Exploring the paper ‘Slaying the Seven-Headed Dragon: The Quest for Gender Change in Academia‘ – Brink, M.C.L. van den; Benschop, Y.W.M., 2012
Blog two of five, in a series by Dr Chrissi McCarthy.
When looking to create a more diverse working environment, organisations often look to what others are doing and seek to adopt those practices. Makes sense, right? If the big names got results, why not follow their playbook? It must be effective, right?
Well, no. Unfortunately, not.
If only it were that simple.
When it comes to tackling inequality, context is everything.
Slapping on someone else’s solution without digging into why your problem exists can stall progress or even make things worse.
I’ve seen it a hundred times: EDI teams diligently seek best practice within their sectors and wider, finding something that seems to solve the same problem they are having, it appears to have good impact metrics, only for it to fail to have any impact when they apply it in-house.
Key insight: When dealing with people, there are too many factors at play, and one-size-fits-all approaches rarely work.
What’s going wrong? Two things:
As discussed in research-to-social cycle 1 (McCarthy et al., 2021), the way staff perceive organisational fairness, encompassing distribution, procedures, and relationships, fundamentally shapes their responses to EDI work. If the underlying perception of fairness isn’t addressed, even the best intervention can spark backlash.
Even if you have fairness, you might not have identified the cause of your problem. The same problem – say, too few women in senior roles – can have totally different causes. Skipping straight to a generic fix misses the real issue.
Key insight: Diagnosing before prescribing
Good EDI work needs the same rigour as a doctor diagnosing a cough. You wouldn’t grab the same remedy for a dry cough, a chronic cough, or a productive cough, so why treat all EDI challenges the same way?
Evidence from Dutch academia
Van den Brink & Benschop’s 2012 study, Slaying the Seven-Headed Dragon, looks at exactly this problem. They analysed 971 committee reports from seven Dutch universities and interviewed 64 committee chairs across medical sciences, humanities, and natural sciences. Sure enough, every department had a leaky pipeline of women rising to senior roles, but the reasons were completely different:
A. Humanities
- Patriarchal support: Men recommend women only when specifically asked, but recommend men proactively.
- Invisible rules: Women aren’t let in on the “hidden game,” so they are labelled less “operationally savvy.”
- Elite grooming: Senior employees nurture male successors by sharing informal rules.
B. Medical sciences
- Masculine networks: Exclusionary networks that women struggle to penetrate.
- Motherhood bias: Committee members worry about women’s roles as mothers, doubting their commitment.
- Protective restrictions: Women are deemed too vulnerable for the role and are “protected from failure.”
C. Natural sciences
- Quality undervalued: Women’s work gets lower subjective scores, even when objective data says otherwise.
- Group stereotyping: Men are judged as individuals; women get lumped into gendered assumptions.
Here, the problem remained the same: a leaky pipeline of women into senior roles, but each field revealed different causes.
Key insight: The same problems can be found in different contexts, but that doesn’t mean they have the same cause.
Consider the why: is there a pattern to the problems?
These problems can be summarised by theme:
- A. Humanities: Women dominate at junior levels but are not considered “operationally savvy” because they’re excluded from the unwritten rules.
- B. Medical sciences: Women are kept out of networks and considered too “weak” for senior roles.
- C. Natural sciences: Women are deemed to have fewer “quality points” than men.
Although the outcomes appear similar—fewer women in senior roles—the mechanisms driving inequality are very different. The overall number of women in the space may predict the type of inequality:
- Where women are underrepresented, we question their technical quality.
- Where there is parity, we question their organisational competence.
- Where they are plentiful, we exclude them from hidden networks.
The more insight we have on specific causes, the quicker we can diagnose and treat them. This is why, for us, EDI should be seen as a diagnostic tool to understand the challenges faced by the organisation.
From insight to action
Organisational action: What do you know about the problems you are trying to solve? Do you understand the causes? Ask the decision maker and those impacted to identify key points of opportunity.
Research opportunity: What patterns can be found in context and cause? Are there some underlying truths?
Peer learning: Have you seen well-meaning EDI programs backfire? Tell us below.
Looking ahead: In different contexts, various types of inequality emerge, and therefore, the tools used to address these inequalities must also differ.
In the next blog, we will examine how the cases in Van den Brink & Benschop’s 2012 study, Slaying the Seven-Headed Dragon attempted to address their problems and whether they were related to the problem or its cause.
From here, we will begin to consider how to design effective solutions.
