navigate a system that's not fair. 

Say, Okay, we know that there's going to be a bias against you because you're older. Here's how you get around it. You know, don't mention those older work experiences. And that might be an effective short term strategy, but to me, the real solution is fixing the system that's unnecessarily unfair to begin with, and say, let's change the criteria whereby we valued people so that we don't have this bias against older applicants with longer work histories or people with career gaps. Actually, there's a beautiful study that showed that when we just change the resume format so instead of expressing our past work experience with the specific dates attached, but just the total number of years, so seven years doing x5, years doing y, that got rid of the bias against people with resume caps.

Marcel Schwantes 14:36

Okay, here's another one. So I think this tell me if this is data driven or not, but I think I might have seen research that talks about job candidates that have very ethnic sounding names, and they're American, but they, you know, they have, it's not Joe Johnson. They are doing what's called the whitening. Resumes just to get their foot in the door and get, get, get an interview. I mean, what? What is the data saying about that? 

Siri Chilazi 15:06

Yeah, yeah, you're absolutely right. And this is another sad example of how those individual level adaptation and navigation strategies are still necessary. So research finds that when people whiten their resumes by changing their names. So maybe their true name is something that sounds very Asian, and they pick, you know, a first name like Sherry or Jane That sounds more American, they are actually more likely to get hired if you are a member in college of certain extracurricular groups, you know, the Indian cultural association or the LGBTQ association or whatever, and if you then omit mention of that on your resume, again, it makes you more likely to be hired, which indicates that there's some real bias against different ethnicities, certain backgrounds in the hiring process, which, again, is just, it's unfair. So it's sort of, I would, I would argue morally wrong. But it's also not smart from a business perspective, because talent exists everywhere, and when we refuse to allow for the potential of talents based on things like your ethnicity or your extracurriculars that have nothing to do with the skills that you bring to the table, we miss out on a lot of really, really good people that could do really, really work, good work in our organizations.

Marcel Schwantes 16:23

Yeah. So I want to bring this to the upper echelons of decision making. Why this? Why this keeps going on? So we're going to kind of point the finger back at the C suite and the ivory tower, if you want to use those terms, okay, but I'm really curious about something I read, I think, in the first 20 pages of your book, okay, I want to ask you to expand on this. You have a story about a large company with very few women at the top, and the company, I think, funded your research, and, you know, and they showed support. They were getting into our the discussions about gender equity and all that. But when it came time to implement the strategies that that were recommended, the executive blocked and they the project ended. I'm very curious if you could share, because that might, that might, sort of, I don't know, point back to sort of what, what, you know, the systemic, yeah, practices that still exist, that need to be, you know, need to be broken and done away with. But what happened in that situation and why they decided to end that project?

Siri Chilazi 17:39

Yeah, and it's a great example, because a case study, if you will, because I've seen this happen over and over again in many different organizations, as have you, and as have many other people, it's a lot easier as an executive, or even as a mid-level leader, to sign to write a big check for a program, or to say, yes, sure, I'll be an ally for the Women's Network, and I'm going to come to your quarterly meeting. Or Sure, sure you can start a new leadership training for women, because those types of interventions are programmatic. They're off to the side, and they don't touch how daily work gets done in the organization. So you can keep doing exactly what you were doing before, and you know that your bonus isn't going to change and you're going to get evaluated against the same criteria. 

You get to run your meetings the way you've already run them. Right? You get my point? Yeah, unfortunately, though, research shows that precisely because these programmatic interventions are separated from the daily flow of work, they're not that effective at yielding meaningful results, because let's take women's leadership training programs as an example. Participants often love them. They feel like they learn new skills. They rate the program in 11 out of 10. But do those programs introduce them to the senior leaders that could actually sponsor them their next promotion. Do those programs actually put them on projects that would allow them to develop and showcase the skills that they're going to need to provide proof of next time they're being evaluated? Right? Does it give them an opportunity to build visibility externally, go represent the company at a conference, give the important presentation in front of the board of directors, so that people get to know who you are, oftentimes not those the things that you actually need to advance. 

So it's easier, often, for executives to put the money and even put their mouth and support behind those types of programs, rather than to say, let's actually change how we do work every day. Let's revisit our promotion criteria. Let's take another look at our performance evaluations to make sure that they're fair. Let's make sure that opportunities like going to conference. Is presenting in front of the board, working on the high profile projects, that everyone actually gets equal access to those so that we don't just always tap the same people for those high profile assignments. And that's a lot harder to do, is changing how you work every day. It's not impossible, but it's harder.

Marcel Schwantes 20:18

Is it because they lose they fear losing power at the higher level?

