How a Six-Month ‘Quota Hire’ Role Uncovered the Missing Ingredient in EDI: Fairness.

How a Six-Month ‘Quota Hire’ Role Uncovered the Missing Ingredient in EDI: Fairness.

Blog two of five, in a series by Dr Chrissi McCarthy.

Imagine being a fully qualified setting-out engineer and being told to sit at a desk for six months because your boss was worried about you being on site as a woman. That’s exactly what happened to me when I became a quota hire, and it taught me why fairness must come first in EDI.

This is the first of our monthly research to social cycle blogs, which aim to make academic research accessible by unpacking one paper a month over three blogs.

This month, we will examine what we found when researching over 700 people from three organisations about fairness.

Exploring the paper ‘Understanding Gender Equality Policy and Practice Gaps Through the Lens of Organisational Justice: Development of an Employee Alignment Model‘ – McCarthy, C., Barnard, S., Thomson, D. and Dainty, A., 2021

#OrganisationalJustice #EDI #Fairness

When Good Intentions Backfire

One of the things that I noticed when I worked in construction was not just the high level of inequality but also the fact that many of the measures taken to overcome that inequality made the situation worse. It’s important to note that although this blog uses examples from construction, I’ve seen the same things happen across every sector; construction does it bigger.

It’s important to say that these equality approaches had good intent; however, they resulted in unexpected fallout. For example, the ‘women in construction’ days they sent me on, asked me to provide the solutions or presented me as the problem to be fixed. On top of this, when I returned to site, I got grief for having a day off at the ‘the knitting club’, which put additional stress on me to prove my value. Another example is equality training, which, when focused on the law, was translated as a punishment to my peers. Colleagues told me they felt they had lost a day, and that day was all about giving me something more that they weren’t getting.

The most impactful was client equality targets on-site. I once got a job for a company, and I later found out it was because the client had equality targets to meet; that became a problem because my boss did not see women as capable engineers, so I was given the role but no responsibility. I just sat there doing data entry on the computer for six months, watching my career disappear.

Please note, none of this is supposition; everyone felt able to tell me exactly what was happening.

Why Fairness Wins

The important thing from all of this was that it made me realise that there was something else going on here. People I knew who were supportive of EDI in their personal lives were often the ones berating the equality work in the organisation. It started me thinking: Why was there this backlash to EDI? What was happening to make supportive people hostile?

That’s when I started to pay attention to what people were saying to me about EDI. They told me how unfair they thought that it was, that I was getting more than they were, and that I had an unfair advantage around promotions.

That gave me the premise that underpinned my research. I asked what fairness has to do with how we respond to EDI.

After researching sociology and fairness, references in the paper, I ended up with the question.

“What is the relationship between employee perceptions of fairness and attitudes towards equality approaches?“

The paper this blog series relates to shows the research findings, which were conducted on three organisations with over 700 employees.

Unfair

In short, what we found was that when we perceive our working environments to be unfair, when we don’t think that we’re being treated fairly, we start to act in this really individualistic way, so almost like we’re thinking “I’ve gotta look out for me because nobody else is going to”.

When we’re in that state, in that individualistic way of thinking, a few things happen:

• We tend not to follow the rules, policies, and processes of the organisation because why should we? What’s the point? It’s not fair anyway.

• We tend to see differences as a threat, not an opportunity. We don’t know why people are getting promoted or given roles, so we’re worried that someone else is going to get more than we are.

• We don’t tend to align with the organisation’s overarching aims and goals; instead, we align with individuals or groups with power and copy and adapt to their behaviours, even if we recognise them as detrimental.

If you imagine for a moment dropping an equality and diversity initiative into that environment, one people perceived to be unfair, I think you can guess the likely outcome. 

Our research found that people were more likely to be hostile to equality approaches, more likely to resist, and in the very worst situations, people started discriminating more against individuals from marginalised groups.

In an unfairly perceived environment, equality approaches increased inequality. 

In all three companies studied, interactional justice (fair treatment in interpersonal interactions) showed a statistically significant relationship with positive attitudes toward workplace equality.

But there is hope…

Fair

We also found that when people perceive their organisations to be fair, they act differently; they start to act collectively.

Which meant:

• They were more likely to follow the rules, processes and policies of the organisation

• They saw difference as an opportunity, not as a threat, because they trusted that the best or most conscientious people would get to where they needed to go, so they didn’t need to worry about the things that they didn’t know.

• Perhaps most importantly, people were less likely to align with individuals with power and more likely to align with the organisation’s overarching goals. This means that they were more likely to call out individuals with power when they behaved inappropriately and more likely to find support for marginalised groups.

This was incredibly important because if we drop an equality and diversity approach into a fairly perceived environment, it has an opportunity for success.

This is a really important finding, because it tells us that if we want effective and impactful work around equality, diversity, inclusion then we have got to start with fairness.

If we don’t, we could be inadvertently making the situation worse.

Quick takeaways

🏢 Organisational action: Do you know how fair your employees perceive your organisation? If not now is the time to find out, perceptions of fairness impact far more that just attitudes to equality and could be holding your organisation back.

🎓Research: Have you considered how fair people consider their environment when researching attitudes to equality approaches?

📚Peer learning: Have you seen well-meaning EDI programs backfire? Tell us below.