ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Iris Bohnet is the Albert Pratt Professor of Business and Government and the co-director of the at Harvard Kennedy School. She is a behavioral economist, combining insights from economics and psychology to improve decision-making in organizations and society, often with a gender or cross-cultural perspective. Her most recent research examines behavioral design to embed equity at work. She is the author of the award-winning book and co-author of the book . Professor Bohnet advises governments and companies around the world, including serving as Special Advisor on the Gender Equality Acceleration Plan to the UN Secretary-General/Deputy Secretary-General and as a member of the Gender Equality Advisory Council of the G7. She was named one of the Most Influential Academics in Government and one of the most Influential People in Gender Policy by apolitical. She served as academic dean of Harvard Kennedy School for six years and as the faculty chair of the executive program “Global Leadership and Public Policy for the 21st Century” for the World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leaders for more than ten years. She presently serves as the faculty director of the social sciences at Harvard Radcliffe Institute and on a number of boards and advisory boards. She is the recipient of several awards and honorary degrees. Iris is married and the mother of two children.
Siri Chilazi is a senior researcher at the Women and Public Policy Program at Harvard Kennedy School whose life’s work is to advance gender equality in the workplace through research and research translation. She operates at the intersection of academia and practice, both conducting research on how organizations can become more inclusive and bringing those research insights to practitioners through speaking, training, and workshops. As an academic researcher, Siri specializes in identifying practical approaches to close gender gaps at work by de-biasing structures and designing fairer processes. As an advisor and speaker, Siri frequently collaborates with organizations ranging from start-ups to Fortune 500 companies and leading professional service firms in order to close gender gaps. Siri’s work regularly appears in leading media outlets including Harvard Business Review, The New York Times, BBC, Fast Company, and Forbes, and she has spoken on gender equality at hundreds of large events around the world. Siri is the coauthor, with Iris Bohnet, of Make Work Fair: Data-Driven Design for Real Results (HarperCollins, 2025). She has an MBA from Harvard Business School, a Master in Public Policy from Harvard Kennedy School, and a BA in Chemistry and Physics from Harvard College.
BOOK DESCRIPTION
Two leading gender experts and Harvard researchers reveal a new paradigm for fairness at work and offer professionals at every level, in any kind of organization, immediate, proven, and evidence-based ways to do their everyday work better and smarter—and more fairly.
To make organizations more fair, many well-meaning individuals and companies invest their time and resources in diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. But because inequity is built into the structures, processes, and environments of our workplaces, adding these programs has been ineffective and often becomes a burden passed off to the individuals they are meant to help.
In Make Work Fair, behavioral scientist and author of What Works Iris Bohnet and gender expert Siri Chilazi offer data-backed, actionable solutions that build fairness into the very fabric of the workplace. Their methods—tested at many organizations, and grounded in data proven to work in the real world—help us make fairer, and simply better, decisions. Using their three-part framework, employees at all levels can embed fairness into their everyday practices.
Believing in equal opportunity is essential—but it isn’t enough. Offering an evidence-based blueprint, Make Work Fair shows you how to make it a reality, no matter your role, seniority, responsibilities, or where you are in the world.
Behind the Book is brought to you by vlog Library & Research Services, in collaboration with the Office of Communications & Public Affairs. If you have any requests, comments or suggestions, please contact us.
Ros Atkins: So join me, Ros Atkins, for Outside Source, Monday to Thursday from 18 GMT on BBC World News.
Alessandra Seiter, narrator: In 2016, Ros Atkins had been working at the BBC for nearly two decades. He had a nightly prime time news program, had won a few awards, and was by all accounts a successful journalist. But he was noticing a problem. He wanted to ensure his journalism featured a wide array of perspectives, but he didn’t have any data on the demographics of his guests. So, for one month, Ros and his producers collected that data themselves, tallying the genders of guests after every show. The results were striking. Only 39% of the featured guests were women. Ros and his team immediately set the goal of achieving gender balance. Soon, their approach spread to other BBC news shows and led to more equitable coverage for all genders across the network.
