Rotman Management – April 2019

rotmanmagazine.ca / 29

Humberto Carolo

Executive Director, The White Ribbon

Campaign

for men to that of women in an organization — and it is therefore
more reflective of the overall power dynamics in an organization.
The second challenge we are working on is that while most
employers are willing to submit their gender pay gap figures
for public scrutiny, they aren’t sure where to begin in terms of
making positive change. That’s not surprising, because many
companies haven’t even looked at their data to understand pre-
cisely where the problems lie. As with any kind of behavioural
change that you want to encourage, the key is to make it easy.
So, to make it easy for employers we’ve published a clear guide
[available at https://gender-pay-gap.service.gov.uk/public/as-
sets/pdf/Evidence-based_actions_for_employers.pdf ]. In the
category of effective actions, it shows that most actions have
to do with transparency, accountability and structure, because
a lack of formal structure is how bias often creeps in. If there is
a clear set of criteria and people must justify their decisions to

someone, that is a great way to stop bias in its tracks.

The third challenge we are working on is that the evidence

around ‘what works’ is patchy. To address this, we have been

partnering with several large organizations to run our own

field trials to improve the evidence base. We look at participat-

ing organizations’ recruitment data, performance evaluation

data and promotion data, and wherever we find the most bi-

ases, we work with the company to create an intervention. The

good news is, the demand to participate in these creative in-

terventions has exceeded our expectations. More good news:

People from every country in the world (except North Korea)

have visited the Government Equalities Office’s gender pay

gap website [https://gender-pay-gap.service.gov.uk/Viewing/

search-results] to review the latest data, and many countries

are considering introducing similar legislation.

PART OF OUR WORK INVOLVES LOOKING at the root causes of vio-

lence against women. We believe that masculinity is socially

constructed, so we have been studying how, from a very young

age, boys and young men are pressured to conform to the

popular notions of being a ‘real man’ — including dominance,

control and anger as the only form of emotion that men are al-

lowed to express (because anything else is a sign of weakness).

We talk to young men about how these constructs affect their

lives and the lives of others — particularly women and the LG-

BTQ communities — and we talk about the importance of

promoting healthy, alternative forms of masculinity. As a so-

ciety, we need to start encouraging men to live much health-

ier, more humane and empathetic lives, both for themselves

Rony Hacohe, continued