Siri Chilazi 20:23

Yeah, that's an interesting hypothesis, yeah. And I think, you know, status quo bias is a big factor. We humans tend to prefer the status quo or the way things are, not because it's better, just because it is. It's easier to stick with what's happening now and to start changing it. 

Marcel Schwantes 20:41

Yeah, I documented in my book, and I wrote an ink article as well on the CEO of Salesforce, that a couple of his a high level HR people came to him, and they are females, to point the fact that Salesforce had pay inequities between males and females. And this is, you know, this is all over the place, right? But in in the Silicon Valley, it's even worse, I believe. And so Mark Benioff, the CEO, he didn't believe it at first. He's like, No way, show me the data. And so they presented to him the data that showed how much less women at the same skill level and job position, etc., were being paid in in comparison to their male counterparts? And he's, you know, Mark is a sort of a humanitarian. He's in that he's a he's an activist, right? So he advocates for women. 

And so he's like, Okay, we're going to do something about it. And, and he was able to, you know, correct those wrongs and pump millions of dollars back into pay structures to level the playing field. What's interesting about that story is that he was in a, I think, in the forum with other tech CEOs and founders, and they couldn't believe it either. They couldn't believe that this was going on and at Salesforce. And in fact, it and so Mark, to Mark's point, he says, You need to investigate your pay structures, and you need to go down deep into the reads that find out if, if the data shows that you have pay inequities between males and females. And sure enough, it was found that it was prevalent across the board at various other tech giants. So there you have it. 

Siri Chilazi 22:37

That is such a great example, Marcel, because it gets to the heart of what is our core argument in the book, which is you need to manage fairness using the same tools and the same approaches and with the same seriousness as you manage all other aspects of your business. So when we launch a new product, we don't just assume that it's going to meet its sales targets and be profitable, which rigorously track a gazillion data points to make sure that we're on track to meet all of our projections. And if not, we intervene right away. You know, if we want people to sell more in the market, we give them quotas, and then we track their accomplishments of the quotas by quarter, and then the top 10 salespeople of the company get to go on an all expenses paid vacation to Hawaii with their families as a reward. 

So we have all these mechanisms, tracking data, setting goals, implementing incentives, using transparency and accountability to close the loop. This is how we manage the quote, unquote revenue generating side, or the core business. So this is exactly how many we need to manage fairness as well. We can't just assume that it's automatically happening in the background. We have to look at the data and allow the data to speak and point us to the places where we might have gaps, whether that's in pay or hiring or career advancement or opportunities, and then take action to close those gaps.

Marcel Schwantes 24:02

Yeah. Speaking of data, so okay, let's, let's bring that to the forefront of the discussion, because chapter two of your book is, is designing fair workplaces based on data, having the right data, right so boil it down for us. I mean, what's the best approach to use the data to drive fairness.

Siri Chilazi 24:21

Let me. Let me share the example of Roz Atkins, a career journalist at the BBC based in London, who I think did this incredibly well. Roz cares very deeply about the quality of his journalism, and he believes that the highest quality journalism is reflective of the world that it's actually reporting on, but he realized a few years ago that he had no way of knowing if he was actually living up to that aspiration. He had no data on the people that he was featuring in his own journalism. So instead of sitting back and saying, Oh, I have the data. I don't have the data. There's nothing I can do, or I'll wait for HR to send the data to me, he generated it himself and he. His team spent two minutes after each night's show. 

So at the time, he was the anchor of a night nightly Prime Time news program. They were on air for 60 minutes, so they would take two minutes after the show. Counting. Okay, during that time, how many women and how many men did we feature in our program on air? And after a month of counting, they averaged out the results and discovered that they were only at 39% female contributors. They said, well, the world is not 39% women, so we're going to set ourselves a goal of getting to 5050 over time. And they did get there over the course of four months. One of the key things that they did, for example, is they used to always have the go to expert for every topic area, like banking or aviation. 

So anytime there's an avid news, really aviation related news story, they call up the same guy and say, Hey, can you come to the studio? We'll interview you. And they realize, well, there's probably more people in the world than just this one person who can offer educated and interesting perspectives on aviation, so they kind of broadened their pool of people that could be expert commentators on a variety of topics. That's one of the strategies that really helped them, and that's how they got to 5050 and stayed there for years, for as long as that program was an error. And then they started sharing the approach with other teams at the BBC to the point where it's now spread to more than 750 programs and content creating teams around the BBC globally, as well as more than 150 external partner organization. 

But it goes to show you that just one person without a budget, because ROS Atkins didn't have a budget to incentivize anybody to do anything, he also didn't have formal power in the organization to compel other people to do anything, but he had a good idea. He proved the concept in his own work with his own team, so that they could become evangelists and say, Hey, we know you're busy. Journalists like us, the nature of news is unpredictable, we know, but we still managed to do this on a daily basis, consistently for months. So you might be able to do this too, and you might benefit from this approach as well. And that's how they are able to spread the approach. That's great.

