What a Woman Who Studies Gender Inequality Saw at a Gathering of the Global Elite
DAVOS, Switzerland — Iris Bohnet navigates the narrow carpeted stairs to the wood-paneled hotel lobby balancing a smartphone, two bags and a winter coat the size of a duvet. It’s below freezing here. She’s been up for an hour already, checking emails and sending a quick note to her husband, who is looking after their two boys, but mostly, she admits, blow-drying her hair. This is her first observation of the day: Davos Woman gets less sleep than Davos Man because of her hair.
Ms. Bohnet studies gender inequality. A behavioral economist at the Harvard Kennedy School, she is one of about 600 female participants at this year’s World Economic Forum. There are about 2,400 men — that’s 80 percent of all participants. The gender imbalance here very much reflects the dearth of women leaders in the real world. As one female American executive put it: “Who do they think they are? The Senate?”
I was curious: What is it like to be Davos Woman for a day?
We step into the Davos dawn and start walking down the icy sidewalk. Ms. Bohnet’s first appointment is a breakfast panel on how to increase gender diversity in companies. She recently wrote a book on the subject and will be one of the speakers.
Ms. Bohnet arrived the day before and caught the end of the conference’s annual women’s reception. This is where female newcomers to Davos receive advice from the regulars — a sort of survivors’ guide for the 20 percent. Bring sturdy shoes. Expect long security lines. Don’t be intimidated, but if you are, don’t show it.
Judging from the stories here, Davos Man is still coming to terms with the presence of Davos Woman. High-powered women getting mistaken for the “plus one.” The confusion of men when they meet with female executives.
Ms. Bohnet knows the drill. This is her fourth year as Davos Woman. She is wearing sturdy shoes and carries her high heels in a spare bag.
There are quite a few men in the line at the Morosani Schweizerhof hotel. “That’s encouraging,” Ms. Bohnet whispers.
Have they all gotten up this early to learn about gender equality? We quickly discover that there is a finance breakfast scheduled for the same time.
Still, of the roughly 200 people who have come for the gender discussion, perhaps a third are men. And half of the speakers are women. This is good, in my thinking.
The first time I came to Davos, in 2002, it was pretty standard to have a panel with four middle-aged men. A “manel,” as women here call it.
The setup for the rare female speaker was often awkward. Microphones that interfered with earrings. Barstool-like chairs that made legs dangle, skirts ride up and high heels fall off.
Not today.
Over the next hour and a half, it almost seems as if the corporate world could be on the cusp of a gender revolution. Unilever and Mercer are using a gender-neutral assessment test to hire employees. SAP is using a big data tool to evaluate employees and job ads that avoid adjectives like “aggressive” and “competitive” that have been shown to put off women. The number of female managers has risen at all three companies.
This is all in Ms. Bohnet’s book, “What Works,” a blueprint for how to de-bias organizations rather than human beings. We are all biased, she explains. “Even if you have the best intentions, it’s hard to overcome your unconscious biases.”
Her favorite example is about the top orchestras in the United States, which began having auditions behind curtains in the 1970s. At the time only 5 percent of their musicians were women. Orchestra directors were confident that they did not need the curtain and that they had been choosing candidates purely on sound.
But with the curtain, the proportion of female musicians in American orchestras started to rise. It’s nearly 40 percent today.
It’s not even lunchtime and I’m beat. Ms. Bohnet pops an acetaminophen. Nine out of 10 panels have women speakers — so the 20 percent are in hot demand.
We’re walking down the Promenade, Davos’s main street, passing Russia House (usually a coffee shop); the HSBC cafe (a shoe shop the rest of the year); the Salesforce Lounge (a bookstore); and the Facebook building, a two-story pop-up that will be dismantled after the conference.
Ms. Bohnet is heading into a McKinsey studio, normally an office building, for an interview about her book.
McKinsey has done extensive research to prove that gender diversity is good for business. It recently piloted an algorithm built to recruit employees without bias. The formula picked more women.
“Wow,” Ms. Bohnet says. “After a morning like this, you really think something is happening.”
Back in reality, we are at an event on artificial intelligence run by two male presenters. There are 12 men in the audience and four women.
When they open up the session for questions, two women in the back row raise their hands first, followed by a man in the front row.
“Um, shall we start with the front row?” the speaker says, his eyes darting up and down.
“No, let’s start with a lady,” the man in the front row quickly says. It’s awkward.
A woman asks about the impact of artificial intelligence on education and children. The man asks about the impact of the technology on the bottom line of his business.
“That was cringy,” Ms. Bohnet says later. “I mean, it was good to call him out on wanting to pick the guy. But then the whole ‘ladies first’ thing.…” She pauses. “It just didn’t seem natural.”
What would she have done?
“Use a generic description: ‘Let’s start with the person in the blue scarf,’ something like that,” she offers.
On our way out, we meet Sophia. She has beautiful soft features, clear skin, lightly made-up eyes and a winning smile.
Sophia is an android, basically a hot female robot. Ms. Bohnet and I stop to take a closer look. “Hi,” I say. Sophia nods and her smile deepens. She is pretty good at animating human expressions but is only beginning to learn about emotions, explains her maker, a lanky young man.
It suddenly occurs to me that every android I’ve ever seen is female. I ask Bob Goodson, the founder of Quid and an artificial intelligence specialist, whether he has ever come across any hot male androids made by women.
“I haven’t thought about it,” he says. “But now that you mention it, yeah, all the androids I’ve ever seen are females made by men.”
It’s a little creepy, I think. What does it mean for the next technological revolution if most smart machines are made by men? I remember something that was said in a session earlier: “Algorithms are only as unbiased as those who program them.”
Bias is a big theme today. At a session that Ms. Bohnet moderates on forecasting bias, two professors — one male, one female — present together. He presents first; she doesn’t interrupt him once. When she speaks, he interrupts her six times — once, as he puts it, to clarify, before repeating what she said just 30 seconds earlier.
I’m beginning to understand what women here mean when they tell me they’re “in the room but not in the conversation.”
Next on the schedule: a Harvard reception at the Steigenberger Grand Hotel Belvédère, the poshest hotel in town. At the cloakroom we are told that bags with shoes now cost 5 Swiss francs to check. Call it a tax on women.
I stop at the bathroom to freshen up. There is a long line outside the men’s room and the staff is getting annoyed because men keep wandering into the kitchen by mistake. The women’s bathroom is quiet — one advantage of being among the 20 percent.
The World Economic Forum actually has a female quota of sorts. Big companies are allowed to bring five people as long as one of them is a woman. Otherwise, the maximum is four.
Whether the guys notice the imbalance is another question. “When men see a room full of people and 20 percent are women, they see 50 percent,” says Laura Liswood, secretary general of the Council of Women World Leaders, citing social science research.
The guys think we’re already there. Is 20 percent the new glass ceiling?
Not among the millennials, it seems. The Global Shapers, the under-30 cohort of leaders in Davos, have a 50-50 gender split. Young women like Gianina Caviezel, 29, the founder of Student Impact, a management consultancy, tell me that gender equality is not a major focus for them, at least in the West. They care about climate change and youth unemployment and refugees. I remember feeling the same way — until I had children.
I catch up with Ms. Bohnet after dinner. It’s 11:20 p.m., early by Davos standards. But it’s been a long day. We have changed shoes 10 times and gone through security eight times. We have paid the woman’s tax, suffered through a couple of manels and met Sophia. Onward.
P.C: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/20/business/dealbook/world-economic-forum-davos-women-gender-inequality.html
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