Studies show that gender and culturally diverse companies are more successful. This report from McKinsey found that businesses that are gender diverse are 15% more likely to financially outperform homogenous companies, and businesses that are ethnically diverse are 35% more likely to outperform less diverse ones.

Yet, according to this study by Yale researchers, decision makers may downplay the importance of a female applicant’s areas of expertise and inflate the importance of her areas of weakness. Alternatively, decision makers may view the credentials of a specific male applicant as essential to job success and view his areas of weakness as nonessential.

Many companies are trying to improve diversity, or at least claiming they are. Earlier this year, Airbnb announced they assembled a team of civil rights leaders (including the former Attorney General Eric Holder) to review and update the company’s anti-discrimination policies. “I want us to be smart and innovative and to create new tools to prevent discrimination and bias that can be shared…” said co-founder Brian Chesky in this blog post.

Blogger Erica Jones candidly discussed her own experience being the sole black woman on various IT teams, encountering racial bias’ both blatant (degrading comments by coworkers) and clandestine (the company hiring out on a project Jones was the most qualified to do). Jones said,

“I am a black woman who happens to work in the tech industry. I don’t need to change to fit within my industry. My industry needs to change to make everyone feel included and accepted.”

New tech start ups are finding ways to minimize the diversity bias.

Some companies are making progress on gender diversity. Fortune recently reported that food-delivery company Grubhub has seen success with 50% of its executives being women, 43% of its workforce, and 23% of its engineers (10% more than U.S. average).

Recruiting talent from a larger pool of backgrounds lends itself to a more balanced team. One can see how, in this analysis by Talentoday who reviewed real personality comparisons by country:

Talentoday’s study on comparing the ability to take initiative by country

Having a team of dynamic, cautious, enterprising and developer mindsets is ideal — for balanced idea generation and execution. The enterprising person inspires the developer, the dynamic person’s boldness is balanced by the cautious. As the graph above shows, if one only hires people from the U.S. it can be harder to obtain such a diverse team.

Avoiding discrimination bias and fostering a culturally and gender diverse team begins with the hiring manager. Companies who try to do diversity well often make the mistake of casting a wide net initially, but bias’ show up in the final selection. Hiring managers shouldn’t focus on people that are most similar to him or her, but rather aim for as wide of a range of a group as possible. The real problem lies in the bias of the final selection from recruiters and hiring managers.

Disrupting the Bias

One way managers can minimize their bias may be by evaluating the skills of candidates using a personality assessment tool. This gives managers and recruiters an objective way to look at a persons soft skills to create a team that works best together.

But not all tools are created equal. As Nanette Byrnes wrote in this piece on Technology Review,

“the danger remains that unrecognized bias, just in the programming of an algorithm but even in the data flowing into it, could inadvertently turn any program into a discriminator.”

Algorithms must be specifically tailored to minimize the bias, like objective data found in the Talentoday manager that helps reduce the bias of decision makers. Talentoday takes a look at the motivations and personality traits needed to succeed at a given job. Managers can assess their candidates and match the personality results to the industry standard to find the right fit, scientifically.

Another company has taken a different approach. GapJumpers has reworked the hiring process to include blind interviews modeled after the hit TV series The Voice. Cofounder and CEO, Kedar Iyer, states,

“If one industry, especially a shallow one like the music industry, can do [blind auditions], why can’t tech companies, which are so much more scientific, do them?”

GapJumpers found that male applicants raised concerns about having to prove themselves in a blind test more often than women. Once the blind challenge was completed, the gender breakdown of those candidates hired was 58% women, 42% men.

At the end of the day, in order to interrupt the process of judgment the focus must be shifted to evidence and away from perception. We may be a long way from changing human conditioning but companies can adapt with tools to make the hiring playing field less biased.

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