Marcel Schwantes 27:13

Okay, you write in in the book that we need to focus on behaviors, not attitudes in order to achieve fairness. Share more about that. 

Siri Chilazi 27:24

Yeah, this is one of the core insights from behavioral science, and it's that what we actually end up doing is influenced to a great extent by the people around us, by the physical environments that we're in, by the policies and processes that surround us. So our actions are not only determined by our deep, you know, values and underlying beliefs, although they of course, play a role. And it turns out that shaping those external environments and the decision making context that we find ourselves in is actually much easier and faster than trying to change people's hearts, so to speak, our deep beliefs. 

So a great example of this is what happened at Santander Bank in the UK. They asked men working at the bank how supportive they were of flexible work. And 99% of the men said, Yeah, flexible work is amazing. I love it. But then when they were asked, how supportive Do you think your colleagues are? These men thought only two thirds of other men would be supportive of flexible work. And it turns out that between these two things, how I feel about flexible work versus what I think other people think about flexible work, the latter is actually a bigger shaper, a bigger influencer of what I end up doing. 

So when some of these men were then informed accurately that, hey, actually, basically all of your colleagues are in favor of flexible work, they expressed intention to take longer parental leave, substantially longer parental leave. So if they had been, you know, behaving in accordance with their values. They would have been taking those longer parental leaves all along, but they didn't think it would be socially accepted. They expected to face some stigma or backlash or negative consequences, which is why these guys were taking less leaves than they would have wanted to. But now, when they were told, Don't worry, there's not going to be negative consequences, because other people, just like you, think this is important, their behavior changed interesting.

Marcel Schwantes 29:24

So it's not focusing so much on attitudes, which the emphasis has been so much on, exactly because that clearly, in your example, doesn't work. It's focusing on the behaviors, because we can change our behaviors. And in a way, it's

Siri Chilazi 29:39

a hopeful shortcut to seeing results, right? Because if we believe that we have to change everybody's hearts and minds before we can get them to change their actions, that's a really long and uncertain road, because there's actually no good research to suggest that we can change people's deeply held beliefs. Yeah, but if we can change their behaviors without even touching those attitudes, that means that we can change the world a lot faster and a lot more efficiently. Yeah, okay,

Marcel Schwantes 30:09

I want to do a sort of like, here's where we are and here's what we need to be. And so maybe this is, for me, it's, it's, it's a way to expose the wrongdoings of current practices and processes and the systems that keep these things in still in place right, rather than advancing to fair and equitable workplaces. So I'll throw a few out and tell us where we are now and where we need to be to improve. Okay, we talked already about like we've mentioned the interviewing part, or applicant, applicant screening and job interview time. But do you have any other advice about, okay, here's what's clearly not working. Here's where we need to be around the whole hiring process, maybe even throwing interviewing. 

Siri Chilazi 30:59

Yeah, yeah, yeah, resumes are actually one of the least predictive ways of hiring. As much as companies love using resumes, the correlation between how highly someone's resume is rated and how well they actually perform in the job is quite low. What's a much more predictive way of spotting talent and assessing who would be the best fit for a given role is what we call work sample tests or skills-based assessments, where we have the candidate participated in exercise or a task or scenario or role play that mimics the actual job as close as possible. So if writing will be a big part of somebody's job, don't talk to them about their writing. Have them write something like an audition, yeah, exactly. Or an audition in music or theater, it is precisely. 

So we should be making more use of these types of skills based assessments. Now, you mentioned interviews, that's another hot spot, area of bias, the traditional unstructured interview, where I just walk into the room, maybe with your resume in hand, and say, okay, Marcel, tell me a little bit about yourself. Why notice that your hobby is, you know, ballroom dancing, just like mine. Oh, my goodness, right. So much room for bias to flourish, for us to make decisions, not based on how good you'd be at the job but just based on how much I happen to like you. A better way of conducting interviews, to make them is to make them as structured as possible. Yeah, so predetermine the questions that you're going to ask of all candidates for a given position, then ask the questions in the same order of every single candidate. 

And when you're grading the answers, grade them horizontally, which means, let's say I interviewed five people, I'd look at everybody's answer to question one first, and say which was the best answer to question one, and then move on to question two. So that instead of grading the person, I'm actually grading the quality of the answer, the information, the knowledge that they're sharing, and then, of course, I'd tally it all up at the end and combine it with other assessments that we've done. Just adding those two tweaks to hiring would make it a lot more objective and less biased, and

Marcel Schwantes 33:05

make it behavioral. Interviewing techniques to include in that, right? Yeah, and I was going to ask you, would you say as part of that structured interview process, are you including questions related to values, how their personal values align with the organizational values.

