Interactive
“Nordell’s novel experiment reinforces what we’ve long known; that laws and corporate policies against bias are necessary, but on their own they’re not enough to close the promotion gap and ensure women reach the highest rungs of management. Only real cultural change that eliminates everyday sexism.”
(Above gif courtesy of the NY Times, “This is How Everyday Sexism Could Stop you from Getting That Promotion” by Jessica Nordell, graphics by Yaryna Serkez)
How Everyday Bias Adds Up
Bias is typically measured as a snapshot of one moment in time, but in the real world, it’s experienced continuously. I teamed up with computer scientists to create an agent-based model— a computer simulation of a workplace that models how small amounts of gender bias compound, over time. We found that tiny amounts of bias create unexpectedly large disparities.
Laws are designed to address either rare events that can be attributed to a single person or "pattern and practice" problems. Our model shows that huge gender disparities in organizations can emerge from very small, even unintentional amounts of gender bias, when those are applied frequently.
Our paper is “Insidious Nonetheless: How Small Effects and Hierarchical Norms Create and Maintain Gender Disparities in Organizations,” by Yuhao Du, Kenneth Joseph, and me. All the code is open source.