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Articles by Iris Bohnet
Living heritage and sustainable landscapes in rural Europe: narratives of change and continuity in four Biosphere Reserves
ABSTRACT Biosphere Reserves (BR) are regions designated by UNESCO and are cultural landscapes shaped by living heritages and communities. However, in Europe, the creation of sustainable BR landscapes has often neglected cultural heritage, and how it is contested and always in the making. This qualitative research focused on four rural European BRs in Czechia, Estonia, Norway and Scotland, working collaboratively with organisations of Třeboň, Nordhordland, Wester Ross and West Estonia Archipelago.
A Research-Backed Training Method That Improves Hiring Outcomes
A Research-Backed Training Method That Improves Hiring Outcomes October 10, 2025 In the current climate, generic and expensive programs to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion—for example, trainings—are increasingly falling out of favor. In fact, most of the existing research suggests that trainings have not been effective at changing people’s behaviors or measurable organizational outcomes, such as who gets hired.
Präzisionsgerechtigkeit: Neue Wege für faire Arbeitswelten
Wege zu finden, um den gesamten Talentpool nutzen und eine produktive Zusammenarbeit ermöglichen zu können, ist entscheidend für Wirtschaft, Gesellschaft und Politik. Rund 40 Prozent des Wachstums des BIP pro Kopf in den Vereinigten Staaten ist darauf zurückzuführen, dass die Beschränkungen, die talentierte Menschen in den 1960er-Jahren vom Arbeitsmarkt fernhielten, heute nicht mehr gelten.
Para que su lugar de trabajo sea más justo, tome el control de sus normas
Piense en todas las veces que ha comenzado un nuevo trabajo. Probablemente conoció las políticas clave y los procesos formales en torno a temas como las vacaciones. Sin embargo, los manuales para empleados no enseñan otras cosas, como si debe abogar por un ascenso o esperar a que se lo ofrezcan, qué tan rápido se espera que responda los correos electrónicos, o si las reuniones comienzan a tiempo o tres minutos después de la hora establecida.
To Make Your Workplace Fairer, Take Charge of Its Norms
By Think of all the times you started a new job. You probably learned about key policies and formal processes around things like vacation time. But employee manuals don't teach other things, like whether you should advocate for a promotion or wait to be asked, how quickly colleagues expect email replies, or if meetings start on time or three minutes after the hour.
After DEI backlash, embracing new ideas for fairness in the workplace
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After DEI backlash, embracing new ideas for fairness in the workplace Original
Much has been made of the recent backlash to diversity, equity and inclusion across parts of corporate America. The parade of headlines seems endless: companies scaling back DEI programs, struggling DEI consultants closing down or pivoting their businesses and a court ruling against DEI considerations on the boards of Nasdaq-listed companies by a slim 9-8 majority. In the latest salvo, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg called for more “masculine energy” to counteract “neutered” corporate culture.
Why women hold back - and why we need a smarter approach to workplace promotions
When Google noticed that its female employees were less likely to nominate themselves for promotion, one of its heads of engineering sent out an email to all technical employees explicitly inviting women to nominate themselves.
How to build workplaces where everyone can succeed
When a professional services firm discovered that, come promotion time, some associates had a ‘thinner file’ than others, it took a closer look at the career paths of its employees. Specifically, it examined the performance reviews people had received over the years.
Sunday Book Review: February 9, 2025, The Business Fairness at Work Edition
In the Sunday Book Review, Tom Fox considers books that would interest the compliance professional, the business executive, or anyone who might be curious. These could be books about business, compliance, history, leadership, current events, or anything else that might interest Tom. Today, we look at books on fairness in business.
How Zero-Sum Beliefs Get in the Way of Fairness
A fairness myth we frequently encounter is what one of the leading decision-making and negotiation scholars, Max Bazerman, calls the “mythical-fixed-pie mindset”: the often-incorrect assumption (also called zero-sum thinking) that one person’s gain has to equal another person’s loss, or that there is only a finite amount of resources to go around. In some cases, this is, of course, true.
We can’t “de-bias" our brains but we can change our systems
Learn from the world’s biggest business thinkers Excerpted from MAKE WORK FAIR: Data-Driven Design for Real Results By Iris Bohnet and Siri Chilazi Copyright © 2025 by Iris Bohnet and Siri Chilazi. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers. Our biases have far-reaching consequences for others, and when constantly reinforced, they can turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Behaviorally designed training leads to more diverse hiring
Policy Forum Diversity A field experiment provides a promising proof of concept Cansın Arslan, Edward H. Chang, [...] , Siri Chilazi, Iris Bohnet, and Oliver P. Hauser o.hauser@exeter.ac.uk+2 authors fewerAuthors Info & Affiliations Science 23 Jan 2025 Vol 387, Issue 6732 pp. 364-366 Abstract Many organizations have shown interest in increasing the diversity of their workforces for various reasons. Collectively, they have spent millions of dollars and countless employee hours on diversity training.