Siri Chilazi 33:23

That is an excellent question. Marcel and I, a variation of that is when people ask me, but what about fit? You know, it's not only important that they're technically competent, but it's really important that they also would play well with the existing team, right? I get that 100% I think that's very compelling. Now it's not the case for all jobs, right? But if this is a role where they're fit with the organization, the existing team, with the culture and the values are actually important, then we need to assess those on par with the technical competencies. So I would put in specific questions or tasks to evaluate those sort of attitudes and values and then develop, you know, similarly formalized and rigorous rubrics to evaluate what are we actually looking for. 

But see, the interesting thing of with something like fit and values is, if I asked 10 people in the organization who's a cultural fit here, I'd probably get 10 different answers. Yeah. So that's actually an organization's first task, because it's so nebulous. It's so fluffy to say, oh, fit is often cold for I just like them, maybe because they're very similar to me. So I think that's actually a very interesting and important exercise for organizations to go through. Is, what does cultural fit mean here? What are the what are the types of qualities or values or personal attributes that we're looking for in people and to articulate that. 

Marcel Schwantes 34:48

Yeah, the other thing I have my clients do is, is that when you're interviewing for, say, a high level position is, let's say, you know, the Senior VP so. They have to have leadership skills. But it's pulling away from what they imagine leadership being, you know, things like executive presence and charisma, right? And really looking at the competencies of leadership, which tend to lean more towards female traits, if I may. I don't know the, let's, let's talk about that. I mean, how do we, how do we assess the right skills for leadership so that we are advancing women to higher leadership roles, but at the same time, you know, we're getting the right people, whether you're male or female.

Siri Chilazi 35:36

Absolutely, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think getting the right people, getting the best people, is key. But you know, this harkens back to what we were saying a moment ago about sort of status quo bias, and just because we're doing something a certain way today doesn't mean that it's the best way or the fairest way or the most objective way. And I think definitions and evaluations of leadership are a really good example of this. Most of us know from our own experience that there's a lot of different ways to be a good leader. Some people lead from the front, some people lead from the back. Some people are really assertive and loud. Some people are really quiet and give the floor to others and anything and everything in between. 

But there's a lot of different ways to be effective at leadership, and the assessments that we have in place today tend to screen for a very narrow prototype. Right? We have a very narrow conception of who is a leader. What do they do? What does that look like? So I think the first thing we need to do is broaden those definitions of leadership. The second thing we need to do is factor in the changing nature of the world into our definitions of leadership, because a lot of the ways, right, a lot of those attributes and qualities that we're looking for, they worked well in the 1960s and 70s, when you have a homogeneous workforce who came into the office five days a week for eight to 10 hours at a time, and they sat at their desk and then later in front of computers.

Siri Chilazi 36:58

Well, look around the world is changing. Remote work is here. 24/7 technology’s here. The robots are coming very, very soon. So that's an we have to be constantly updating those criteria and those definitions, and say, Well, what are we actually looking for? A lot of the folks who are working at the cutting edge of the future of work now and thinking about the sort of emergence of AI and how that's going to get integrated in the workplace, are saying that the people skills are becoming increasingly more important, because robots and AI are going to be able to do a lot of the technical and more repetitive and analytical tasks, but what they are nowhere close to doing or replacing is the human touch, emotional intelligence, management of actual humans, motivating, right, all of those things that humans uniquely can do. So we should be reevaluating our leadership criteria for all of those things on a content basis really.

Marcel Schwantes 37:57

Yeah, absolutely. Okay. This is a big one career advancement? What are some biases that you're seeing that keep people from moving up the ladder?

Siri Chilazi 38:07

Yeah, so one we kind of just touched on is evaluations at any level. So this is both performance evaluations and promotions. What are the criteria, and are the criteria designed in the image of a particular prototype of person. I'll just keep the example of the word presidential right. Every four years we have an election for president in the United States, and the question always comes up of who is presidential? Well, the fact of the matter is that we've had 46 presidents in this country. There's some duplicates, of course, and every single one of them has been men, a man, everyone but one has been white, and almost all of them have, I think actually all of them have been Christians and straight. So you tell me who's presidential, right? The whole world, that whole word is defined in the image of who have gone before. 

