Organizations with inclusive practices tend to outperform their peers on innovation, decision-making and employee engagement, and closing workforce gaps could add $28 trillion to global GDP. Yet many corporate agendas have shifted their focus.
As organizations move beyond DEI, what does the next generation of fair workplaces look like?
At Davos’ “Future of Inclusion” session, panelists argued that inclusion must endure political backlash but may need reframing. Iris Bohnet urged moving beyond the DEI label toward “fairness,” defined as “true equal opportunity for everyone,” and emphasized shifting from programs to systems. Bohnet cited evidence that bias remains measurable (e.g., identical teaching rated higher with a male voice) and warned recent setbacks, including disproportionate job losses for Black women in the US, while pointing to progress like the UK’s rise to 48% women on FTSE 350 boards.
Niall Ferguson supported equal opportunity but criticized DEI’s drift toward “equality of outcome,” arguing it produced “new kinds of discrimination” and weakened standards, especially in academia. He predicted a “pendulum swing” back to standardized tests and more rigorous skills assessment: “If you pursue talent…you’ll get a diverse outcome.”
Luana Marques Garcia Ozemela described Latin America’s structural gaps and iFood’s approach: embed “checks and balances” in pay, hiring, and performance. A simple guardrail—raising all offers to the job’s minimum band—reduced gender pay gaps and improved retention. The shared conclusion: “Talk less, do more,” measure outcomes, and redesign processes so fairness becomes “a way of doing things,” not a politicized program.
Again, thank you so much for being here with us tonight. This session will be televised, streamed. So, welcome to everyone watching, remotely. This is at the end of a very busy day here at the World Economic Forum. But a very important topic, a fascinating panel. And I thank Luana marquez Garcia, the chief sustainability officer at Ifood. Welcome. And thank you so much for for being here today. It is Barnett, the director of women and public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. It is, thank you. And Neil Ferguson, the senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. Thank you all so much. Just before we took the stage, we were talking about, how diversity, equity, inclusion, dei, the conversation around inclusion is no longer about does it matter or not, which I thought, I think for many years was not dominant narrative. How important is this for companies, for governments, for society, but whether it can survive the political moment and the ideological ideological weight of of, of the discussion that it brings. So, I want to start by that. Where are we in terms of the discussion around Dei and can it survive the moment? It is.
It must it must survive the moment. Whether we will call it Dei going forward, I don't know, like everything else that is in flux right now, dei is also in flux. And there's certainly things that we can learn from the past, things that haven't worked so well, shining the light on the work that we have done, and then kind of evolving it. So my own term that I like to use is fairness, where we create true equal opportunities, but true equal opportunity for everyone.
Fairness seems to be a much, more neutral, term, not neutral in a way that it's, you know, not not it loses strength, but that is not politically charged, Neil.
Well, I find it interesting that Iris spoke about equality of opportunity. I think, that has my full support that the thing that I think went wrong, in the last decade or so, slightly more was that, diversity, equity and inclusion programs started to become about equality of outcome. And, they ceased to be about creating equal opportunities. They started being about discrimination. And that I'm against. And I think that has generated the kind of political backlash that you alluded to, Enrique. And of course, what happens then is that the effort to achieve equality of opportunity gets impeded because it gets associated with the very much different objective of equality of of outcome. So I think the terminology of diversity, equity and inclusion has been to a large extent damaged, especially in the world that I live in. In the academic world, I think the really problematic part of it was the term equity, which started to be used by the progressive left to mean equality of outcome, and that is something that no society can prosper if it pursues. So we're seeing, I think, a necessary correction. The danger is that in the process of, correction, we end up with a politicization and then an overshoot, which I think would be undesirable. Just one final point. I'm the dead white male on this panel. You know, I'm the kind of, the the object, of a good deal of antagonism. And you might therefore expect me, to be somebody who resents the fact that universities or, for that matter, workplaces, have become more diverse in the sense of there being more women, in senior positions, more non-white people in senior positions. On the contrary, I think that's great. And I think any institution that I have been a part of has benefited from that. The company I started, Greenmantle, is a very diverse group of people in terms of, of gender and race, not to mention religion and other characteristics. It's unquestionably a more dynamic and creative group of people than if we were all people like me, dead white males. But the critical thing is that we didn't arrive at that, diversity, by, in any way rigging a competitive process to attract the most talented people. If you pursue talent and you're serious about it and you're rigorous about looking for talent, you'll get a diverse outcome the minute you start to rig the game in order to achieve specific quotas, whether it's in terms of gender or race or any other criteria. And I think you end up damaging your institution because you're sacrificing, the objective of excellence to other criteria which can't take precedence over excellence in any walk of life and certainly not in a, in academic life.
