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From Research to Practice: Applying Behavioural Science to Prevent Sexism and Sexual Harassment in the Workplace
Practice Management and Business Skills| What area(s) of law does this episode consider? | Mitigating workplace sexism and sexual harassment; behavioural science. |
| Why is this topic relevant? | Sexism and sexual harassment in the workplace remain pressing issues that affect employees’ well-being, productivity, and career progression. As organisations strive to create inclusive and respectful environments, it becomes crucial to explore strategies that can effectively combat these behaviours. One promising approach involves leveraging insights from behavioural science to influence and reshape workplace norms. By understanding how people perceive and respond to social norms, organisations can develop targeted interventions that empower employees to act when they witness inappropriate behaviour. This approach not only addresses the immediate issue but also contributes to a cultural shift towards greater respect and equality in the workplace. |
| What legislation is considered in this episode? | Anti-Discrimination and Human Rights Legislation Amendment (Respect at Work) Act 2022 (Cth) (‘Respect at Work Act’) Australian Human Rights Commission Act 1986 (Cth) Anti-Discrimination Act 1977 (Cth) Sex Discrimination Act 1984 (Cth) Disability Discrimination Act 1992 (Cth) |
| What are the main points? |
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| What are the practical takeaways? |
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| Show notes | The Behavioural Insights Team Australia Behavioural Insights Team Resources with VicHealth The Human Rights Commission’s Factsheet on the Respect at Work Act The Law Council of Australia’s ‘National Attrition and Re-engagement Study’ (the NARS) in 2014 The International Bar Association’s ‘Us Too? Bullying and Sexual Harassment in the Legal Profession’ in 2019 Review of Sexual Harassment in Victorian Courts and VCAT in 2021 Review of Harassment in the South Australian Legal Profession in 2021 |
DT = David Turner; KT = Karen Tindall
| 00:00:00 | DT: | Hello and welcome to Hearsay the Legal Podcast, a CPD podcast that allows Australian lawyers to earn their CPD points on the go and at a time that suits them. I’m your host David Turner. Hearsay the Legal Podcast is proudly supported by Lext Australia. Lext’s mission is to improve user experiences in the law and legal services, and Hearsay the Legal Podcast is how we’re improving the experience of CPD. Despite existing legal obligations on employers, sexism and sexual harassment in the workplace remain pressing issues that can affect employees well being, productivity, and career progression. And as organisations strive to create inclusive and respectful environments, it’s crucial to explore innovative strategies to effectively combat these behaviours. Now, one promising approach involves levering insights from behavioural science to influence and reshape workplace norms. Some recent studies by the Behavioural Insights Team or BIT have highlighted the potential of advertising social norms to encourage bystander intervention against sexism and sexual harassment in the workplace. By understanding how people perceive and respond to norms, organisations can develop targeted interventions that empower employees to act when they witness inappropriate behaviour in their workplace. And this approach not only addresses the immediate issue of sexism and sexual harassment, but also contributes to a cultural shift towards greater respect and equality in the workplace. Talking to us on this topic today is Dr. Karen Tindall, a principal advisor at the Behavioural Insights Team in Australia. Karen has extensive experience in applying behavioural science to social issues, including workplace conduct, and her work focuses on developing and implementing interventions that drive positive behaviour change. Karen, thank you so much for joining me today on Hearsay. |
| 00:01:57 | KT: | Thank you for having me. |
| 00:01:58 | DT: | Now excited to get into this topic, talk about what an intervention is, for one. I think I said it about three times in that intro, but before we get into that, tell us a little bit about the Behavioural Insights Team and your work there. |
| 00:02:08 | KT: | Yeah, sure. So I’ve been with the team since early 2015, so it’s about nine and a half years now, and I’ve been based in Canberra for these past couple of years. And in terms of what the team does, we apply behavioural science concepts from social psychology, cognitive psychology, anthropology, behavioural economics… We apply them to public policy challenges in workplaces, in government, in public life, to understand how humans behave and then design systems and processes and programs to increase the uptake of services, to encourage healthy behaviours, a whole range of different areas. |
| 00:02:47 | DT: | I’m so excited to have someone from the Behavioural Insights Team back on the show. We’ve had some of your colleagues on the show before and public policy is often expressed in legislation in the law, that’s often an instrument by which it’s achieved. The law is often economic policy in action as well. So seeing the work of the behavioural Insights Team, from both the public policy and a behavioural economics perspective, you know, it’s just one facet of the behavioural science work that you do such a close relationship with the law and the work that our listeners do. So very excited to have you back on the show. TIP: On the 12th of December 2022, the Anti Discrimination and Human Rights Legislation Amendment (Respect at Work) Act 2022 (Cth) came into effect introducing some significant amendments to the Sex Discrimination Act and the Australian Human Rights Commission Act. Now these changes are designed to enhance protections for workers against sexual harassment and other forms of sex discrimination, harassment and unfair treatment. And the legislation follows recommendations from the Australian Human Rights Commission’s Respect at Work National Inquiry into Sexual Harassment in Australian Workplaces. And it builds on amendments already made by the Sex Discrimination and Fair Work Respect at Work Amendment in 2021. So the 2022 Act makes it explicitly unlawful to subject someone to a hostile workplace environment on the grounds of sex. This new provision applies if a reasonable person, considering all of the circumstances, would foresee that certain conduct could result in an offensive, intimidating, or humiliating environment for someone of a particular sex. If an individual feels subjected to that sort of environment, then