In just the last few years, the conversation surrounding women’s equality has been wide-ranging, ever-evolving, and contentious; from #MeToo, to the reflexive and often violent backlash, it seems that the cultural reevaluation of how women fit into society is deservedly at the center of the public discourse. At the core of it has been the growing awareness of how women are systematically held back (just this week, NASA faced backlash after scrapping what was set to be a historic all-women spacewalk because, at the heart of it, workplaces are structured to favor men and disadvantage women; it didn’t have two suits that fit). These problems affect women in every field, and it’s not hard to imagine how this continues to happen; for one, women are not recruited or promoted in anywhere near the numbers of their male counterparts, which just creates a feedback loop of self-perpetuating bias.
This isn’t a secret. It’s never been a secret. The research has been done, the numbers crunched. Men – as a rule – don’t promote women nearly as often as they promote and mentor other men. Women aren’t hired in the same numbers, and those that do get hired are met with workplace cultures that weren’t designed with them in mind. None of this is news; it’s been endlessly covered and re-covered in thinkpiece jeremiads written for people who already agree to nod along to. I myself have done that work. And, as someone who has lived most of her life in the corporate world, it’s impossible not to do this work without some pessimism. Change, at best, is slow.
Which is what makes the news coming out of Goldman Sachs so exciting: a policy change aimed at fundamentally reinventing hiring culture at one of the biggest financial firms in the world. I spoke with representatives from Goldman to see what it was and how it was going to work. That’s a critical question in an era when slapping down a new policy or diversity initiative is often more an empty PR move in response to criticism than a force for change. So I did not go in with high hopes.
But Goldman’s new policy, roundly oversimplified in reporting as “50% of junior bankers must be women,” actually seems to be a far-reaching and meaningful effort at reform. I was struck by how much it was driven by a deep, data-driven analysis of why women (and other minorities) don’t end up in leadership roles, with real efforts to locate problems in the company’s promotion and recruitment pipeline that couldn’t simply be fixed by with statements about how diversity matters or implementing, but not enforcing, a quota. You can’t fix a culture that easily.
Goldman, to its immense credit, is focusing on improvement over time driven by incentivizing better practices. Goldman’s managers (overwhelmingly white men) will quickly discover that continuing the same old hiring practices will impact compensation and promotions. Goldman has begun the process of redefining what successful hiring looks like by dangling both carrot and stick: follow the new hiring procedures – which demand widening the search and mandate diverse candidates for new positions – or find yourself held accountable for falling short of the firm’s goals.
That’s the part I want to zero in on, and the part that makes this new policy an exemplar of what practical progressivism in corporate America can look like. It’s not an empty promise; it’s a basic, revision of how hiring is done at the root instead of a number that ignores why the company is so white and male. It incentivizes the new procedure, using hard metrics to track how successful or unsuccessful a particular manager has been at diversifying their talent pool. That’s going to make it difficult to fudge the numbers or equivocate; simply put, actualizing the policy will affect whether a VP becomes a managing director, and whether a managing director becomes a partner.
It's about using self-interest to promote results; however any individual executive might feel about women, at the end of the day his career cannot advance if he doesn’t diversify the team working underneath him. He can’t check off the box saying he interviewed a diverse candidate every time without ever hiring one; he has to actually do it. It is, for once, a diversity program founded on results more than intentions.
That is fascinating to me, and I hope other business leaders who read or hear about it feel the same way. So much of the debate around how women can advance in the workplace has revolved around looking at hiring practices and workplace cultures without ever really going into how to solve the core problem that inequality perpetuates itself over time. This has the potential, not only to improve hiring practices, but to encourage leadership to make the retention and promotion of women a priority.
Setting aspirational hiring goals that prioritize diversity is a good and needed step, but without accountability and an understanding of why women are held back in the first place, nothing actually changes. That accountability is what makes the difference here, and it’s what other companies need to adopt if they’re serious about workplace equality.
Just think. Managers whose careers depend on creating non-hostile work environments, recognizing the structural barriers women face, and ensuring that we have the opportunity to thrive. Where powerful men’s financial wellbeing depends on making sure women have a chance to succeed instead of being driven out before we can even take our shot. A corporate environment that doesn’t treat our needs as ancillary or burdensome additions, but as a priority on which their own success depends.
And Goldman looks like it’s cracked the code.