Luana, we're talking about a necessary correction. How do you prevent companies from falling into this pendulum logic where you're following the whims of the moment? And you go back and forth from a more fair environment, hiring practices, promotion practices, and your interaction with your clients and your community. You know, that's all the time pursuing what the public seems to want or where the the public conversation seems to be going.
Yeah, I think I'll pick from both of you. So in Latin America, gaps are pretty much, structural. So we also need to move from we believe that we need to move from diversity and inclusion as a politicized term to focusing on how do we change our system. So for me, fairness, besides being equal opportunity, is also, once you are in a corporate setting, what are the standards that we accept and that we do not accept in terms of, the operating model in the workplace? So in our case, we've moved from values based rhetoric to what is fairness for us? Do we want it because it's not the natural state of productive systems of corporations?
How so?
So if you think that hiring based policies today pretty much rely on what we call homophily or statistical discrimination, or that it perceives some individuals riskier, right, compared to others, not based on real performance, but based on prior judgments or comparisons. We say that there is an incorrect option there that is structurally embedded in the system. So for me, this is what needs to change. It's not having a beautiful DNI program that is can swing left and right, depending on the moment and on the political, on the geopolitics, on budget. You know, we need to embed mechanisms, checks and balances, guardrails for that matter. In order to say, where are we failing as a company? And we have done that in three aspects. I'm not going to extend too much myself here, but we have done in, in, in terms of, pay pay gap, we have identified where we were failing, were identified in hiring, and we identified in performance. So and and when we identify and we say leaders, and if one leader, one respected leader starts doing something about it, say, I'm not going to accept unfairness because I'm losing good people. I'm not building trust with my stakeholders. I am not developing a good product to my market because I do not reflect how my market thinks. If this one leader decides to do something about it, there is peer effects, there is social, you know, norms that are established and other leaders follow. So I think we we have to rapidly move away from the DNI way of doing things from the past. And I agree with you in some aspects. I do believe equality of outcomes that I think you might, consider the representation aspect as equality of outcomes as well. But that's the minimum. Just to give you an example, Brazil is an extreme, diverse country. If you look at 75% of Brazilian population is either brown, black or a woman as a company. If we do not reflect that level of diversity, we are not going to develop good products. We are not going to have the license to operate. So these are the things that for us, it's a business. Yeah. We don't have alternative. We have to do it. So otherwise we are going to we are doomed. So it's a long process. It's a journey. But if we do, if we don't want to bear the costs of not doing it, we must move and move fast.
And let me grant our discussion on data. What does the data say over the past five years about, you know, how the economic and professional gaps for underrepresented groups have actually evolved theories?
