By: Laura Santana and Katherine Pappa
Research consistently shows the value women leaders bring to their companies. Women are critical to success, yet barriers remain to the advancement of women at work.
How can companies step up to the challenge of developing, retaining, and promoting talented women?
Read Moreby Lazlo Bock for Harvard Business Review
Are you a Segmentor or Integrator? Google's approach is to survey and test employee's gDNA in order to provide the best solutions for their approach to work and life distinctions.
Our first rounds of gDNA have revealed that only 31% of people are able to break free of this burden of blurring. We call them “Segmentors.” They draw a psychological line between work stress and the rest of their lives, and without a care for looming deadlines and floods of emails can fall gently asleep each night. Segmentors reported preferences like “I don’t like to have to think about work while I am at home.”
For “Integrators”, by contrast, work looms constantly in the background. They not only find themselves checking email all evening, but pressing refresh on gmail again and again to see if new work has come in.(To be precise, people fall on a continuum across these dimensions, so I’m simplifying a bit.)
Of these Integrators (69% of people), more than half want to get better at segmenting. This group expressed preferences like “It is often difficult to tell where my work life ends and my non-work life begins.”
Read MoreThe difficulties associated with proving and addressing gender discrimination in hiring processes have presented policymakers with a major challenge over the past few decades. In an attempt to overcome gender-biased hiring, a vast majority of symphony orchestras revised their hiring practices from the 1950s. Many orchestras opened up their hiring process to a range of candidates, rather than only hiring musicians who were handpicked by the conductor. As a result of these changes, most orchestras now hire new players after about three rounds of live or recorded auditions: preliminary, semi-final, and final. Additionally, as part of these revisions, a number of orchestras adopted “blind” auditions whereby screens are used to conceal the identity and gender of the musician from the jury. In the years after these changes were instituted, the percent of female musicians in the five highest-ranked orchestras in the nation increased from 6 percent in 1970 to 21 percent in 1993. Given the low turnover found in most symphony orchestras, the increase in female musicians is significant. In this seminal study, the authors examine whether these new hiring practices were responsible for the increase observed in women’s employment in symphony orchestras.
Read MoreAndrew Fleming and Anja Tranovich via The Guardian
Similarly, cities in Bangladesh recently sought to serve women more equitably in infrastructure improvements. They recognized that this begins with understanding what women need. The programme made sure women had representation in local governments and a voice in urban planning – down to the very construction of buildings.
Read MoreIt's likely that as long as humans and their institutions hold prejudices and bias, their designs will reflect them. But some progress is possible. Two decades ago architect Ronald Mace imagined a new standard, in which anything humans make — a new piece of technology, a public park, a household product — is usable by everyone. He called this idea "universal design." Today it's an enforceable legal standard in Norway. One way to help us get there? Make sure the design process itself is also accessible to all.
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