Dismantle Career Roadblocks for More Equitable Outcomes

Even organizations that specifically focus on advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) struggle with improving representation in a sustainable way. Women and people of color continue to face obstacles advancing to more senior roles and are frequently not positioned to succeed in the same ways as their White male counterparts.

That was the message from Haig R. Nalbantian, cofounder and coleader of the Workforce Sciences Institute, during Work/23, an MIT Sloan Management Review symposium held in May 2023. Nalbantian helps organizations apply evidence-based, empirical methods to strengthen their DEI efforts and retention strategies and asserts that “the surging use of analytics in the HR domain to inform work and workforce management” is a big part of the future of work.

While talent and drive are important in shaping careers, situational factors profoundly affect what happens to employees at work. They include employees’ access to “accelerator” roles, such as customer-facing jobs; how employees navigate flexible work arrangements, such as part-time status; and employees’ reporting relationships, such as whether they report to higher-level or high-performing supervisors. Nalbantian noted that these easy-to-identify circumstances, which he called explained differences, are prevalent.

Many organizations also have pervasive and sizable unexplained disparities regarding who gets chosen for promotions. Nalbantian said that in both his own studies and others, “women are actually more likely to be highly rated” by their managers at elite, large employers — all things being equal — “but in the majority of companies, they’re less likely to be promoted.”

He said it is critical that companies address the explained differences and explore the unexplained disparities.

Nalbantian wasn’t able to get to all of the questions from attendees during the event, so he answers some of them below. (Questions and answers have been lightly edited for clarity.)

Does your research address intersectionality in its analysis? You talked about women and people of color, but what about women of color and other people with multiple intersecting minority identities?

In many of the client cases covered in my study, we did indeed examine intersectionality directly. We’ve done this quite a bit in larger U.S.-based organizations that have adequate populations of these demographic groups for modeling purposes.

One of the areas of particular interest to client organizations is intersectionality with respect to reporting relationships. That is, do the specific demographics of one’s supervisor affect whether the employee is promoted, is highly rated, or gets higher pay increases? For example, do White male supervisors treat Black female reports worse than White male or White female reports? Do White female supervisors help the prospects of their female reports, regardless of color?

I can say that there are few regularities in these results — certainly far less than the results I’ve reported with respect to performance ratings, roles, supervisor performance and level, and flexible working.

Has this research mapped across socioeconomic status as an intersectional influence?

Unfortunately, we’ve had much more limited data on socioeconomic factors, in part because most of our clients focus these studies on their salaried populations, ignoring their hourly workers. This concerns me, as it reveals a tendency to discount front-line workers. I try to remind organizations that what happens in their front-line ranks can have a major impact on business results. I’ve seen and documented this in client assignments. Still, the tendency of organizations is to prioritize their salaried employees — professionals, managers, and executives.

You mentioned that being younger than comparable peers is an attribute favorable to success. Can you elaborate more on what your studies have found regarding age inequalities?

The negative impact of age is close to universal among our analytical findings with client organizations. The simple fact is that once an employee gets beyond the median age of their cohort, all things turn negative: They’re less likely to be promoted, they’re less likely to receive a high performance rating, and their pay growth levels off or declines.

The one positive is that there is less turnover with older employees, often substantially less. Indeed, it may be that it is precisely because older employees tend to stay that employers don’t feel the need to promote, pay, or recognize them in the same way as they do their younger employees. The latter have more outside opportunities, so they may need to be constantly wooed.

These negative signals about older workers can be very misleading. We often find that groups with more older workers actually outperform those with more younger workers. There’s a discordance between what’s found at the individual level compared with the group or organizational level.

This suggests that the productivity of older workers shows up not in their own measures of individual performance but in the performance of those with whom they work. We call this a spillover effect. So, for example, if older workers are less likely to turn over, they can cause their younger colleagues to follow suit, thereby bringing more stability to their work groups and making them more productive. For more evidence about the productivity of older workers, see the recent study I conducted with Richard A. Guzzo and Nicholas L. Anderson, which we discuss in the article “Age, Experience, and Business Performance: A Meta-Analysis of Work Unit-Level Effects” in the journal Work, Aging and Retirement.

How can organizations ensure that age diversity and inclusion are integrated into their equity and diversity initiatives?

Again, it is a common view among business leaders that older workers are less productive. And because they tend to cost more, they are viewed more as a liability than an asset, despite significant evidence to the contrary. For some reason that I find hard to explain, combating ageism is not high on the DEI agenda, certainly not as compared with efforts to address gender and racial inequity. I fault the DEI community for not being more aggressive on this front.

The aging workforce is a fact of life almost everywhere. Organizations that don’t deal effectively with the repercussions of this secular trend and ensure that they are managing their older workers effectively run the risk of undermining organizational performance. In effect, they may make their unfounded stereotypes a self-fulfilling outcome.

I always urge my clients to undertake the kind of disciplined diagnostic work to evaluate the realities of their own workforce — to determine whether spillover effects are indeed at work in their organization, and to respond accordingly. Through this process, many of them will find that they have an asset to protect rather than a liability to discard.

Is there any analysis done on the correlation between company performance or share price and the situations demonstrated by the survey?

I’ve undertaken client studies in which we link workforce characteristics and management practices to various business outcomes, including profitability, financial and operational productivity, revenue growth, and customer retention, among others. Our results have been mixed. In some, we’ve seen that greater diversity in work group or unit composition improves business performance; in others, we’ve found no effect or statistically negligible results. The most robust review and synthesis of the results of these studies is the meta-analysis of the effects of age and tenure noted above. That study did not focus on the effects of race and gender.

What concrete steps can organizations take to battle these biases?

My article in the summer 2023 issue of MIT Sloan Management Review, “Opening Access to the Fast Track for Career Equity,” speaks directly to this question. I explain how organizations can use the results of this kind of modeling to help eliminate or reduce the influence of demographics on how well employees are positioned to succeed at work. The reality is that all too often, situational factors inordinately affect the ability of employees to succeed and that women and people of color are situationally disadvantaged.

Employers who recognize that they are not positioning this talent to succeed can deploy an approach I call proactive career management to change this reality on the ground. This may involve getting more women and people of color into supervisory or other accelerator roles, changing reporting relationships, and neutralizing the negative effects of flexible working, among other things. I share a case study in my article to illustrate this approach in action.