The article from the Harvard Business Review titled, “Hacking Tech's Diversity Problem” is more than an article about gender bias in the technology industry. The article is more than just talking about the problem of gender bias, it is also about how to identify it and stop it with ‘interrupters’. In addition to identifying and stopping gender bias, the article discusses measuring the change through metrics individually identified by each company because interrupters and measurement metrics will vary from company to company. First thing, the article covered was explaining what a bias interrupter is. A bias interrupter is a small systematic change in the way business actions are conducted. The purpose is to resolve an area affected by gender bias organically. They gave an example in the article in which a small change was made to the wording in job postings. It was described like this
Researchers Andreas Leibbrandt and John A. List posted two versions of announcements for administrative assistant jobs in stereotypically masculine businesses -- NASCAR, football, and basketball. One version said nothing about salary; the other …show more content…
It is important to measure the changes because if you don’t measure the effects it is difficult and almost impossible to determine if the change was effective. When it comes to each common bias there needs to be a specific measureable metric to evaluate the success of the interrupter. Some of the suggestions were to track work assignments to see who is getting the ‘housework assignments’ vs the ‘glamor work assignments’ and watch for changes. Another was to review performance evaluations, pay raises, and promotions to look for patterns of gender bias. Once the metrics are decided upon, it is important to get a baseline to compare against after the interrupter is put in place. The third step is to experiment with