So of course, if you don't fit those, if you don't check all those boxes, it's going to be that much harder for people to perceive you as presidential just because you're bringing a new face to that job. And this happens in our organizations all the time. Is we tend to when we're evaluating folks say, do you look like or do you remind us of all the people who have had this job in the past. And if yes, it's easier for us to say, Oh, we believe in your potential. We believe that you can hack this and do this, but if not, it's that much harder for us to imagine you as being successful. Yeah, so making sure that we don't have those types of biased criteria in place is one thing, but then we also have to look at what happens before we get to that point of evaluation. 

So we might have performance evaluations once or twice a year. You might be valued for promotion, you know, once every three or four or five years. But in between, you're doing all this work. Right? There's a lot of evidence that we have. From studies done in real world organizations that show that people don't get the same access to opportunities. So for example, in a stock brokerage firm, men were assigned the higher performing accounts and larger accounts and historically more successful accounts to work on, and women got stuck with the crappy accounts. So even when those women were equally good as stockbrokers as the men, they brought in less money because they were working off of a lower base. 

So the issue wasn't any of the stock brokers performance. The issue was that they didn't play on a level playing field to show what they could be made of. Yeah, the same thing goes for the invisible office, housework, things like booking meeting rooms, taking meeting notes, getting the birthday cake for the colleague, right? These all things that someone has to do. They make our workplaces function better and more effectively. But for most people, you're not going to get promoted because you're so nice that you remembered somebody's birthday was because you take impeccable meeting notes. So then we have to look at that sort of grunt work, if you will, or the housework of the office, and say, is that spread out equally? Because data shows that at least today, women are doing a disproportionate share of that, which of course, means that they have less time to devote to the glamorous work, the promotable work that could actually get them recognized and noticed.

Marcel Schwantes 41:26

So that means we have to also sort of reimagine, or maybe even change, the perception around traditional gender roles, because we bring that from the home to the workplace. So then males in the workplace are looking at, you know, the setup for a party or and, and already, I think they're thinking in the back of their mind, oh, yeah, the waiters will take care of that.

Siri Chilazi 41:55

Exactly, exactly. So, you're right. We bring a lot of the baggage and the social conditioning and the associations or unconscious biases into the workplace with us. But this is another great example where a system, a smart system, can help us overcome those biases. So simple example, what if you rotated the note taking role in a meeting? So if this is a team, you know, a team of seven people that has a weekly meeting instead of always make it the woman making it the woman's job. You say, Okay, each week it's a different person. Or you could have a simple rule, a decision rule, that says the meeting rooms are always booked by the most junior member on the team, no matter what gender they are. 

So the newest member always takes care of it. Then when you hire a newer person to the team, okay, that becomes their responsibility. So that's a simple decision rule that at least level the playing levels the playing field, because it makes it fair and transparent why a certain person is having to do this. And of course, another solution is if we have people in the office, like executive assistants for whom this actually is promotable work, then we might put them in charge and actually evaluate and promote them based on doing a really good job of managing meeting bookings and birthday celebrations. 

Marcel Schwantes 43:10

Yeah, okay, let's bring you very mentioned that remote work into the discussion, maybe as even in the career advancement conversation. How does remote or hybrid work a hurt career advancement, maybe for women.

Siri Chilazi 43:27

So the data would suggest that in many cases, it actually helps. Okay, this is a conversation where I hear a lot of ideological statements being made, people, you know, CEOs, saying things like, I know my people are more productive in the office. My first question as a scientist is, based on what data, based on what evidence? Because actually, a lot of research has been done, even well before the pandemic, on the effects of remote work, and we see a lot of really positive effects, in many cases, on productivity, on employees, work satisfaction, life satisfaction, increased retention, reduced turnover. 

So, so many benefits. We see the biggest benefits from remote work when people are allowed to self select into the arrangement, arrangements that work best for them. Some people love coming to the office. Great. Let them some people would love to work from home three days a week, provided that they produce the output that you need them to produce. Great let them the data shows that, of course, there was a huge spike in remote work right at the onset of COVID, and since then, since the end of 2023 we've kind of stabilized at a level where about two days a week on average are being worked remotely across the US. 

So we've got about 10% of the workforce who is in fully remote jobs. This is often things like accounting or IT management, you know, that doesn't require a lot of team interaction that you can do on a computer. Computer, then we've got 60% of the workforce that is fully in person, and then about 30% that are doing some version of hybrid, and that's actually been very stable for the last two years, and that has remote work at a much higher level than it was before the pandemic, but also at a lower level than it was at the peak of COVID. So when I hear people saying remote work is dead, nope, that is not what the data shows. It very much shows that remote work is here to stay, because it's working for people.

Marcel Schwantes 45:33

Yeah, yeah. What about the women that you know go on maternity leave and then they come back, and I'm seeing instances where they are even either demoted or they're not brought back at all. Yeah. So how do we make that more fair for women that are coming back for maternity leave? Yeah?

