Impact Brief: A ‘Small Wins’ Model for Overcoming Gender Bias Transforms the Workplace

Lori Mackenzie had just wrapped up a conference presentation on gender diversity in the tech industry when she was approached by a chief executive with a problem that anyone who had ever heard of his company knew it had.

The company was GoDaddy, which most people recognized far more for its controversial Super Bowl ads featuring scantily-clad women and over-the-top sexual innuendo than its position as the world’s largest registrar of Internet domain names. Less well-known, too, was its hard-charging workplace culture and practices around hiring and promotion that were inadvertently favoring men over women.

GoDaddy’s then-CEO had inherited these challenges when he took the helm in 2013. By the time he met Mackenzie two years later at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, which is the world’s largest tech conference for women, he had already stopped the company’s salacious advertising. Now he wanted to address any internal gender disparities—and asked Mackenzie, the co-founder of the Stanford VMware Women’s Leadership Innovation Lab, if she could help.

She could. A team of Stanford scholars—led by Shelley Correll, a professor of sociology and organizational behavior and director of the Women’s Leadership Lab — had recently developed a groundbreaking model for overcoming gender bias in the workplace. The idea was to bring research insights into the real world through intensive collaborations between academics and company leaders.

The approach, which was organized into five concrete steps, had been tried only once before and it took about a year. The Stanford team was looking for a second 12-month test case and plenty of companies were volunteering. “GoDaddy’s genuine willingness to admit it had problems told me that anything we did wasn’t going to be window dressing,” said Mackenzie.

Four years later, things are much different at GoDaddy. Its work with Stanford jumpstarted a revamp of how it recruits, pays and promotes women and minorities. Where practices and policies were once ambiguous, today they are clearly and consistently defined and measured.

According to yearly data GoDaddy publicly releases as a sign of its commitment to gender equity, women in senior leadership has increased 7 percentage points to 33%. In 2018, 50% of promotions to vice president and above were women. The company also closed a gender pay gap among top executives.

GoDaddy’s makeover has not gone unnoticed. The company is ranked among the top tech firms for women, according to a 2017 New York Times article. The headline said it all: “If GoDaddy Can Turn the Corner on Sexism, Who Can’t?”

SMALL STEPS, BIG IMPROVEMENTS

For Correll and her team, the GoDaddy work was proof that their novel approach to addressing gender bias worked. Their strategy, which they call the “small wins” model of change, is based on the notion that there is no quick fix when it comes to overcoming gender inequality. Unconscious bias trainings or seemingly objective criteria for hiring and promotion are useful, says Correll, but they are insufficient if the goal to create sustainable change.

Instead, says Correll, drilling down into a company to uncover disparities in gender and race and implementing gradual improvements grounded in research are key to closing the diversity gap. When employees realize that small changes work, they are inspired to do more. As the momentum builds, equitable policies and practices follow. The company culture shifts, too.

50: Percentage of GoDaddy promotions to vice president and above that went to women after the company collaborated with Stanford on gender equity

“The ‘small wins’ model is about creating cultures of continuous improvement,” Correll said. “People genuinely want to be inclusive and this model allows them to see how even minor fixes, even imperfect or incomplete ones, add up.”

Today, Correll and her colleagues have built a corporate program that brings together academics and business executives to advance gender equity at work. With 57 members, including Google, Uber, and Visa, the initiative is Stanford’s second-largest Industrial Affiliates Program connecting researchers and companies across disciplines.

‘BE EXTRAORDINARY’: REASSESSING A CORE VALUE

At GoDaddy, putting the “small wins” model into practice meant taking a deep dive into its operations for signs of gender bias. Correll pulled together a team that included Caroline Simard, the Women’s Leadership Lab’s managing director; Mackenzie; and JoAnne Wehner, a research associate at the lab. They spent the initial weeks poring over all of GoDaddy’s anonymized employee data, including performance reviews, surveys, and assessments of top leaders. They held focus groups with employees and interviewed senior executives. They observed the company’s yearly calibration meeting where senior-level promotion decisions are made.