Behaviorally Designed Training Leads to More Diverse Hiring
By: Cansin Arslan, Edward H. Chang, Siri Chilazi, Iris Bohnet and Oliver P. Hauser ShareBar Many organizations have shown interest in increasing the diversity of their workforces for various reasons. Collectively, they have spent millions of dollars and countless employee hours on diversity training. Yet, there is little empirical evidence that such training increases diversity in organizations (1, 2).
Incorporating DEI into Decision-Making
Most people don’t think of themselves as biased or prejudiced, and people often explicitly endorse diversity as something companies should strive for. But many organizations struggle with DEI. Why? Implicit or unconscious biases can lead to inequitable decision-making. More mundanely, people are just busy. They have lots of competing priorities and lots to occupy their brains. Even if they care about DEI, they might not have it top of mind as they go about their work.
Does Increasing Farm Plot Size Influence the Visual Quality of Everyday Agricultural Landscapes?
Abstract : The increase in farm plot size is one of the most apparent and significant trends that have influenced central and eastern European agricultural landscapes since the 1950s. In many countries where the average plot size in traditional land-use systems did not exceed several hectares, present-day plots reach the size of 200 ha or more.
Achieving Gender Balance at All Levels of Your Company
It’s common for organizations to have gender parity or close to it in entry-level roles, only to see the percentage of women employees decrease as you get closer to the top. A deeper dive into the data reveals that the drop-off of women is primarily driven by gender disparities in promotion rates, not gender differences in hiring or retention.
How to Best Use Data to Meet Your DE&I Goals
In 2014, several large tech companies including Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft started releasing annual diversity reports detailing their workforce composition. The data themselves were not cause for celebration: The reports showed that women made up approximately 30% of the overall workforce and between 15% and 20% of the technical workforce of these companies. Blacks and Hispanics were represented in the low single digits, on average.
Tackling the Underrepresentation of Women in Media
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Venture Capitalists Are Using the Wrong Tools to Improve Gender Diversity
The female startup CEO was emailing again. It was the final stage of a potential funding deal with a venture capital firm, and she was negotiating hard to close it. “I saw that as a CEO she was doing her damnedest for her company,” one young female venture capitalist told us during a recent interview. “But the general discussion, even from internal women at our organization, was ‘I don’t want to work with someone like that. She’s too pushy.
We can't get rid of bias — but we can disrupt it by design
This kind of design thinking is also starting to impact the way business is done globally, which is great news. Redesigning HR procedures based on research evidence should be a core priority of any organization. An increasing number of hiring platforms, including Applied, pymetrics, and Textio (to name but a few) are putting research insights into practice.
Descriptive norms and gender diversity: Reactance from men
Main Article Content Maliheh Paryavi Harvard University Iris Bohnet Harvard University Alexandra van Geen Erasmus University Rotterdam Keywords Choice, Decision making, Gender norms, Gender diversity, Nudge, Framing, Reactance, Backlash Abstract Descriptive norms provide social information on others’ typical behaviors and have been shown to lead to prescriptive outcomes by “nudging” individuals towards norm compliance in numerous settings. This paper examines whether descriptive norms lead to...
The 2018 800-CEO-READ Business Book Awards Shortlist
Business books have long had a ‘change’ ethos about them, but the change that business brings to society isn’t universally positive. It is as important to wrestle with the negative effects as it is to celebrate the ways in which business can and does make the world better. We are at an inflection point in both business and society.
Projects Are the New Job Interviews
Resumes are dead. Interviews are largely ineffectual. Linked-In is good. Portfolios are useful. But projects are the real future of hiring, especially knowledge working hiring. No matter how wonderful your references or how well you do on those too-clever-by-half Microsoft/Google brainteasers, serious firms will increasingly ask serious candidates to do serious work in order to get a serious job offer.
A Scorecard for Making Better Hiring Decisions
Given that most organizations spend roughly 70% of their operating budgets on workforce expenses, it is noteworthy how rare it is for organizations to measure the success of hiring managers in their ability to select the right candidates. It is also rare for individuals to hold themselves accountable for becoming better interviewers over time.
This is how companies can close the gender pay gap
Now that mandatory reporting has revealed that three out of four British public entities and companies pay their male staff more than...
