Kelly talks about workplace fairness with Harvard’s Siri Chilazi who co-wrote the book “Make Work Fair: Data-Driven Design for Real Results” with Iris Bohnet. 

There’s a great term you introduce us to: strategic incompetence. 

“You know, I think I can’t take credit. I think my co-author Iris and I actually saw that term somewhere. It’s this idea that sometimes people when they don’t want to do something, they claim to be so incompetent that it would actually serve everybody else’s interest if someone else did it. ‘I could cook dinner, but, goodness, I’m not so good at it.’ ‘If you make it, it’ll taste so much more delicious.’ Or, ‘Yes, I could take a stab at the meeting notes, but really I’m so bad at transcribing in the moment it would be so much better for you to take them.’ That’s strategic incompetence.” 

You show in the book that we have systems and designs that are not only unfair, but unsafe. Tell us about Astrid Linder and how she helped to fix an unfair design. 

“Astrid is very special. She’s a Swedish engineer. She’s the Research Director of Traffic Safety at the Swedish National Institute of Road Safety. Her job in her own description is to keep people in cars as safe as possible in Sweden. But as we know, a lot of regulations and things are actually global. And one of the things Astrid came across a decade ago was that there were no crash test dummies that were based on a human female’s body. All the crash test dummies that were in use around the world to help crash safety, test cars and ensure that cars indeed keep their occupants safe, were based on the average male body: shape, size, weight, distribution, mass, distribution, and all these other biological factors. And it turns out that there are some important differences on average between biological males and biological females, they turn out to matter a lot for traffic safety.” 

Another term you introduce us to is ‘twocanism.’ Can you explain what that is? 

“Yes, twocanism. That’s a term by our colleague, Edward Chang, a professor at Harvard Business School. He and his colleagues did this study looking at the composition of corporate boards. Among the largest, you know, 1,000-ish companies, and what they found was that boards with exactly 2 female board members were statistically overrepresented. So, regardless of the size of the board, because it does vary, the average is about 9 or 10 board members. But you know some boards are 6 people. Some boards are 13 or 17 people, and yet there was a statistical overrepresentation of these boards that had 2 women exactly, and the rest men.”