When their top-to-bottom review was done, the Stanford team suggested that GoDaddy start by rethinking how it evaluates and promotes talent. Employees had told them they thought the process was mysterious and unfair, and research shows that ambiguity in employee policies and practices contributes to unconscious bias.

In particular, the researchers recommended that the company undertake a number of steps to clarify its performance criteria. This included rethinking how the company’s core values, one of which championed “Be Extraordinary,” were used to subjectively evaluate workers.

“When we asked managers what ‘Be Extraordinary’ means to them, they all thought they were talking about the same thing and, yet, 10 different managers gave 10 different answers,” said Wehner. An analysis of the language they used in written performance reviews and their choice of words in the calibration meeting confirmed the ambiguity. Men, for example, who were described as “aggressive” were considered passionate, while women deemed aggressive were seen as more unlikable.

The lack of clear and concise criteria, the Stanford researchers concluded, contributed to an unequal distribution in review ratings whereby women were more likely to receive middling marks while men were more likely to land at the top. Without intending to, GoDaddy was limiting opportunities for women to advance.

A PREMIUM ON STAKEHOLDER CONSENSUS

The Stanford team’s proposal that GoDaddy rethink its performance review process was just that—a recommendation. “Corporate partners have to be intimately involved in co-designing any change—that’s the most important part of the model,” said Simard. “A researcher can’t just say, ‘Here’s what you should do’ and then walk away. The only way you can make progress, is if people in the company are invested in the process.”

Monica Bailey, the chief people officer at GoDaddy, was on board. To get buy-in and lay the foundation for the “small wins” effect, she made sure that all of the key players had a voice. “We love our values and we are a company that wants to use them to evaluate people,” she said. “But we recognized that they weren’t specific enough so we could consistently review everybody in a way that blocked unconscious bias.”

In the end, GoDaddy leaders and the Stanford researchers created a dashboard of specific evaluation criteria that managers now complete for every employee. There were internal discussions about how a “good collaborator” isn’t a proxy for outsized personality. Similarly, “responsiveness” doesn’t mean replying to emails promptly (which can be a source of gender bias for women, who are often the primary parent at home after work); it means contributing helpful ideas. And while “Be Extraordinary” remains an aspirational value at GoDaddy, it is no longer used as a measure of performance.

The impact on GoDaddy’s employee reviews was immediate. In the first year under the new criteria, a gender gap in performance ratings for midlevel and senior managers all but disappeared. At the next calibration meeting, which Stanford researchers observed, leaders used similar language in discussing promotions. They also held each other accountable when there were differences in opinion about an employee’s performance.

Stanford’s official work with GoDaddy ended, as expected, after a year. But the company’s diversity initiatives did not. The insights into its performance reviews inspired leaders to adapt Stanford’s approach to its hiring process and to apply it to how the company recruits and retains minorities. And by disclosing its diversity stats every year, the company hopes to inspire other firms to tackle unconscious bias.

“The people we worked with at Stanford were incredible thought leaders and practitioners, which is a very rare combination,” said Bailey. “The hard part about work on unconscious bias is that it is never done.”

This issue brief describes how teams of researchers and leaders in government, business, and nonprofits can work together to generate new ideas, insights, and solutions to make progress on social problems.

Shelley Correlll, the Michelle Mercer and Bruce Golden Family Professor in Women’s Leadership and co- Director of the Stanford VMWare Lab serves on the Stanford Impact Labs’ leadership team as Associate Director. The VMWare Women’s Leadership Lab is also hosting one of three inaugural SIL Post Docs. This brief was written prior to the launch of Stanford Impact Labs to show how new evidence and insights developed jointly by scholars and external practitioners can inform policies and programs to improve lives.

Stanford Impact Labs invests in highly-motivated teams of researchers and practitioners from government, business, nonprofit organizations, and philanthropy. These teams—impact labs—work together on social problems they choose and where practical progress is possible. With financial capital and professional support from Stanford Impact Labs, they can rapidly develop, test, and scale new solutions to social problems that affect millions of people worldwide.

Learn more about the work Stanford Impact Labs is investing in at impact.stanford.edu.