We diagnosed the barriers holding back women's access to, and retention in, leadership positions, and designed behavioral interventions to address them.
Note: in Colombia, a "caja de compensación familiar" (family compensation fund) is a private entity that provides workers and their families with benefits such as subsidies, healthcare, education, and cultural services.
Despite efforts by governments and companies to close gender gaps, Colombian institutions still face underrepresentation of women in leadership positions.
As of 2020, women held an estimated 25% of executive positions in the country, and 33.5% of president and general-manager roles. Ten Colombian companies set out to increase the number of women applying for, and staying in, leadership roles.
Closing gender gaps is a challenge across multiple sectors of society, and it generally requires institutions to combine several complementary behavior-change measures.
Within the Women Leaders Program, we diagnosed the barriers limiting women's presence in leadership positions across ten Colombian organizations. After a thorough analysis of eight organizational processes, we used behavioral science principles to design four scalable behavioral interventions with immediate, lasting impact.
Literature review, administrative data analysis, and in-depth interviews to map the real barriers.
Talent attraction, hiring leaders, onboarding, development, performance evaluation, compensation, policy-driven retention, and women leaders' internal perceptions.
Four behavioral interventions designed around the processes where the diagnostic found the most friction.
We tested the solutions experimentally to tell what actually works from what only seems to work. Some findings turned out to be counterintuitive.
Building gender-gap metrics is critical at the moments of recruitment, promotion, turnover, climate, and job satisfaction. One counterintuitive finding that showed up across the board: informing people about a bias can, in some experiments, increase the very behavior associated with that bias. That's why campaigns communicating gender bias need to be designed carefully. By contrast, showing how the mind grows stronger when facing challenges (Growth Mindset) helps lower performers see mistakes as learning opportunities.
Behavioral science is fundamental to overcoming some of the gender barriers in corporate leadership.
The interventions we designed, grounded in scientific principles and experimentally validated, offer valuable insights for strategic decision-making in organizations. Beyond promoting gender equality, they can improve organizational efficiency and workplace climate.