Almost every organisation has an Authority Gap. And it doesn’t just exist between women and men. Colleagues of colour, of a different class background or sexuality, and with disabilities also experience Authority Gaps.
We start with gender, because it affects the highest proportion of your workforce. Becoming more aware of the gender Authority Gap, though, will help to close all the others. Once we notice the way our unconscious biases manifest themselves and learn to correct for them, we become generally more respectful and empathetic to people who differ from us.
Our programme has four stages:
1. Education
Set the scene
Outcome
The Authority Gap becomes a topic of conversation in the organisation and most employees are aware of what it means, how it manifests itself and why it matters.
The first time I saw the authority gap in all its brazen irritating glory was when I was working in a legal department and was asked to give a trainee solicitor some guidance in conveyancing. So I said, ‘Why don’t you sit with me while I do this completion?’ I went through everything and he sat and watched. Afterwards, the solicitor said to him, ‘I think she did very well, don’t you?’ The guy didn’t say, ‘Well, actually she’s training me.’
Margaret Casely-Hayford CBE, former Director of Legal Services, John Lewis Partnership
2. Diagnosis
Measure the Gap
Outcome
You find out where and how your organisation’s Authority Gap manifests. You then have a quantitative baseline against which to measure the success of the targeted actions, and together we have a roadmap to help us co-design the scope and scale of your programme.
Check the culture
Outcome
You have a better understanding of the working culture in which your female colleagues operate and how it could improve.
You have to constantly prove yourself over and over again. When a guy will say something at a meeting, they’re like, ‘Yes, that sounds great, I think we should do it,’ and a woman says something and they’re like, ‘Well, I think we should look into it, I think we need more data, we need to think about that, I don’t know if that’s really going to work.’ I get challenged a lot, constantly, and it’s become a way of life.
Shubhi Rao, former Treasurer of Alphabet, parent company of Google
3. Treatment
Engage senior leadership
Outcome
You achieve buy-in from C-Suite and ExCo members, helping to cascade the culture change throughout the organisation.
Teach men to be allies
Outcome
Men become more aware of how their own unconscious biases affect their behaviour and have the tools to help correct for them. They become more conscious of taking up disproportionate speaking time, interrupting or challenging women and undervaluing their contributions. They actively help their female colleagues to be valued, respected and heard.
Train managers
Outcome
At each level of your organisation, the Authority Gap is recognised and countered. It will become normal for colleagues to say, “That was a bit of an Authority Gap moment”, followed by a discussion on how it could have been handled better. Talented women progress faster and mothers are penalised less. Succession planning becomes fairer once managers learn to resist the temptation to allocate better tasks and clients to junior colleagues who look like them.
Open men’s eyes
Outcome
Senior men become more aware of how experiences can differ within the same organisation. These interactions create empathy, increase awareness of unconscious bias, and help to convert sceptics into allies.
Debias HR processes
Outcome
Bias will be reduced and you will be collecting and analysing the right data. Closing the Authority Gap will become an element in your performance management process.
Although I look my age, people think sometimes that I’m a mature student. At a conference, I’d meet someone my equal and they’d tell me how brave I was, going back to study. Nowhere at any time did I tell them that I’d gone back to study; they just assumed because I was with a bunch of students that I was a student. I had to inform them that I was their lecturer. It’s incredibly patronising.
Olivette Otele, 54-year-old Distinguished Research Professor at SOAS
4. Follow up
Embed the culture change
Outcome
Awareness of the Authority Gap and intention to close it become reflex actions. Once colleagues learn how to spot it, they start to see it everywhere and take steps to remedy it. By noticing, and correcting for, their bias against women, they find they start to do the same for people of different ethnicity, class, sexuality and ability.
Your male colleagues will also find the workplace more congenial as behaviour becomes generally more respectful and the women they work with are more appreciative and engaged.
Measure the Gap again
Outcome
You know whether the programme has worked. You can see which parts of your organisation have responded best and worst, and this will inform what actions, if any, you need to take next in your continuous improvement cycle.
Gain accreditation
Outcome
Women are are already asking prospective employers, “What are you doing to close your Authority Gap?” This will allow you to answer that question with confidence. You will retain and attract more female talent and your organisation will become known as a great place for women, and all minorities, to work.