After completing last week’s issue about the types of organizations we need to have for women—and others—to feel included in the workplace, I’ve been thinking about how, as a practical matter, organizations can work towards becoming Level 5, or sustainable, organizations.

I came across one idea in a recent Harvard Business Review article entitled How to Equitably Assign High-Profile Work. The article expands upon some ideas Joan C. Williams of the Equality Action Center has been working on for years. I’ve admired Williams since I learned of her research when I was pregnant with my first child almost 20 years ago. For decades she’s been doing truly groundbreaking work about improving the status of women in the workplace. So it doesn’t surprise me that she had something to say about relatively simple things that organizations can do to disrupt bias in the workplace on a daily basis.

This particular article also appealed to me because, when I reflect on my career to-date, some of the most painful moments were when I realized that men I worked for—men I respected and admired—were never going to extend their power to me. In one case I learned from a male colleague that my firm’s managing partner had told him that I was one day going to run the firm. But several weeks later, when I spoke to that partner about the conversation relayed to me and asked him in what type of future leadership role he saw me, he laughed in my face. In another case I was given feedback during my annual review that in the next year the managing partner wanted to talk to me about assuming a leadership role in the firm. When I later asked him about the specific “leadership” role he had in mind, he told me that he wanted my help in—wait for it—HR-related tasks.

In both cases, I’m quite sure my male supervisors believed me to be capable of doing high-profile work in those firms. They also knew that they needed to say they planned to give me that work in order to keep me there. But when I started asking hard questions, they acted as if they’d never made their original commitments. It’s one thing to say you want to give women high-profile assignments. It’s quite another to do it.

So how can law firms and other legal organizations begin to walk the walk?

Moving Away from Office Housework

While high-profile work gives people the opportunity to take on a new challenge and can lead to advancement and promotion, women tend to be asked to do office housework instead. As Williams explains here, this type of work can include:

• Taking the notes

• Procuring the conference room

• Getting everyone on the conference line

• Planning parties

• Buying the gifts for birthdays/retirements/baby showers, etc.

• Ordering lunch

• Organizing lower level employees

• Mentoring activities

• Serving on committees that are not linked to revenue or core business goals

• Handling less-valued clients

• Handling HR tasks

• Handling routine work vs. work that is central to business strategy

• Organizing off-site events

• Keeping the task list

• Keeping the trains running vs. strategy and big-picture thinking

Research repeatedly shows that women not only do more office housework than men, but also are routinely placed in a position where they have to work extra hours in order to have the same amount of time to do high-profile work. As Williams and her co-authors point out, this difference is a big deal. “Bias is like compound interest—even small amounts add up over time to be career-defining.”

To change this dynamic, Williams and her team first measured the amount of office housework being given to all employees. Then they ran a 90-minute workshop about how to interrupt bias in everyday interactions. Three months later, the data showed that the disparity between women and men who did office housework dropped dramatically.

What was so magical about the 90-minute workshop Williams’ team ran?

First, rather than discussing sweeping social issues like the patriarchy or structural racism, they focused on how bias plays out in everyday interactions in the workplace. They used the measurements they took at the outset to identify things that were occurring at each company, and then addressed their training only to phenomena occurring in that specific workplace.

Second, they provided workshop participants with concrete strategies for interrupting bias in breakout sessions of six people. During those breakout sessions they presented a certain scenario of bias that arose in a company’s survey responses, and then asked participants how they would feel comfortable interrupting that type of bias.

Third, Williams and her team trained everyone at the company or a department, so that junior employees would see senior managers making a commitment to proactively addressing bias.

Interrupting Bias for High-Profile Assignments

While it’s relatively easy to see how collecting data and using that data to create training scenarios for how to interrupt bias could work for distributing office housework, it’s much harder to imagine how this process could work for the distribution of high-profile work. High-profile work is more heavily one-sided. Williams’ research across industries—including law—found that while 81% to 85% of white men reported that they have fair access to desirable assignments, only 50% of women of color, and 43% of Black women, believe they have the same access.

In addition, there’s a lot more ego involved in distributing thhis type of work. You can see a senior partner becoming willing to embrace taking turns at keeping a task list, but it’s much harder for me to imagine how you could train that same senior partner to rotate attendance at key client meetings the same way. It’s easier to take on housework in the name of being equitable than it is to give up high-profile work.

At the outset, Williams and her team attacked the distribution of high-profile work much as they had with office housework. They started out by building tools that allowed companies to track the distribution of high-profile tasks. They likewise built a tool that allowed managers to track recognition for high-profile work. (After all, we can’t see what we don’t track.)

At the midway point, she and her colleagues held a workshop for managers on ensuring fair access to high-profile opportunities and recognizing those achievements. They taught managers how to interrupt the bias often present in giving high-profile assignments. And in every case, the disparities that existed before the intervention improved.

The workshops were effective because they helped managers see why high-profile work wasn’t getting evenly distributed in the first place. For example, one company discovered that the fast pace of their work left overwhelmed managers sticking with the tried-and-true: someone already familiar with the task at hand. (I admit to having assigned work this way many times during my career.) The company therefore set out to improve its employees’ strengths both within and outside their typical assignments. This gave managers a broader pool to draw from when they needed high-profile work completed.

The workshops worked because they explained why bias was occurring. And the answer wasn’t “all our managers are sexist.”

Concluding Thoughts

Williams describes her method in three steps:

1. Evidence. Developing and tracking key metrics to pinpoint where bias exists, establish baselines, and measure progress.

2. Action. Implementing evidence-based bias interrupters into existing business systems.

3. Commitment. Measuring progress and implementing stronger bias interrupters until metrics improve.

But in essence, Williams’ research shows that, if an organization is committed to collecting data and then using that data to design organization-specific solutions where bias is found within that organization, real progress can be achieved. We can correct bias when shown where and how it occurs in our organizations.

Of course, the commitment part is key. Not every employer will be willing to invest the time and energy into collecting this data. Even fewer might be willing to address how to change what the data observes. But for those interested in doing so, Williams and her team make a pretty good case that transformational change can be made.

The importance of the experiments done by Williams and her team is that they show that we can show the existence of bias in a way that doesn’t blame the people who made the decisions about the distribution of office housework or high-profile work in the first place. They offer forward-looking solutions rather than dwelling on the mistakes of the past.

I suspect that’s a trade-off that many women lawyers would absolutely embrace if they could get the same opportunities at high-profile work that their male peers receive.

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