Prof. Iris Bohnet is Dhe director of the Harvard Kennedy School's Women & Public Policy Program (see full bio below).
Gender equality is a moral and a business imperative. But unconscious bias holds us back, and debiasing people’s minds has proven to be difficult and expensive. In an effort to make workplaces more effective and inclusive, companies have tried special training programs and a score of other techniques to change the way employees think. Behavioral design offers a new solution. By de-biasing organizations instead of individuals, we can make smart changes that have big impacts. Building on new insights into the human mind, Bohnet draws on data from companies, universities, and governments, often from randomized controlled trials, and offers evidence-based interventions. Presenting research-based solutions from her new book, What Works, Iris Bohnet shares the tools we need to move the needle in classrooms and boardrooms, in hiring and promotion, benefiting businesses, governments, and the lives of millions. More can be done—often at shockingly low cost and surprisingly high speed.
Iris Bohnet, Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, serves as director of the Women and Public Policy Program, co-chair (with Max Bazerman) of the Behavioral Insights Group, an associate director of the Harvard Decision Science Laboratory, and the faculty chair of the executive program “Global Leadership and Public Policy for the 21st Century” for the World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leaders. She served as the Academic Dean of the Harvard Kennedy School, and is on the boards of directors of Credit Suisse Group and University of Lucerne, as well as the advisory boards of the Vienna University of Economics and Business, EDGE, Applied, and numerous academic journals. She is a member of the Global Agenda Council on Behavior of the World Economic Forum.
Professor Bohnet teaches organizational design, decision-making, negotiation and gender in public policy and leadership in degree and executive programs, and has been engaged in the teaching, training and consulting of private and public sector leaders in the United States, Australia, Europe, India and the Middle East.
A behavioral economist, she combines insights from economics and psychology to improve decision-making in organizations and society, often with a gender or cross-cultural perspective. Her most recent research examines behavioral design to de-bias how we live, learn and work. Her academic work has been published in the best journals of her profession, including the American Economic Review, the American Political Science Review, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, and Management Science. Her book, What Works: Gender Equality By Design (Harvard University Press 2016) provides decision-makers from across the sectors with scientific insights on how to redesign organizations, school and society. Her work has been profiled by leading media outlets around the world.