If I may, I'm actually going to take an even slightly longer perspective for a moment because, I think where we might disagree is that the system has been rigged for hundreds and hundreds of years. It's not that the system was rigged in the last ten years. We might have overdone it in some ways, and I'll talk about that, too. But we just have to acknowledge why it came about. I mean, the evidence, and that's where the data comes in is so overwhelming that, you know, gender is my particular expertise. So let me start with gender. But I could also talk about race, about religion, about disability, about other pieces of your background. If that appeared on your resume and you applied for a job, and you were one of those underrepresented members of a group with everything else identical, you were less likely to be invited to an interview. Just to give you one example of studies. But there are many, many, many more. You know, talking about my own profession in academia, during Covid, we were able to do some interesting experiments where people, of course, were teaching remotely, and then you could teach exactly the same material. But in one case, have a woman narrate the material, in another case, have a male voice narrative material, and students like the male professor better. They think he's more competent and also more fun, doing exactly the same thing. So I think, you know, we just have to go back for a moment to where we were, 20 years ago, even ten years ago, where? Because when I say the system was rigged, I don't actually mean we were sitting there plotting and rigging the system. I mean, this is how our minds work, that we don't associate engineering with women. We don't associate nursing with men. So male nurses have a harder time being respected and appreciated. Women engineers have a harder time being appreciated or even selected. So I think that's where we started. And then, you know, dei came about and interestingly enough, I became interested in the topic, mostly because I thought many of the things that we were doing were actually to focus on programs. So I'm so happy by what you just said. Programs as in diversity training and employee resource group, a leadership group for somebody. And then when we tested those in randomized controlled trials, they had no impact. It's incredibly hard to change mindsets. So diversity training kind of wasn't really working. So I became interested to say, well, what is working? And basically that's what you said. You have to embed it in your systems. You have to de-bias how you hire, how you promote, how you do performance appraisals. So very, very quickly to your last question, what has happened most recently? You know, the good and the bad. Let me maybe do the bad first and then end with the good. Two examples. One is from where I live now, the United States. I'm Swiss, originally, women of color, particularly black women, have over proportionally lost jobs in the last year. That's a significant change. And that's due to a number of factors. Partly they were overrepresented in particularly vulnerable sectors, and that includes the public sector. So that's a very worrisome development. But let me give you a very positive example also on gender. United Kingdom in 2011 set itself a goal, wasn't a quota, but a goal to have 25% women, represented in their FTSE 100 boards. So these are the 100 biggest companies. And it turned out to be a coalition across sectors, public sector, private sector, the media, NGOs, everyone. They're now at 48% women on the FTSE 350. So it first worked for the FTSE 100. The biggest companies now it's we're down to the FTSE 350. And so, so you know so so both are happening and I think that's just where we are in the world that generally we see lots of polarization, including in the developments, on gender, more generally, certainly.
Neal, you have argued that in some contexts, like you said at the beginning, Dei went too far, and produced new forms of unfairness and institutional rigidity. What is the strongest version of that, of that critique that, that proponents of, of fairness and Dei should take seriously?
Well, first, let me put my historian's hat on and agree with something Iris said. If one goes back in time, 200 years, discrimination was, really quite a complex thing. It didn't just discriminate against women, or people of color, the discrimination system discriminated against people who were, in the working class, people who were Roman Catholics, people who were Jews. I could go on. And so the history of the period, really, since the late 18th century until now has been, a history of of the erosion of hereditary status, diminution of the kind of, exclusion that characterized the pre-modern world. And that's good because from a societal point of view, a talent is distributed, really quite randomly through the population. And so if a society is excluding everybody except the people, the males from certain landowning families, the society is just excluding enormous amounts of talent and guaranteeing that mediocre people get into positions, often of considerable power. So this is great. We find ourselves in a society which is much more open to to talent, regardless of its gender or race or its religion of its class, because we mustn't lose sight of that, and because of the way that talent is distributed, an organization that is colorblind, that is not prejudiced in favor of men, that is, interested in the social origins of candidates, is more likely to get the most talented people. And this was the sort of trend towards what was called, for a time, meritocracy, what went wrong. And I think it became obvious in the mid 20 tens was that in their efforts to try to redress past, discrimination, the proponents of Dei introduced new kinds of discrimination, and this is now well documented, so that it became more or less hopeless for male white candidates to apply for a whole raft of positions in the academy. It was more or less overt. There was also overt political discrimination where conservatives wouldn't get hired. This kind of discrimination became rampant in the elite universities, and in ways that were indefensible on any basis. Obviously, two wrongs don't make a right. New wave of discrimination in the name of, say, anti-racism isn't something to celebrate. Discrimination is discrimination. There were all kinds of unintended consequences. If you pursue as a conscious goal, having more people of color and make that the