The title of our second book says it all: It’s Not You, It’s the Workplace. The truth is, in the case of gender inequality at work, it actually isn’t you. Individuals can somewhat mitigate the detrimental effects of gender inequality at work. But much of the quantifiable harm is done by the systems we all operate in. And so, ahead of our third book and almost a decade into our work as writers on workplace inequality, we’re tackling the biggest culprit.

The place to start is not with individuals, but with time-honored accepted practices, policies, procedures, and systems.

Moving our focus to structural inequity is absolutely not an attempt to absolve individuals from personal responsibility and accountability. Rather, it’s a call to action for organizations to change the workplace systems, processes, and practices that foster and facilitate gender inequity.

Within the workplace, leaders have spent a lot of time, energy, and money on efforts to eliminate gender inequality, yet we have little to show for it. Why? Because these efforts have largely focused on training people to be less biased and more inclusive. Yes, people make up organizations, but data shows that giving individuals more knowledge does not translate into systemic change.

Changing the Approach to Systemic Bias

My husband, Alton B. Harris, and I have grappled with gender bias our entire careers. As co-authors, we sought to find solutions to women’s greatest obstacles to career success in Breaking Through Bias: Communication Techniques for Women to Succeed at Work in 2016 (updated in 2020) and It’s Not You, It’s the Workplace: Women’s Conflict at Work and the Bias that Built It in 2019. In both books, we had suggestions for ways leaders could eliminate the bias-­driven barriers to women’s career advancement, but our overarching objective was to help women, as individuals, cope with their workplaces as they found them: biased, unequal, and implicitly structured to keep women from achieving comparable career success to men.

Since then, there has been some shift in how people — and society more broadly — think, talk, and fight gender inequality. From #MeToo, the COVID-19 pandemic, a growing awareness of microaggressions, and other overt examples of unconscious bias.

Now is the time to address workplace gender inequality at its root. The paradigm that once dominated the conversation — debiasing individuals — must shift. Today, organizations’ objectives ought to be to:

• Ensure women and men can experience workplaces that are equally rewarding, engaging, and inclusive.
• Offer women and men equal access to career advancement opportunities.
• Create a culture that enables women and men to thrive, grow, and succeed.

We Need to Set Out On a New PATH Toward Gender Equality

In our third book, Beyond Bias: The PATH to End Gender Inequality at Work, we present a new approach to solving the pervasive issue of workplace gender inequality, one that puts the onus on organizations and the leaders who direct them.

In the past 10 or so years, Al and I have spoken directly with thousands of women being held back at work and we have tried to offer techniques and tools they could use to get ahead without waiting for their organizations to change. But now we are ready to directly address workplace gender inequality itself. Organizations must take responsibility for fixing the policies and procedures that allow gender inequality to persist.

Our integrated, comprehensive, and multifaceted program involves four straightforward steps:

• Prioritize elimination of exclusionary behavior.
• Adopt discrimination-­resistant methods of personnel decision-­making.
• Treat inequality in the home as a workplace problem.
• Halt unequal performance reviews, career advice, and leadership opportunities.

This PATH offers organizations a way forward, a way to end the systemic practices that either set women back or push them to the sidelines.

The Problem Is Bigger Than Unconscious Bias

Think of every off-color joke, crass reference, non-inclusive invitations, and discriminatory judgment you’ve heard in the workplace over the years. These experiences eat away at women’s confidence, happiness, and sense of inclusion and impact the organization. The organization’s response? Corporate training to address the issue, not the cause.

We need to take on the cause.

Even if anti-bias training worked to change individual minds — and the evidence suggests it does not — it wouldn’t close the pay or achievement gap. It is not the individuals making the personnel decisions. Instead, it is the systems behind those decision-makers that keep women back. Changing the context in which individuals make decisions is necessary if we are to build fairer workplaces.

The PATH Forward to Achieve Gender Equality

When leaders and decision-makers follow the PATH, they strengthen employees’ productivity, efficiency, creativity, confidence, and collaboration.

These sensible — and entirely realistic — changes deliver a series of small wins, that over time can make workplaces fairer, more equal, and more inclusive. When employees see the very real progress PATH can make, their sense of purposeful engagement increases and companies see a return on investment with increased productivity, collaboration, and trust.

PATH, and Beyond Bias, diverge from our prior books by focusing on the responsibility that organizations have in fixing themselves in order to end gender inequality. PATH does not ignore individual’s biases and gender stereotypes. But it addresses these individually. It provides a blueprint for leaders to identify the systemic bias in their organizational structures by changing these structures organizations change the context of individuals’ behavior — and that behavior necessarily becomes less biased.

Using PATH, organizations act to change the gendered status quo. This is the only way to drive systemic change and move closer to gender equality.