AS: Ros had a few key things to make his program fair for his guests and his viewers. He used data to motivate action. He set a clear goal to give women experts equal airtime. And he built a work environment where gender parity was simply the normal thing to do. These data-driven, evidence-based workplace practices are the focus of a new book by Iris Bohnet and Siri Chilazi of Harvard Kennedy School. On this episode of Behind the Book, we speak with Bohnet and Chilazi about their latest book Make Work Fair: Data Driven Design for Real Results.
AS: Bohnet and Chilazi have been studying how to make workplaces more equitable for years. Their book draws on research with local governments in India and multinationals in Sweden; platforms created in Australia and Colombia, including by vlog graduates Kate Glazebrook and Mia Perdomo. And it draws on case studies featuring change-makers like Oona King in the tech sector and Jon Iino in the legal sector. The two authors argue that workplace training programs around diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, haven’t achieved their desired effect in producing equal opportunity to all workers.
Siri Chilazi: The things that we’re doing now are not working, certainly not working as well and as quickly as they should. For all the talk, the hours spent on trainings, the conversation, the public engagement; we’re seeing very little real results. Part of the reason why we’re a little bit stuck or not moving forward as quickly as we should be, is we’ve been spending our time and effort doing the wrong things. While things like training programs are popular and are often considered best practice, they are not based on the best evidence of what works and what doesn’t. And similarly, expecting a couple of people in a large organization of hundreds or thousands of hundreds of thousands to be able to fix fairness for everyone just doesn’t happen.
AS: Bohnet and Chilazi think one of the biggest reasons DEI trainings haven’t succeeded is that they focus on changing people’s beliefs rather than their behaviors.
Iris Bohnet: Behavior change is important to us for at least two reasons. The first one is that it’s in fact hard to change minds. It’s hard to change these deeply held values our beliefs, our attitudes. The second reason is that our virtuous intentions do not always translate into actions.
AS: Instead, Bohnet and Chilazi have found that the most effective way that workplaces can make real change for their employees is through structural rather than individual change, where fairness gets baked into everything a workplace does.
IB: That includes how we hire, how we promote, how we do performance appraisals, but also how we organize our meetings, how inclusive our meetings are, how we organize our work.
SC: So the core of the paradigm shift that we’re proposing with this book is that organizations need to start approaching fairness exactly the same way they approach their other core priorities with the same seriousness and using the same tools with all of their recommendations.
AS: Bohnet and Chilazi stressed the importance of using strategies that have been carefully researched and tested.
SC: How do we know if something actually works? This is where we turn to science specifically randomized controlled trials that are considered to be the gold standard method of determining what the effect of an intervention is.
AS: For example, in 2017, the New York City Fire Department was interested in attracting more women, Black and Hispanic job applicants. Typically, FDNY candidates are asked to take a civil service exam, which has a $30 fee. So FDNY conducted a randomized controlled trial in which some applicants had this fee waived while others were still asked to pay it.
IB: Removing the hurdle increased the fraction of people who applied dramatically, particularly from people who were into additionally in the work force, and in this case, that was women and Black Americans.
AS: Bohnet and Chilazi argue that removing barriers is an important driver of fairness, even long after an employee has been hired. They encourage employers to move from a focus on where and how long people work to what people actually do. This shift, according to Bohnet and Chilazi, can allow employees with disabilities, caregiving responsibilities and even long commutes to thrive at work, with no negative effects and even positive effects on their employers. For example, when the US Patent and Trademark Office allowed employees to work from anywhere four days a week, the number of patents they examined increased by 4.4%.
IB: Good organizational culture starts with fair processes. It includes work arrangements. Sometimes they’re formal, sometimes they’re informal. Sometimes people have no control over their time. They have no control over how they will work when they will work next week. There’s no flexibility in the system. So again, a big factor in how employees perceive the culture to be.
AS: The book is Make Work Fair: Data-Driven Design for Real Results. It’s written by Iris Bohnet, Albert Pratt Professor of Business and Government and co-director of the Women and Public Policy Program at Harvard Kennedy School, and by Siri Chilazi, senior researcher at the Women in Public Policy program. It’s published by HarperCollins. This has been Behind the Book, a production of library and research services at Harvard Kennedy School. Find past and future episodes of Behind the Book by subscribing to Harvard Kennedy School on YouTube, subscribing to our newsletter, and visiting our website.