Franco Uta Manios

What I want to do with you for the next 45 minutes or so, it is to talk a bit about Gender
Equality and not just about Gender Equality per se but really focused on What Works to close gender
gaps. You may be here because you care about this pyramid here, the lack of women on leadership
position and there's various versions of this pyramid that we could have up here from United States
but really from every country around the world, and yes, it is an issue that we have few women in
leadership position but I would want to suggest to you that you should really be here because
gender equality can actually be a matter of life and death.

The Economist a few years back entitle one of its magazines with “Gendercide”, Gendercide
stands for set selective abortion of girls and neglect during the first 5 years, the UN now estimates
that 200 Million of women and girls are missing around the world, 200 million is a big number, it is
about the number of women living in United States. But I don’t want to start on a sad note, but in
fact I start with this example to suggest to you that even a thorny topic such as this one that many
people think is too big to solve, we can do something, we can actually move the needle.

This is one of my favorite studies by Rob Jensen a professor at Wharton, he wanted

to go into India and understand whether by providing economic opportunity to women and girls we
might be able to change how parents see theirs daughters, or put differently, he asked the question
whether even the pores of the poor cares about the returns and investment, so what are the returns
on having a daughter could be increase; and what he did was he hired the firm which provided the
training for women to go and work in these call centers, and yes, he was interested in the question
of whether then women would go into work, but more importantly, he was interested in the
question, what do this affect how parents treat theirs daughters. That seeing a woman who has
economic opportunities all of the sudden changes how much money and time parents spend on
daughters, he founded that the few women who got jobs in call centers affected their parents and
girls, it was possible for themselves to increase the survival chances. That is why it should really care
about gender equality because it can be a matter of survival.

Let me take you back to this country and introduce you to Heidi Roizen, she is a venture
capitalist in Silicon Valley and a few years back one of my colleges wrote the case study on her. It is
an interested study because numbers years later we encounter the study again with the protagonist
being called Howard in fact some create professors, exchange the protagonist first name with the
male name and get half of the student of the case with the protagonist being called Howard and the
other half of student with the protagonist being called Heidi, and what they found was that students
evaluated Heidi ask equally competence in their jobs, but they did not like Heidi, they did not want
to work with Heidi and they did not want to hire of Heidi.

What Heidi encounter was unconscious bias, she does not look the part, and she does not
look like the typical venture capitalist in Silicon Valley and by violating this gender norms she ran
into social punishment. So why that is happening into our minds, let me show you this image here
and ask you to compare square A and B for me, I presume most of you see that they different and
square B is more lightly than A, but wait I cover that surrounding and I presume most of you now
see the same color; that is a trick of your mind to see what you want to see, that is the question to
you now, what are the patterns that you see in the world? This is happening with other types that
we may make, do we fall into the same pattern recognition stereotypes? Are we separating people
into boxes, putting a man in a venture capitalist position and a women in a kindergarten teacher?
Franco Uta Manios

An example how of bias can be this one which is very a creative invention by symphony
orchestras in this country, which took place in the 1970s, they realize that they had very few female
musicians, in fact about 5 to 8% and what they did was to introduce curtains and they made
musicians audition behind the screens, it turns out that the screen increases the likelihood that a
female musician advances to shoot two rounds by 50%.