criterion pigmentation, the beneficiaries may very well be people from highly elite backgrounds. In, say, India, you don't actually redress any historical wrong by doing that. So what happened was not only new forms of discrimination were brought in on the basis of Dei, but also we ended up with at the wrong people being hired, and there were appreciable impacts on the quality of the work that was done. This led to all kinds of really major problems, in the Academy, rampant plagiarism being one of many symptoms. The publication of absolutely bogus research in phony journals. What my friend Peter Bogosian called the grievance studies industry. And so one can't defend that dilution of of academic standards in a university. The lesson I learned observing these processes at work was that once institutions, particularly academic ones, but I think it's also true of commercial institutions. Once they start making decisions about hiring or admissions of university and promotion on criteria other than excellence, once they start saying, well, obviously X is the is the strongest candidate, but he's a white guy. We we're not hiring white guys anymore. That's that's doubly wrong. It's wrong because it's discrimination and it's wrong because you're about to have a weaker candidate as a matter of choice. So this, I think, explains a lot of the alienation and resentment that began to develop over the past decade as it became more and more obvious that diversity, equity and inclusion actually stood for the very opposite of those words. What was arrived at was a homogeneity of outlook. The discrimination was partly political, not diversity of outlook. You had diversity of pigmentation, certainly, but you did not have diversity of outlook. In fact, you ended up in a situation where an elite university known to us both was essentially 95% liberal or progressive. The last conservative could have turned out the lights a couple of years ago. The you ended up not with equity, but a whole series of meaningful injustices. Were hard work and talent were not rewarded. They were, in effect, punished. And as for inclusion, the whole goal appeared to be the exclusion of certain, identified groups. Now, all of that was bad in itself. I believe it had a perceptible negative impact on the performance of the institution, but I think it also generated the backlash. Yes. And that that was where we began our conversation. The backlash against Dei has been able to mobilize a substantial amount of support, not least for those who felt that they had lost out. And I'm afraid about where that can lead. In fact, it's already led to tremendously, I think, over, reaching efforts by the federal government in the United States to affect the ways in which institutions like Harvard are run. So it not only was a bad strategy in terms of outcomes, it's actually backfired in ways that I think ultimately will be net negative. Last, last thing I'll say, Roland Fryer is an old friend of mine. Roland is a very interesting case because not only is he an African American, but he was really born on the wrong side of the tracks. I mean, he was in no way from a privileged background. And he made it to the commanding heights of the economics profession because he has a brilliant mind, brilliant and original mind that they just happened to discover when he was on a football team in a state college in Texas. And Roland has done some pioneering work on how to do it right. And his point is that if you're doing it right, you will go out into the lower reaches of society, to the people in the bottom quintile of the income distribution who are in a lousy schools, and you will find the talent there. It's much harder work than doing admissions. The conventional way will have some legacies here, some affirmative action candidates here, and the people who did well in school here. The hard thing is to find the talent in the rough. But as Roland says, if you're systematic about it and you also can account for the fact that those people won't have had such good school educations, you will get the most talented workforce. And lo and behold, when you step back and look at it, it will not be an all white, all male, all middle class workforce. On the contrary, I think that's the strongest argument I can make for real diversity. But you've got to prioritize talent. You've got to prioritize industry. I mean, people have to be hard working as well as smart. You've got to prioritize the things that an organization needs. If you prioritize those things and do it right, then you will end up with diversity.
And I wonder if this backlash, this backfiring of Dei extends to what we call the global South, both of us being from Latin America. Or is this something that's just being felt in the US mostly, and European societies?
I think the rhetoric is stronger. In the US and in the Western world, in Latin America, obviously it increased tensions and it increased the disbelief. I think there was a resurgence of this reverse discrimination argument, which I don't buy it because 25% of the population retains 90% of the wealth. So, opening space for the mass, 75% of the people access quality public free education is the minimum that we can do in order not to, destroy growth. Because if you lock in talent, lock out talent is the countries that are losing the most is the companies that are losing the most. So I think in terms of the backlash, I it led us as well to, rethink. We used to make an, big beautiful discourses around our huge commitments to, representation of women, of Afro descendants, both in the overall body of our 8000 employees, but also in our leadership. We are quite proud that we achieved 41% of women in leadership already, and 45 in the whole company. We still have a road with, Afro descendants in leadership, which is about 25%. But we used to talk only about the commitments, commitments we want to reach at this point, because it's the right thing to do, because we are heroes. Right? And we realized and people will not tell you this. They felt maybe like you feel right in a way that we are doing. Affirmative. Affirmative. We call it vacancies, right. Reserving positions. So and I think that happened in the past, then the wave of George Floyd gave allowance for that to flow. But then there was a new wave of the backlash that made us rethink. We still have some affirmative actions, but we moved from specific programs to more embedded mechanisms. Let me give you an example.