Siri Chilazi 45:56

So just very concretely, one of the you know, things that organizations need to again. This goes back to status quo. If you have people going on leave and coming back, that's a transition that has to be managed. So we have to plan for it. There has to be transparency around. When do you let certain people know? How do you give your projects to someone else to take over when you leave? How do we make sure that they get transitioned back to you when you return. So you just have to iron out the practicalities of that. But even a bigger and somewhat perhaps surprising or paradoxical solution to make parental leave more fair for women is actually to give it to men and to really encourage men to take it. 

Because the reason maternity leave has hurt women in the workplace in the past is since they're the only ones taking it while they're out, men continue to work, rock up, accomplishments, high performance evaluations, promotions and bonuses. So of course, there's always going to be a disparity there, if women are the only one going out on leave. But men have kids too. You know, the father is 50% of every child that's born, right? A 50% contributor. So the simple way to level the playing field would be to give all parents the same amount of parental leave and strongly encourage them to take it. So now, if everyone's gone at one point or another for three months or six months here and there, we no longer have that disparity.

Marcel Schwantes 47:27

Yeah. Okay, even though you know your focus of the book is to close the gender gap, you also note that, well, gender equity is a two way street, meaning that men are also experiencing inequality in the workplace. Do you want to talk a little bit about that?

Siri Chilazi 47:46

Yes, and in society more broadly, I think this is such a critical point, because, as you're right, Iris is in my book. Since we're scholars the workplace and we focus on organizational design, the data shows that in the workplace context, women are still typically lagging behind men. But in educational contexts, for example, girls and women at all levels of the educational spectrum, from elementary school to PhDs, have already overtaken men in scholastic achievements and academic achievements, and that's also a real problem. So multiple things can be true at the same time, there are areas like education where girls lag boys, and that's something that we need to tackle. 

One thing that has been shown to really benefit boys in school is having male role models as teachers. But our teaching workforce is more than 90% women, so that's actually a workplace where gender equality is needs to be pushed in the opposite direction, meaning we need more men as kindergarten teachers. Also think about health occupations, administrative occupations, literacy occupations, these are all that are currently dominated by women, and they would really benefit from the increased presence of men, just like science, technology, engineering and math, would greatly benefit from the increased presence of women. 

So gender equality, 100% is a two way street. And I think the parental leave is actually another good example, because it has always been socially accepted for women to take leave. Yes, it hurts them in the workplace in terms of advancement outcomes, but it doesn't hurt them socially, because it's expected and approved, so to speak, men, though, have traditionally faced a lot of stigma if they want to go out on parental leave or become the primary caregiver for their children, or if they need to peace out of a meeting because daycare just called and my kid has a fever and I Have to go pick them up. You know, they're likely to encounter those comments from other men at work that say, Why can't your wife take care of this? Why don't you have a nanny? You know? So that's and I know men love their children just as much as women do, and they also want to be present and caring and loving parents. So this is an area. A where making the workplace more compatible with life outside work might actually disproportionately benefit men, which would be a wonderful thing.

Marcel Schwantes 50:08

Yeah, yeah, okay, speak to the CEO here, tasked with shaping a company culture of equality and fairness for all. I mean, what would you say is a good starting point for them, if you were to advise that client, right? That sits up at the top? Yeah.

Siri Chilazi 50:26

Oh, so many things you can do. Number one, ask for the data for your own company, to pinpoint areas, just like Mark Benioff at Salesforce, right? His first point was, show me the data. I don't believe that there are gaps, but when the data was shown to him and he saw that there really were gaps in pay then he immediately moved to fix them. So follow Marc Benioff’s example, and you know your organization might not have a pay gap issue. You might have some bias in hiring. You might have issues in assigning people to high profile projects. Who knows where those gaps will show up? Maybe in product design even right? Maybe you're only using men in your product testing. 

And so when your product launches out onto the market, you know it doesn't if it's a bracelet, it's too big for women, for example, like a watch. So there's a lot of opportunities to embed this in so that's the first thing. Is use the data to shape your organization. The second is become a role model and a norm entrepreneur. So what you say as a leader and what you do really sets the tone for everybody else around you, because it signals how we do things around here. And Iris and I would actually argue that that is really the essence of culture, is how we do things around here. 

So if you have a kid, do you take parental leave? You know, do you leave the office at five or six or seven? Or are you always there until midnight? Do you take vacation? And do you role model that? Do you focus on evaluating your leadership team based on their results, or do you want them all to sit in their offices next to yours, so that you can manage by command and control by just looking around and by the way, when people are sitting in front of a computer, that doesn't mean they're doing productive work. They could be surfing the internet on social media, right? This is another example where we have to update those management practices from the 1960s and 70s to the 20 70s to the 21st century, because we know that as long as people have internet, they can be productive from just about anywhere. So what leaders say and do matters so much. 

