We all know about the positive impact of compound interest in our bank accounts, but often fail to recognize how the compounding effects of systemic biases and frequent microaggressions at work can impact a woman’s chances of career success. 

While compounding interest delivers large gains over time, the seemingly small differences between the ways in which women and men are treated in the workplace also delivers large negative consequences for women’s career advancement. For example, even tiny inequalities in the evaluation of women and men allow men to gain substantial advantages over women. 

The Reality of Microaggressions in the Workplace

It’s a pervasive belief that workplaces operate as meritocracies—fair, unbiased places where success comes from the merit and hard work of individuals. Under this misconception , women could not possibly face obstacles that stunt their career progression because “social rewards and status” in America are due to individual merit and hard work. This perspective is reinforced by everything from Horatio Alger’s rags-to-riches tales to “The Little Engine That Could,” the classic Golden Book that was required reading for many children. 

Working women know the truth. Workplaces are not meritocracies and they must deal with gender-based obstacles and countless microaggressions to achieve success. Because of this,  women experience less job satisfaction, fewer advancement opportunities and advice and encouragement, than men. Women also are more likely to encounter instances of workplace bullying and incivility, microaggressions, and harassment. 

All Types of Microaggressions Add Up, and Not In a Good Way

There are many stories that illustrate the progression from seemingly insignificant to dramatic inequality. As an example, Professor Lenore Blum, the Distinguished Career Professor of Computer Science with more than 20 years on the Carnegie Mellon University faculty, resigned in 2018. Despite her tenure, senior status and many honors, she cited the institution’s endemic sexism as the reason for her departure.

“Subtle biases and microaggressions pile up, few of which on their own rise to the level of ‘let’s take action’ but are insidious nevertheless,” Blum said at the time. And if women call attention to these slight displays of discrimination, they get labeled as complainer or “difficult.”

This creates a double bind for women, because if they don’t point out microaggressions, they risk continuing to suffer from cumulative, discriminatory treatment, and if they do, they are stigmatized.

Blum’s experience at CMU was far from unique. In a 2016 survey, when asked if another Carnegie Mellon faculty member had made “an assumption about you based on your birth sex,” 62% of the women but only 1% of the men answered “yes.” In 2017, a Pew Research Center survey revealed that women were three times more likely than men to say they experienced repeated small slights at work because of their gender.

Proving the Cumulative Effect of Incremental Discrimination 

Unfortunately, many leaders—not surprisingly, mostly men—at the helm of top companies and organizations choose to believe they have little to no control over gender inequality. Rather, they try to explain the dearth of women in leadership roles to their lack of ambition, ability, or commitment to succeed. 

Because of their belief in the meritocracy of their workplaces, many leaders dismiss claims of discrimination, or assume if it does exist, it’s an outlier and largely inconsequential. In their view, obstacles to advancement are slight. And while that may be true of each individual microaggression and discriminatory action, in the aggregate, it is patently untrue. Even small discriminatory obstacles result in large gender disparities in senior leadership teams, as discovered by a compelling 1996 computer simulation, published in American Psychologist, that shows a large, discriminatory impact of slight unequal treatment.

The simulated organization consisted of 500 entry‐level employees and 10 senior managers, with an equal number of men and women at each of the eight hierarchical levels across the company. Everyone received a randomly generated rating (evaluation), with women scored on a scale of 1 to 100 and men on a scale of 1 to 101. 

That one point gave men a seemingly small, yet clear, advantage. With that thumb lightly placed on the scale, the simulation began calculating where the hypothetical employees would end up, Assuming a 15% periodic attrition rate for employees at each of the eight levels, those with the highest ratings moved up in the simulation, while new employees were added at the entry level. The 1% advantage held by men resulted in 15 percentage points of inequality for women. Even with a slight head start, the men moved up the ranks to ultimately hold 65% of senior leadership positions within this hypothetical organization. 

The chart below breaks down the shrinking percentage of women, demonstrating the dramatic effect a so-called tiny inequality on women’s career advancement.

A 2022 model, expanding upon the 1996 simulation, sought to link gender disparity to six empirically identified ways in which gender bias manifests within organizations. Assuming these factors had a seemingly small (typically 2% disadvantage) effect on women’s careers, men ended up holding, after a series of promotion and turnover simulations, 84% of the hypothetical organization’s top leadership roles.

In reality, the combined effects of bias create a serious disadvantage for women. McKinsey estimates, men currently hold 74% of leadership positions—leaving only 21% of high-level roles to white women and just 5% to women of color. 

A New PATH to Drive Systemic Change

There’s a clear takeaway from these sophisticated computer modeling experiments: The scope of the cumulative effect of consistent and continuous discriminatory treatment is undeniable. If seemingly trivial instances of unequal treatment constitute a systematic pattern, it becomes easier for these chronic behaviors to become entrenched in workplace culture. This results in systematic organizational problems—subtle and seemingly insignificant at first, yet capable of compounding insidiously over time. 

It’s not enough for decision-makers to endorse DEI programs with the sole focus on blatant, easy‐to‐identify stereotypes and biases. Rather, they must consider holistic efforts that identify and resolve the outsized impact of the incremental and ever-increasing bias women face in their everyday work experiences.

We need to solve for these compounding effects of systemic biases and microaggressions. Our third book, Beyond Bias: The PATH to End Gender Inequality at Work, presents a new approach to tackling the extensive issues that workplace gender inequality raises, one that puts the onus on organizations and the leaders who direct them.

Using PATH, organizations can fight microaggressions at work with systemic measures to change the gendered status quo. When even a 1% bias can sway outcomes significantly, the only way to drive real change and move closer to gender equality is to tackle the systems themselves.