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DOCTOR’S CORNER
GENDER
EQUALITY
by Allen Weiss, MD, MBA, FACP, FACR
President and CEO, NCH Healthcare System
A merica has more women (162 million) than men (157
million) according to the 2014 census. How can we best
harness the talent, intelligence, skill, competence, and
compassion of that larger group?
Gender inequality is being actively discussed in many ways. A
famous bias was recently recounted in a Harvard Business Review
article by Gardiner Morse concerning the lack of female musicians
in prestigious orchestras in the 1970s. At that time there were
fewer than 10 percent women. By having the auditioning musicians
behind a curtain (thus hiding their gender), the number of women
rose to 40 percent. And the quality of the orchestras improved as
nearly twice as many people competed fairly for places.
We can’t always have such simple and elegant solutions but we
should try to at least recognize our innate prejudices. Much also has
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been written about the hiring process. Can we blind applications as
to age, sex, and ethnicity to create better and fairer comparisons? For
instance, current software easily allows for redacting information
which might give clues and inadvertently feed into innate prejudice.
Unfortunately you just can’t outlaw bias, according to two
professors of sociology, Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev—one
from Harvard and the other from Tel Aviv University, respectively.
Even the names of these two professors and universities brings to
mind different images and pre-formed attitudes.
Different words also can be encouraging or discouraging
to either gender. “Nurturing, supportive, understanding and
compassionate,” are all friendly to females but less so to males.
Conversely, “competitive, assertive, forceful, and dynamic” all seem
to imply masculinity.
Life in Naples | December 2016