And then my third point would be, listen to your employees, because one of the things that data shows is that senior leaders lives in work, but also especially outside of work, tend to look very different than the lives of all the people that work for them in the organization. Senior leaders, of course, are paid a lot more. So they tend to have bigger houses. They live in wealthier neighborhoods. They have more help at home. They have private jets, all this stuff, but more than 70% of CEOs have a stay at home spouse. That's not typical at all for the rest of the workforce, you know, about 40% of the workforce is single parents, especially single moms. So your people's lived reality and their everyday life is very different from yours, and that affects whether they prefer working in the office for or from home, if they need flexible hours, right? All those things. So listen to your people and what they need, because it's likely to be different from what you need and what you think they need. And you're their boss. You're their leader, so your job is to serve them and enable their best performance.

Marcel Schwantes 53:38

I love it. So many great examples of individual behaviors that we need to sort of hold ourselves to. A lot of it, a lot of it that you mentioned, falls in the areas of empathy, emotional intelligence, compassion, yes and yeah, and seeing and hearing people where they're at right. Good stuff. Okay, as we wind down here and move to our speed round, is there anything that our listeners absolutely must know that we did not cover? 

Siri Chilazi 54:11

I'll just double click on a point that we touched on briefly, because I think this is so critical, is that fairness is not a program but a way of doing things. So think about the example of ROS Atkins, for example, at the BBC. He had no training in Dei. He didn't, he didn't sit in HR or the DEI function, but he saw an opportunity to do what he was already doing, presenting this nightly Prime Time news show better by tweaking it just a little bit. And that's what the most effective fairness solutions will do, is they won't be separate things that you have to add on top of your everyday work, but it's you're doing what you're already doing and finding ways of doing it slightly better. And. All of us in our everyday work have an opportunity to do just that. That's great.

Marcel Schwantes 55:05

Alright, strap on the seat belt. Speed Round. Here we go. Let's go. What are you reading right now?

Siri Chilazi 55:11

Oh, I'm reading my friend Elizabeth Weingarten’s new book, How to Fall in Love with Questions, and it's speaking to me in a world that feels more uncertain than ever, because questions can be a great way of navigating uncertainty.

Marcel Schwantes 55:24

Awesome. I'm going to put that in the show notes. Okay, greatest lesson you've learned in your life?

Siri Chilazi 55:31

In my life, I'm going to stay in my career, if that's okay. I learned this in my first job in management consulting, is you are in the driver's seat of your own career. No one cares about you, your advancement, your potential, as much as you do. So you have to be always taking initiative, asking questions, gathering up new information. How do I get promoted? How does this work? I'd love to work on this project. Who do I need to know to get there? Don't expect people to come hand you opportunities. You have to be seeking them out at all times.

Marcel Schwantes 55:59

Someone that inspires you right now?

Siri Chilazi 56:03

Right now. Harvard University, my employer, they are taking a strong stance to, you know, fight for academic freedom, to fight for academic research, the life changing, world changing discoveries that come out of academic research that are not quick. We often have to do basic science for decades for some fancy new drug to come out that will change the world. But I do believe that's how we advance as a human species, is through science and through research and knowledge. I

Marcel Schwantes 56:36

love that you chose an institution as the Who inspires you because institutions are made out of people, and so there's a lot of people that probably inspire you as well. So yes, all of my colleagues, in fact, yeah, yeah, good deal. Okay, something nobody knows about you.

Siri Chilazi 56:53

I'm learning Italian currently with my husband. We love spending time in Italy whenever we can. And I started getting frustrated by the fact that I couldn't speak the local language. So I said, you know what? We can learn this.

Marcel Schwantes 57:07

Can we hear a sample

Siri Chilazi 57:09

Buongiorno!

Marcel Schwantes 57:13

All right. Name a person dead or alive that you would love to have dinner with?

Siri Chilazi 57:18

Eleanor Roosevelt.

Marcel Schwantes 57:21

Ooh. Nice. All right, your biggest hope for 2025, and beyond?

Siri Chilazi 57:28

I'm actually very hopeful, both for the short-term future and the long-term future. My biggest hope would be now that I have this new book, and that's very much the headspace that I'm in, that people don't just buy it, that they don't just read it, that they actually implement some of the evidence based suggestions in it in their own work, because it can be so small, like what Ross Adkins did at the BBC, and it can turn out to have world changing consequences. So if every single person who was interested in these topics, did just one thing in their own team or in their own work a little bit differently, the ramifications would be so huge.