Book Review: What Works: Gender Equality By Design by Iris Bohnet
How might we tackle institutionalised gender inequalities? In What Works: Gender Equality by Design, Iris Bohnet advocates systemic interventions focused on de-biasing environments rather than individuals. Employing a behavioural design approach, the book serves both as a clear indication of where we currently stand and a guide as to how, institution by institution, we can nudge ourselves towards greater gender equality, writes Nic Logan-Murray.
The 2017 800-CEO-READ Business Book Awards Shortlist 52
Although it's never easy to cull our longlist of forty books down to eight, it is easy to celebrate the ones left. There is an existential question at the heart of each of the books on our shortlist this year. They include inquiries into our obsession with competition and economic growth, examinations of what we might be sacrificing in the pursuit of technological progress and corporate profits, and expositions on the underlying nature and process of innovation, invention, and entrepreneurship.
Tackling ‘the Thin File’ That Can Prevent a Promotion
What are the ways in which we can combat these biases in performance appraisals and narrow the promotion gap? One study we have underway at Harvard looks at whether potential bias will go away when we use data analytics to offer more concrete and more objectively measurable criteria for such traits as analytical skills, emotional intelligence, people skills or client interaction.
Start-Ups Use Technology to Redesign the Hiring Process
Iris Bohnet, a behavioral economist and professor at the Harvard Kennedy School, spoke to the founders of two behavioral design start-ups, Kate Glazebrook of Applied and Frida Polli of Pymetrics, for the latest on the algorithmic design revolution that is transforming hiring practices. Tell us more about your tools. How do they work? MS.
Non-Required (But Important!) Reading for Summer 2017
News Story Broaden your approach to equity, diversity, and inclusion with more than 50 great works recommended by NYU leaders in their fields. There's something about summer that makes it a time ripe for reflection—an opportunity to slow down and explore new ideas or try on different points of view.
Topics - Behavioral Scientist
How Zero-Sum Beliefs Get in the Way of Fairness The more we are stuck in the fixed-pie mentality, the harder it is to spot the opportunities to expand the pie. What’s the Goal of the Goal? The Quest to Imagine a Workplace that (Actually) Values Work-Life Balance Announcing Behavioral Scientist’s 2025 Summer Book Club: ‘Ghosts from the Future’ We’ll read George Orwell’s 1984—a classic novel about a future society overcome by a totalitarian regime and the citizens trying to break free.
THE MAN WHO KNEW by Sebastian Mallaby wins the Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award 2016
22 November 2016: The Financial Times and McKinsey & Company today announce that Sebastian Mallaby is the winner of the 2016 Financial...
What is behavioural science, and how is it going to change your life?
Could behavioural science help to reduce unemployment, or inflation, or prevent another financial crisis? Iris Bohnet, Director of the Women and Public Policy Program at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and co-chair of the Global Future Council on Behavioural Sciences, says that the discipline is helping to break new ground in multiple areas, from healthcare and education to social inclusion and consumer finance. Why does behavioural science matter to the Fourth Industrial Revolution?
Interviewing job candidates? Try doing it blind
This article was first published in the June 2016 issue of WIRED magazine. Be the first to read WIRED's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online. Blind evaluations are en vogue. Compose Inc, a cloud-storage firm in California, no longer asks job applicants for their CVs but instead has them complete tasks relevant to the job.
Leveling the Playing Field by Design
Back in December, journalists were surprised when President Obama called exclusively on female reporters during a press conference. The president is not the only one explicitly focusing on getting women to have more of a say.
Leveling the Playing Field by Design
Fairness on the job isn’t something that happens naturally. It has to be built. Iris Bohnet Apr 12, 2016 Yuya Shino / Reuters Back in December, journalists were surprised when President Obama called exclusively on female reporters during a press conference. The president is not the only one explicitly focusing on getting women to have more of a say.
Real Fixes for Workplace Bias
Corporations, not-for-profit groups and governments spend billions of dollars every year on diversity training—without knowing whether the programs work. A review of almost 1,000 studies on interventions aimed at reducing prejudice found that most programs weren’t tested. For the few that were, including media campaigns and corporate-diversity training, the effects, wrote Elizabeth Levy Paluck of Princeton and Donald P.
How can we promote gender equality in the workforce?
Editor’s Note: How can we address gender inequality in the workforce? That’s the subject of Iris Bohnet’s new book “What Works: Gender Equality by Design.” Bohnet explains how behavioral designs can be implemented in classrooms and offices to change and de-bias organizations instead of individuals. Economics correspondent Paul Solman spoke with Bohnet this week’s Making Sen$e segment on sexism on Wall Street. Below, we have an adapted excerpt of “What Works,” on sale March 8.
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