Moge de beste m/v winnen
Should the people who run the fastest at work be the ones to get promoted first? Or should it be those with the most potential? How can organisations persuade talented women to stick around, instead of watching one after the other walk out the door? Isabella Grabner believes that the way performance is measured makes a huge difference on the work floor. “And that’s the hopeful part, since this is something firms can fix themselves.”
Isabella Grabner (1982) is associate professor of Accounting at the Maastricht University School of Business and Economics. She moved to Maastricht University in 2010 after receiving her PhD from Vienna University of Economics and Business. She has been the director of master’s programmes at SBE since 2015 and is a member of the newly established UM Advisory Council on Diversity.
On 8 November the meeting Diversity and Inlusivity takes place at the Bonnefanten Museum in Maastricht. Donna Lisker, Dean of Smith College, which is among the largest women’s colleges in the United States, will not only talk about Diversity and Inclusivity, but also about ‘Effective institutional research on gender in academia’. Roelie Pot, who is Global Manager Diversity & Inclusion at Rabobank Nederland, will speak about ‘Ambition, dilemmas and best practices’ at the bank. Isabella Grabner chairs the event.
Implicit bias
The main bottleneck for women in academia, Grabner believes, is the way performance is measured on the tenure track. But the problem is not confined to academia. “The evaluation systems used in promotion decisions were designed many years ago, when women didn’t make up half of the workforce. They were designed by men to distinguish between good and bad … men. They need to be adapted to keep pace with reality.” What’s more, women are constantly being evaluated with male criteria. Research shows that this is not always intentional. In one study, students were asked to evaluate an email response from a teacher. When they thought the teacher was male, they rated the answer as ‘excellent and in time’. When they thought the teacher was female, they found it ‘good but too late’. “So there’s an implicit bias in society. But if we know that, we can incorporate it into our performance measurement systems. And not base promotion decisions in academia on ‘objective’ teaching evaluations, because they’re biased!”
All-male PhD committee
When speaking about this topic, Grabner’s eyes tend to light up. She is determined to bring about evidence-based change in this area. Together with her students, she recently developed the rating methodology and conducted desk research for the global report on gender equality by Equileap, an NGO seeking to accelerate progress towards gender equality in the workplace. This is important because, as research shows, gender-diverse companies tend to produce higher financial returns and have lower risk. Equileap argues that equal pay and, more broadly, equal opportunities at work are powerful levers to enhance global prosperity.
Grabner has also been asked to help advise the Executive Board on how to increase diversity and inclusion at Maastricht University. “We want to be a university that has room for everybody. And frankly, at the moment the key positions are dominated by white, grey-haired Dutch men.” To change this, she says, awareness is the first step. “Nowadays I’ll hear people say, ‘Did you see? The committee for that PhD defence was all male!’ And women have to be more aware of their own potential and lift each other up. Most of my PhD students are female and I make sure half of their defence committee is made up of women, even if I have to fly a professor over from America. Women have to be good role models.”
Door: Femke Kools (tekst) and Arjen Schmitz (fotografie)