Marcel Schwantes 58:10

That’s good. Well, you've survived the speed round the seat belt off. Thank you. All right, we bring it home with two questions, as we do with every guest, and the first one is tradition. It's the love question, sticking with themes we've talked about, how do leaders lead with more actionable, practical love, day in and day out?

Siri Chilazi 58:34

Well, I think love and caring and fairness are actually very interrelated concepts, slightly different, yes, but they all work together because fairness turns out to be a universally shared human value. This has been shown in studies across the world and across time. Kids as young as four, five and six years old develop a really keen sense of what's fair and what's not, and they react very strongly to displays of unfairness. One of my favorite examples of this is a study where kids were given an odd number of marshmallows to distribute between two other kids who had done an equally good job of cleaning their rooms. Let's say you have seven marshmallows. 

So what do these four- and five-year-olds do? They put one marshmallow in the trash so that they don't have to give unequal compensation for equal work because they were told your two fellow kids they did an equally good job cleaning their rooms. That means they deserve an equal number of marshmallows, right? This is how sophisticated young kids are about fairness and love. Is another value that's human, universally shared, you know, across all ages. 

So I think there's a lot to be said for creating workplaces that are a more loving and nurturing and caring environment for people, because that's actually when we get folks to do their best work, and that's the same thing that fairness is getting at when we know. We are, we have an opportunity to succeed just the same as anybody else, no more, no less, just the same. And when we are evaluated as individuals fairly and seen for who we are, rather than as you know. Oh, you're a woman, you must be like this. You're a Chinese person. You must be like that. No, you are an individual and you want to be seen that way. That's love, but that's also fairness. 

Marcel Schwantes 1:00:24

Yeah, love is fair. Fairness requires love. It's all Yeah, it's all intertwined. Thanks for that. Okay, bring us home. What's that? One final key takeaway you'd like to leave us with?

Siri Chilazi 1:00:37

I actually heard this from an attendee at a book event in London last month when we were there for book tour, and they wrote it down as their main takeaway at an event. So I'm going to steal it shamelessly, because I thought it was so great. And it's we all have a system that we can influence, and I think that's so powerful. Because sometimes we talk about system change, it can feel so big and so overwhelming. And people say, Oh, but I'm not the head of HR. I'm not the CEO. There's nothing I can do. 

But if you're the marketing intern for your company, and you manage your organization's social media, that's the system right there. You get to choose what pictures you post, what videos you post, you know who you feature in the post, whose work you talk about, that's the system that you control right there. That's actually a lot of power. So I think if we flip from thinking about authority and hierarchy to saying, what are some of the systems that I am in control, daily, in control of daily, in my own work, we can see that there's so many more opportunities for doing things better and differently. 

Marcel Schwantes 1:01:46

Yes, okay, the book, again, is called Make Work Fair. And there it is, data driven design for real results. Siri, if people want to connect with you, they want to learn more about you, what you do, etc. Where can I go?

Siri Chilazi 1:02:03

Yes, I'm very active on LinkedIn, so we'd love to connect with you there. Siri Chilazi, and on the website for our book, makeworkfair.com. In the top right corner, there's an opportunity to sign up for our newsletter, no spam. About once a month, we'll send you the latest evidence-based insights from research on what we all can do better in our work and in life. Because, you know, the book is an amazing resource, but of course, fantastic new research continues to come out on a daily basis, so we want to make sure that you're always up to date on the latest folks. We will

Marcel Schwantes 1:02:35

continue to bring guests like Siri, because here at love in action, we want things to be data driven and research based. We want the evidence to point the way forward to making our workplaces more loving, more fair and more equitable. So get this book again. Make Work fair, data driven, design for real results available everywhere. Siri, thank you so much. It's been a blast hanging out with you, and my mind has been opened up to all of the things that we talked about. And I can't wait to read this again, because I need to this is, this is one of those books where you pull out of the shelf every two or three years like, okay, let's, let's go back to what Siri discovered, right? And I'm sure that if there is a new addition, you're probably going to add new data to that as well. I'm hoping that's the key for sure.

Siri Chilazi 1:03:31

Marcel, it's been such a pleasure. Thank you for having me, and I just love the name of the podcast too. By the way, Love in Action, because it's that same action orientation, right? This is about doing, not about talking just like with fairness, yes. So thank you for having us.

Marcel Schwantes 1:03:46

Thank you so much. All right, keep the conversation going on social media with hashtag love in action podcast, and look for my show notes on my website. Marcel schwantes.com you're also going to find a YouTube link to this very episode if you want to watch us, and you can find all that on my website. So for Siri, I'm Marcel, remember, in the end, love wins. We'll see you next time. Bye.