This piece was written in collaboration with The Institute for Business in Global Society. (copy credit: Esther Schrader)

To close the gender gap in recruitment and empower women in the workplace, business leaders must rethink how they recruit and promote talent. Harvard Business School Professor Katherine Coffman finds the key is seeking out individuals rather than waiting for them to apply, writing job descriptions that rely on clarity rather than ambiguity, and weighing competence at least as much as confidence in hiring decisions.

When the leaders of the storied network of academic medical centers that make up Mass General Brigham created an innovation office to help medical professionals bring their breakthroughs to market, they had everyone across their enterprises in mind.

Fourteen years into the venture, they realized the people getting a boost from their innovation office were overwhelmingly men.

That’s when the collaboration with Coffman started. As an experimental economist, Coffman has earned a reputation for understanding sources of gender gaps. The work she undertook with Mass General Brigham led to an overhaul in how the hospital’s innovation office sought and selected ventures to support. Today, according to the team at MGB, a much greater percentage of them are woman-led and the innovator community initiative better supports women innovators in skills ranging from learning how to network with external stakeholders to honing the processes to commercialize their work.

“We knew we had a problem, and it was something we were motivated to address,” Diana Schwartzstein, Manager Director for Innovation at Mass General Brigham, told Harvard Business School’s Race, Gender & Equity Initiative. “Instead of just jumping in and assuming we knew how to do so, we partnered with a researcher who is really top in her field, who gave us a data-driven approach to help us figure out what the barriers were.”

A Strategy for Dismantling the Gender Gap

Coffman’s work with the healthcare leader is one example of how collaborations between academics and practitioners can work in tackling complex societal issues, such as dismantling barriers for women in the innovation space. Most research into the gender gap has focused on what women need to do to be heard Offman turns the tables on that thinking: Her research shows that instead of putting the onus on women to speak up or demand to be heard, employers need to recognize where missed opportunities may occur.

“Implicitly, lots of organizations have relied, at least in part, on a person coming into the office and saying, ‘I have this great idea,’ or, ‘I’m ready for that next promotion,’” Coffman said of workplace assumptions that the best ideas and best candidates will be volunteered. Such assumptions, she said, fail to recognize that stereotypes can distort individuals’ beliefs about their own expertise. Her research has found that women are less likely than their male peers to recognize their own expertise or volunteer their own ideas in male-dominated spaces.

To address that gap, Coffman said, her research suggests that employers could benefit if they “turn that arrow in the other direction and spend more time trying to seek out and draw in the best ideas and candidates, rather than relying on volunteers. The best ideas don’t always come from those who are the most likely to speak up,” Coffman said.

Coffman’s conclusions draw on years of study. By designing controlled environments that mimic key aspects of the workplace, Coffman uses experiments to dive deeper into questions about how gender and stereotyping influence behavior in professional environments.

It was as a graduate student working toward her doctorate in economics that Coffman said she first began to realize that gender differences in willingness to speak up might have important implications for workplace outcomes.

Coffman’s ‘lightbulb moment’

While writing an early course paper, Coffman was analyzing survey data when she noticed an interesting trend -- men were answering every, single trivia question posed, while women were much more likely to skip those same questions.

“It’s not that women were skipping just to get through the study,” Coffman said. “Rather than just leaving something blank, in many cases women would say, ‘I’m sorry, I don’t know.’ That was, for me, a lightbulb moment.”

The point, Coffman said, was not that the women were less knowledgeable than the men. But, by not volunteering their answers, either due to less confidence or less willingness to throw out a wild guess, women might be perceived to be less knowledgeable – simply because they volunteered fewer of their ideas. They didn’t approach the situation in the same way as men. That finding, Coffman said, has informed her research ever since.

“Not everyone is going to be equally willing to advocate for themselves or their ideas, particularly in the face of stereotypes that might cause individuals to question their own expertise,” she said.

Some Steps to Attract Talented Women

So, how can employers attract and support talented women in their workforce? Coffman’s work reveals a few steps:

• Seek out talented candidates for openings, rather than waiting for them to apply.
• Make job descriptions more precise, and include clear, concise descriptions of what you are looking for. Reducing ambiguity can help more candidates to recognize that they are already exactly what you are looking for.
• Remember that confidence does not always equal competence. Solicit the opinions of applicants and employees who may not put themselves forward immediately but may have a deeper base of knowledge than those who do.

And how can women applicants and employees navigate their way through a still-inequitable workplace world? Here is some advice, mined from Coffman’s research:

• Recognize that gender stereotypes don’t just impact how others view you – they can impact how you view yourself. Recognize that you may be underestimating your talents in male-dominated areas.
• Seek advice from trusted others, arming yourself with information and broad perspectives on your contributions before negotiating or advocating on your own behalf.
• When deciding whether to put yourself forward, don’t just consider the risks of it not working out. Consider asking questions, such as What are the potential benefits? What are the risks of not going for it?
• Seek allies who can amplify your ideas and your voice, particularly in the face of power imbalances or discrimination.