“NUMBERS TAKE US ONLY SO FAR”Though executives tend to think—
and want to believe— they’re
hiring and promoting fairly, bias
still creeps into their decisions.
They often use ambiguous crite-
ria to fi lter out people who aren’t
like them or deem people from
minority groups to be “not the
right cultural fi t,” leaving those
employees with the uneasy feeling
that their identity might be the
real issue.
Companies need to acknowledge
that it’s fair for employees from
underrepresented groups to be
suspicious about bias, says Wil-
liams, Facebook’s global director
of diversity. They also must fi nd
ways to give those workers more
support. To that end, many organi-zations are turning to people ana-
lytics, which aspires to replace gut
decisions with data- driven ones.
Unfortunately, fi rms often say that
they don’t have enough people
from marginalized groups in their
data sets to produce reliable
insights.
But there are things employers can
do to supplement small n’s: draw
on industry or sector data; learn
from what’s happening in other
companies; and deeply examine
the experiences of individuals who
work for them, talking with them
to gather critical qualitative infor-
mation. If fi rms are systematic and
comprehensive in these eff orts,
they’ll have a better chance of
improving diversity and inclusion.Idea in Brief
Supplementing the n
Nonprofit research organizations are doing important work that
sheds light on how bias shapes hiring and advancement in various
industries and sectors. For example, a study by the Ascend Founda-
tion showed that in 2013 white men and white women in fi ve major
Silicon Valley fi rms were 154% more likely to become executives
than their Asian counterparts were. And though both race and gen-
der were factors in the glass ceiling for Asians, race had 3.7 times the
impact that gender did.
It took two more years of research and analysis— using data on
several hundred thousand employees, drawn from the EEOC’s
aggregation of all Bay Area technology fi rms and from the individual
reports of 13 U.S. tech companies— before Ascend determined how
bias aff ected the prospects of blacks and Hispanics. Among those
groups it again found that, overall, race had a greater negative impact