What Works: Gender Equality by Design by Iris Bohnet
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I read a lot of books and journal articles about bias and inequality. It’s pretty common for those sources to offer a lot of recommendations for overcoming bias that sound like a good idea on the surface, but don’t really have empirical support for their effectiveness and may actually backfire. What I appreciated about this book was that it focused more on what works empirically and frequently discussed what doesn’t work or has backfired.
Another common issue in this genre is to advocate for the equality of a specific group in ways that are unfair toward other groups or possibly less beneficial for individuals, organizations, or societies. Once again, this book does a much better job than most but it’s still not perfect in this area.
I would recommend this book to most people because I think it will be beneficial for overcoming bias and inequality, especially for anyone in a leadership role, and the examples or studies discussed are also pretty interesting to learn about. If you don’t think you have bias, or are just curious about one of the many ways it can be measured, try taking an implicit association test (IAT) linked below.
