Why women hold back – and why we need a smarter approach to workplace promotions

When Google noticed that its female employees were less likely to nominate themselves for promotion, one of its heads of engineering sent out an email to all technical employees explicitly inviting women to nominate themselves. But being invited to a party does not mean that it will be safe to show up, so, in addition, Google sent managers this reminder: 

“I wanted to update everyone on our efforts to encourage women to self-nominate for promotion.… Any Googler who is ready for promotion should feel encouraged to self-nominate and managers play an important role in ensuring that they feel empowered to do so…” 

The explicit invitation coupled with the knowledge that their managers had their backs lowered the risk of self-promotion and encouraged women to put themselves forward. 

Opt in or opt out?

Pushing this line of thought one step further, organisations may consider presenting the question differently altogether. Instead of asking employees whether they want to opt in and be considered for promotion, they could tell them that employees with certain qualifications are automatically assumed to be ready for promotion unless they indicate otherwise and literally opt out of the promotion process. 

• How I help to encourage more women and girls into engineering careers

An opt-out frame is an even stronger signal that a person is not only invited but, in fact, assumed to join in, decreasing the risk for women even further. Early results suggest that gender gaps in competitive environments such as promotion settings can be attenuated when women are automatically included in the competition.

Economist Katherine Baldiga Coffman investigated the circumstances under which people are willing to put themselves forward. Her work suggests that Google was right to focus on making self-nominations less risky. To examine the relevance of the potential cost involved when asserting oneself, she turned to test-taking. 

In many multiple-choice tests, people are rewarded with points for correct answers and penalised with point deductions for wrong answers. In fact, until 2015, millions of American students taking one of the most important tests, the SAT, which hugely influenced which college a person would be admitted to, gained a point for correct answers and lost a quarter of a point for wrong answers on the multiple-choice part of the test. Thus, volunteering an answer was risky. Not as risky as applying for a promotion – but with the same outcome: women were less likely than men to take a chance and, when in doubt, preferred leaving the answer box blank and skipping the question (which yielded zero points).