The Office Ecology: Reshaping Workspaces to Reduce Gender Biases
For decades, organisations have invested heavily in diversity training programs and workshops aimed at raising awareness of unconscious gender biases. While well-intentioned, these initiatives have had limited success in producing lasting changes in implicit gender biases and workplace inequalities (see prior blog here for more). A growing body of research suggests we may have been overlooking one of the most powerful tools for reducing biases - the office environment itself.
The Mere Exposure Effect
A recent study published in Nature Communications reveals how the demographic composition and level of integration within urban environments can significantly shape implicit racial biases in residents. Using a combination of mathematical modeling and analysis of over 2.7 million implicit association tests across U.S. cities, the researchers found that larger cities with greater racial diversity and less residential segregation exhibited substantially lower levels of pro-White/anti-Black implicit biases.
The key mechanism driving this effect is the "mere exposure" hypothesis from psychology. Increased exposure to outgroup members, through living and interacting in more diverse and integrated settings, can gradually lead to reduced biases against that outgroup over time through a learning or expertise-building process. People quite literally become more impartial through greater experience with diversity as an environmental norm.
Extending this "urban scaling" effect to the workplace domain could have major implications for how organisations approach the challenge of mitigating inaccurate gender biases and stereotypes.
Social Role Theory and Ecological Psychology
To understand how the office environment can reinforce or disrupt gender biases, it's helpful to consider the interplay between social role theory and Gibson's ecological psychology. Social role theory posits that societal expectations and norms associated with gender roles shape perceptions and behaviors. Men are expected to exhibit more agentic qualities like assertiveness and leadership, while women are expected to be more communal and nurturing.
Gibson's theory of direct perception offers an alternative explanation to the information processing view of behaviour on how these gender role expectations get reinforced through a self-perpetuating cycle in the environment:
1. A perceiver focuses their attention on the gender of another person.
2. The person's gender influences the perceiver's assumptions about their qualities, such as authority.
3. This perception shapes the perceiver's behaviour, such as deferring more readily to a man's opinions because of his perceived higher authority.
4. This deferential behaviour, in turn, affords the man opportunities to act more authoritatively.
5. When men exhibit the expected agentic behaviours, it is rewarded through role conformity.
6. This reinforced authoritative behaviour then further perpetuates the gendered social role expectations.
Traditional interventions like unconscious bias training have proven ineffective in breaking this cycle, as they don't address the environmental reinforcers of gendered perceptions and behaviours. Instead, organisations need to disrupt the coupling between gender and behavioural affordances in the workplace ecology itself.
Counter-Stereotypical Exposure
One promising way to short-circuit the social role cycle is by increasing exposure to counter-stereotypical experiences - men and women regularly exhibiting qualities and behaviors that defy gendered expectations. Over time, this exposure can erode the automatic mental associations between gender and certain traits or roles.
Initiatives like "coding for girls" camps directly challenge the stereotypical association between technology and masculinity. Seeing women consistently in technical expert roles gradually breaks down the perceiver's biased assumptions. Similarly, highlighting men's effectiveness in traditionally feminine-typed roles like teaching, nursing or counseling can expand perceptions of men's communal capabilities.
The office environment presents a rich opportunity to embed these counter-stereotypical exposures into employees' daily experiences. Some strategies could include:
- Elevating women and men in highly visible leadership roles in gender-atypical domains
- Showcasing gender-balanced teams across all functions, from HR to finance to engineering
- Celebrating men's use of parental leave policies or participation in mentorship programs
- Ensuring equal airtime and authority cues for women in meetings and decision-making
- Using gender-neutral language (person in the loop vs man in the loop) and imagery in job descriptions, office decor and communications
The key is to make counter-stereotypical gender roles the "new normal" that employees can't help but notice and couple new action opportunities to, such as affording females more time to talk as they are perceived as equally authoritative to their male peers.
Beware of Backlash Effects
Of course, simply increasing diverse gender contact alone is not a panacea. The research highlights that perceptions of segregation and lack of integration can actually amplify biases and stereotyping. Creating spaces for positive interactions that counteract prevailing gender stereotypes is key.
Backlash effects where increased exposure leads people to double down on stereotypes are a risk if gender mixing is seen as zero-sum, forced, or challenging the status quo without clear shared goals and cooperation opportunities. Effective inclusion also requires leadership pioneering new inclusive organisational cultures and supporting gender-transcendent work environments free of sex-role policing.
Organisations will need to provide training on fostering cultures of mutual workplace respect, creating identity-safe environments, and calling out bias incidents. Because as exposure increases, incidences of explicit gender biases from those most impervious to environmental influences may also become more visible, requiring responsive accountability and resolution processes.
The Long Haul
The longitudinal data from the urban study reveals a more nuanced relationship between demographic exposure and bias reduction over different timeframes. In the short 1-2 year spans, changes in the demographic makeup of environments were the primary predictors of changing implicit biases. This aligns with the learning and expertise-building logic - biases update as people soak up and internalise new social norms from altered surroundings.
However, in the longer 3+ year ranges, the causal direction became more bidirectional, with implicit biases also feeding back into changing environmental demographics and segregation levels. This suggests an ongoing mutually reinforcing cycle once set in motion, where reduced biases facilitate further integration and intergroup mixing.
The key takeaway is that environmental exposure effects on gender biases will be a gradual and continual process requiring long-term commitment, not an overnight revolution. Immediate impacts may seem minimal, but sustained diverse and cross-gender integrated environments can make steady progress in updating deep-rooted associations.
This incremental approach may be more palatable for organisations to adopt compared to endless training programs and unrealistic targets for upfront bias elimination. Steadily evolving the physical and cultural ecology creates a lower-risk path towards reducing biases that develops organisational direction for lasting change.
Beyond Box-Checking
Too often, diversity and inclusion efforts become an exercise in box-checking - hire a few diverse candidates, hold a town hall, run the annual unconscious bias course, and consider it handled. But mitigating the deep psychological roots of implicit gender biases requires a more holistic, ecological approach to re-shaping the physical, social and cultural environments that daily reinforce stereotypical associations.
While more involved upfront in re-envisioning workspaces and workflows, leveraging mere exposure effects through environmental integration may be one of the most powerful and sustainable pathways available for eroding toxic gender biases and stereotypes. It transforms diversity from an abstract ideal into a concrete lived reality.
Aided by structural, policy and accountability supports, organisations can create office environments that gradually reshape behavioural patterns through the passive immersion of employees in more integrated gender roles and norms. Combined with proactive leadership signaling new cultures of equality, designing exposure to counter-stereotypical experiences directly into the workplace may be the key to finally achieving enduring gender bias reduction at scale.