Please.
In hiring. Right. We knew we're losing talented women because of pay gap. Once they came into the company, they realized they were earning less. They would leave. And we like, if we want fairness, we should study it, diagnose it, measure it, and devise a plan to address it. Right. So there was a feeling of unfairness of the women who were leaving the company. So we went into investigate and we found out that actually this was a carry over gap from the market, because the markets in Brazil, in general, reward women less for the education and talents and experiences. So what we decided to do, what is the mechanism we are going to do here? No program mechanism we are going to have practically, I don't use the word policy because we didn't transform into a, you know, a stack of paper on the wall. We just did it and everybody said, this is amazing. We have to always do it. We said whenever. And it's so simple. Whenever a person, it doesn't matter if it's a woman, a black person, a male, a white man, everyone, it's not there. If they are coming, we are going to pay. If they they want less than the minimum that we pay for that grade level, we are going to top up and make them enter in the lowest. In the lowest bracket, women were coming way below 30 to 40% below the lowest bracket threshold of so, and that eliminated the pay gap with time. And that also improved retention. So I think, you know, there are some simple things we didn't need to, speak much about it. We just got one leader. Yeah. Our CTO to say, no, we are going to do this. And that also generated a ripple effect. So that's the power of, behavioral science as well in the sense in, in transforming the workplace with mechanisms that will stay, will be sustained over time.
And have a measurable result. We have about a minute left to go, but I just don't want to say thank you without opening up the floor to at least one question from our audience. If anybody wants to to ask something, please raise your hand. And I'm more than happy to lend you the microphone. In the more than 50s we have left. Anybody? Well, please, over here, if you don't mind standing up and introducing yourself. And if if it's not too much trouble, be brief, because we have a minute left. Thank you so much.
It's it's actually 15 minutes left because we had a problem in the counter, but it was 45 minutes, so.
Oh, okay. Wonderful. Yeah. So.
.
So yeah. You can take 15 minutes for your question. I'm kidding. I'm sorry. I just saw the time expired, so I was worried.
Brazilian as well. I am from a company called todas Group. It works for their in Brazil. And one of the things that we found out is that most a lot of the questions are not only the system are women's. We don't are prepared. We don't feel prepared in a lot of works. We don't put ourselves out there in some positions, as you just said, about the salary that. So we accept a less salary than men. We could not put ourselves out there. So what the approach that we have there is an actual organization, profit organization. We, we help with, education. And what do you think is the problem in ourselves as women, the mindset that you have to change in order to put ourselves out there.
If you don't.
Mind, I'm happy to jump in on that one. So women sadly aren't wrong because there is social backlash against assertive women. It's not that women don't like to negotiate. I've been teaching negotiation and game theory for a very, very long time. It's not that women don't like to do that, but they've learned that if you stick your head out too much, it will be chopped off. And so it's a very good question, but one way to counter what's happening, for example, is something I think that's also important to talk about when we talk about backlash, that in about half of the states in the United States and we now have pay transparency, some version of pay transparency, different states have, you know, have different institutional mechanisms to make this happen, which helps decrease the gender pay gap. So if women know more, if we decrease ambiguity, if women are entitled to ask, then they will ask more. And that's so I'm still turning it on the system now. It doesn't hurt if we help women navigate the system more effectively, but more importantly, we have to change the system so that women aren't punished for counter neurotypical behavior. And this is not about women. It's the counter stereotypical behavior that we're not used to.
Wonderful. Anyone else? Nope. Over here. Thank you so much.
Hi, my name is Janet. I guess what we've talked about and apologies, I was a little bit late coming in, but maybe if I could ask you to forecast 12 months, two years into the future with all of the uncertainty that's that's happening, what do you think inclusion will look like? How will it be defined? What will be the outcomes? How will we measure it? Who will be most successful?
I think that's a great question.
To ask all of them. By the.
Way.
If everyone can chime in, go ahead Neil.
It's dangerous and difficult to make predictions, especially about the future. As Yogi Berra famously said, but I think we can already see a pendulum swinging happening and that that will continue. And that pendulum is the swing back to standardized tests. Because one thing that really moved the world away from hereditary privilege towards meritocracy was the realization that standardized tests, it would be, pretty clear, where the talent was and they couldn't be rigged. So standardized tests were an extraordinarily important source of social mobility. Once they were introduced, the backlash against them was part of Di, which was bad. The argument that, well, no, we shouldn't really pay attention to SAT scores because actually, they have embedded, privilege, they serve the patriarchy, etc.. That was a terrible argument because what happened was by getting rid of standardized tests, a whole bunch of universities fell back on much less fair methods of making decisions. What's interesting about admissions to university is that it's an incredibly important gateway. In many ways. It's the most important social gateway in our society today. The decision about whether you go to college or not has enormous consequences in terms of outcomes. Every outcome in terms of life expectancy in the United States, you name it in terms of income, it's a big deal. So this is a very, very important thing. If we start getting it wrong. My observation is that the experiment with doing without SATs was an unmitigated disaster in the University of California system. Everybody is quietly returning to the tests. Are the tests perfect? No. Are they nevertheless necessary? Yes. I have been involved in a university in Austin, the University of Austin, that ran an experiment this year where we simply got rid of everything else except standardized tests. We said we won't. We don't want an essay saying that you're going to save the world and win an Oscar and, you know, solve.
World.
And create world peace. We said we simply will look at your SAT scores, and if the score is high, we will automatically admit you. That I think has proved already a successful exercise. And it didn't produce a monochrome all male class, or for that matter, the all Asian class that some people predicted we would get. Because of course, we now have a situation in the US where Asian students outperform in SATs. It used to be Jewish students. No, it didn't have that effect at all. So I think I would predict a return, not only a return to standardized tests, but much more effort to think about how we test AI makes this, possible. More and more tech companies are doing their own quite sophisticated testing at hiring. That's the trend that I, I, I'm really supportive of because I think that will produce the best outcomes, not just in terms of the quality of people who get admitted, but I think it will also end up being fair, and the outcomes will be will be surprisingly diverse. To the skeptics, that's already obvious to us.
Yeah, I think I will not predict what the future will look like. I will perhaps share what I don't want the future to look like. And and going back to the issue of unfairness, right. And I bring an example from a development economist called Hirschman, who has a theory of the tunnel effect and the tunnel effect. Simply explain how indignation, and resignation can rise from a feeling of unfairness. Right. It just two lanes, one lane start going, people keeps the hopes up, but then they realize that the lane doesn't move as fast, and suddenly that becomes a sense of inequality, of injustice, of unfairness. And I think having unfairness embedded in our structures or as the not embedded, but as the norm, right? As the natural, the neutral state of doing nothing can generate this type of unrest. Gen Z today does not want to stay in companies that are not diverse and who do not, promote, give space and include the voices of everybody. So if companies today want to have a slim chance of actually attracting and retaining the Gen Z in the workforce in the next 18 months, we have to do something much more intentional. Both the people who work with diversity and inclusion, to look more towards how can I be very laser focused on the mechanisms that are failing and creating this sense of injustice and even injustice in outcomes, as we see structurally and for the leaders, you know, bring up and we don't believe as DNI, as a single department, we we believe as DNI, as the the fabric and the job of everybody and fairness. So and for leaders is to really challenge themselves and look at themselves on how can I design smart mechanisms like what you're explaining, if that really standardized scores can really include everyone and give a chance for everybody to flourish. And it's not about just entering, it's about maintaining. And we saw that in real life. If you don't have metrics, if you don't have a strategic, panels with metrics and, and follow through on those metrics, diversity and inclusion is going to derail because it's not the natural state of things. So the I think what I perhaps don't want to see is a world where things stay as they are right now. And I want to see many more people reading Iris book, about how we can actually use behavioral science. How can we embed fairness in, in, in the workplace?
Yeah. If you don't mind, I want to hear from you and your prediction, and let's do it in a sort of 35,000ft perspective. And we'll close the session with that. If you had the opportunity to advise one of the CEOs of the tech companies, the artificial intelligence companies that dominate the conversation in in Davos today, what should be the one thing they should stop doing when they're in terms of thinking about Dei and fairness and the one thing they should start doing right away?
Okay. I will answer your question, but I'm going to violate the rule for just one second, because while this is not a session on the standardized test and not a session about the United States, I do want to tell you about a study that one of my doctoral students did, which was, in fact, about the standardized tests used in the United States. And it has been replicated in Chile. So it's not just probably your country has some sort of entry test into universities as well. And the answer has to be we have to make them better. We have to make them fairer. Right? I'm not arguing for doing away with them, but what she in fact found is that many of these tests have a feature where if you don't know the answer, you can guess. In fact, your tutor teaches you what's the optimal strategy to guess? At which point is it better not to answer and skip the question? When should you guess? Now? Guess what? This goes back to your question earlier. Women are slightly more risk averse than men, so women used to guess less. And so that's exactly what she showed that knowing exactly the same thing women did worse on this test because they skipped the question rather than guessing. Now, what did the SAT to do at the time? That was in 2016. They actually changed the test format. They removed the penalty from wrong answers, at which point the criticism was, oh my God, you are inviting wild guessing. And then the chair, Dave Coleman of the College Board, which designs this test, said, well, we have been inviting guessing by 50% of the population for about 100 years. It's now time to make this legal for everyone. This was replicated the study in Chile, Chile very similar results. It closed the gender gap because of the guessing piece. Right. So we have to scrutinize every process, every feature, every, you know, every everything we do. So now that answers your question. So I just quickly had to talk about the.
It's a great point.
It is a very imperfect thing. What I'm interested in looking ahead is how can we get better testing and not just test for certain things, like being able to write a good sentence or do math? You know, forum needs to hire people who have grit, who've got stamina. Do we do we test for that? No we don't. So we need to get much, much smarter looking for all the different kinds of talent that we want. And of course, we also need to screen out bluffers because a test that rewards rampant bluffers, which I've no doubt the S.A.T. does. I mean, we don't want to hire too many people who just bluff their way through life. So let's get better tests. But let's have tests. That's the only way to be fair.
I'm sorry, I'm sorry. So now I'm going to quickly say so. Fairness is not a program, but a way of doing things. That is my first thing that organizations should do. Less of. Talk less, do more. This is not your celebrating this day, that day, having a program here, having this little group there. It is a way of doing things. There is no meritocracy without fairness. You have to equalize the playing field before people can compete fairly. And that of course, has lots of implications. And now this is your question. What should companies do? They should use data they should measure, which is a risky thing right now, particularly in the United States, very different in Europe, very different Latin America, very different in Asia was just in India. They measure everything. It was really very, very, for me, very uplifting to see. But, you know, if you don't, it's not just that what you what does what you don't measure doesn't count. It's also what you don't measure, you can't fix. So do measure. Use data to inform your choices. Evaluate the processes that you're using, how you hire exactly what you're doing. I mean learn, learn from you. You know, learn from, you know, what's the best hiring mechanism and very encouraged by the movement, by the way, that is, as far as I can tell, actually quite broad ideologically on skills based hiring. Right? We want people who have the competencies to do the job. We don't need to know where they come from, where they went to school, what they look like, etc. we want them to do the job. And so that's what I would say. Use your data and change your processes, hiring, promotion, performance appraisals, how you run your meeting, how you support people, how you reward people, and then make work fair.
Well.
That's the last word. This year's theme at Davos is the spirit of dialogue. And I see that as an aspiration, certainly at a time where dialogue seems to be so fractured. But, I'm glad that this is part of the, of the, of the program. I'm glad that we're having the discussions others are avoiding. And I think that's the only way to make these conversations matter, to not just scratch the surface, but actually bring thought and argument and data and experience to, to to the conversation. So I appreciate everyone. Luana Neil, thank you so much. Thank you. And thank you so much for giving me this.