they can lodge a complaint with the Human Rights Commission, and if conciliation with the commission fails, they can take their case to the Federal Court. But one of the most significant changes introduced in this act is the new positive duty imposed on employers and persons conducting a business or undertaking – or PCBUs, a term that anyone who’s worked with the Work Health and Safety Act recently would be familiar with – to take reasonable and proportionate measures to eliminate, so far as possible, discriminatory conduct, including sex discrimination, sexual harassment, sex based harassment, hostile work environments, and victimization. And this positive duty applies to the conduct of the employers themselves, their employees, their agents and contractors, and even in certain situations, third parties, like customers and clients. The Australian Human Rights Commission has been granted new powers and functions to help ensure compliance with this positive duty, which came into effect in December, 2023. These new powers include conducting inquiries, issuing compliance notices, applying for court orders to enforce compliance and entering into enforceable undertakings with employers or PCBUs. Again, an enforcement tool that some might be familiar with from the Work Health and Safety Jurisdiction or from the ASIC Corporate Compliance Jurisdiction. This delay is intended to allow the Commission to prepare educational materials and for employers to understand and implement the new obligations. The Act also empowers the Commission to investigate and report on issues of systemic unlawful discrimination or suspected systemic unlawful discrimination across all Federal Discrimination Acts. What’s systemic discrimination? Well, that refers to patterns of continuous or repetitive discrimination affecting a group of people and the Human Rights Commission can initiate these sorts of inquiries at its own discretion or upon request from the Minister, and it can publish reports and recommendations based on those findings. The Act also allows representative bodies like trade unions, advocacy groups and human rights organisations to initiate legal proceedings in the Federal Court on behalf of one or more aggrieved people if the complaint can’t be resolved through the Commission’s conciliation process. And that amendment’s designed to facilitate greater access to justice so that the responsibility or the opportunity to bring a private action isn’t laid just at the feet of the individual who’s faced the discriminatory conduct. The Act also clarifies that victimisation under its terms can be the basis for a civil action under the Disability Discrimination Act, the Racial Discrimination Act, the Age Discrimination Act, or the Australian Human Rights Commission Act. The test for finding sex based discrimination under the Sex Discrimination Act has also been lowered by removing the requirement for the conduct to be seriously demeaning. It now suffices for the conduct to be unwelcome and demeaning. Finally, the Act standardises the time frame for lodging complaints of unlawful discrimination, allowing the President of the Human Rights Commission to terminate complaints made more than 24 months after the alleged conduct across all relevant Federal Discrimination Acts. This replaces a previous six month limit, aligning the time frame with the one that’s already established under the Sex Discrimination Act. Now we’re talking about sexism and sexual harassment in the workplace. There was a relatively recent amendment to the Anti-Discrimination Act 1977 (Cth) in December, 2022, the Anti-Discrimination and Human Rights Legislation Amendment (Respect at Work) Act 2022 (Cth). And as I said at the top of the episode, obviously there were a number of incumbent obligations on employers around sexism and sexual harassment in the workplace from a work health and safety perspective, from an anti-discrimination perspective. What were these legislative changes designed to do and how did they impact the existing obligations of employers so far as they pertain to workplace sexual harassment? |
| 00:07:48 | KT: | Sure. Well, first off, I should say I don’t have a legal background, so I’ll be very careful how much I speak on this topic. |
| 00:07:55 | DT: | That’s great, you can talk about it from a practical perspective, which is much more useful. |
| 00:07:58 | KT: | So in terms of the Act, I tend to call it the “Respect at Work Legislative Changes”. I find it’s less of a mouthful. And so it made some key changes to better protect workers from sexual harassment and also from other forms of sex discrimination and unfair treatment. A key change to be aware of was to do with employer obligations. So employers now have a positive duty to take reasonable and proportionate measures so that they can eliminate or as far as possible, certain discriminatory conduct. This includes workplace sexual harassment. The other key change to be aware of is that at the end of last year, the Australian Human Rights Commission now has new functions and powers, so they can monitor and assess compliance with this new positive duty. |
| 00:08:50 | DT: | Yeah, absolutely. So, This amendment amended both the powers of the Australian Human Rights Commission and the Sex Discrimination Act 1984 (Cth). And as you said, it introduced a positive duty for employers, one that really reflects a lot of the work health and safety obligations. We use some similar terminology there in terms of persons conducting a business or undertaking being kind of the employer and its management. And I think the obligation under the Respect at Work legislation… I think that’s a much neater name for it, Karen, I agree… Really does reflect the work, health and safety primary duty on people conducting a business or undertaking to take positive steps to ensure the safety of their employees, and puts beyond doubt that creating a culture that is free from this sort of conduct is an obligation beyond work, health and safety legislation. I think there were some who suggested that work, health and safety legislation already imposed this obligation on employers, but this really puts that beyond doubt. And we can compare that with the position before the legislation, where if you like, this sort of conduct was the responsibility of the individuals who exhibited it and the employer’s responsibility was to respond to it when it happened. Is that correct? |
| 00:10:03 | KT: | Yeah. It’s made it much more proactive and much less reactive. That’s the key obligation change. TIP: Now, according to the Human Rights Commission, the enactment of the Respect at Work Act in 2022 has led to significant and immediate effects, especially in the realm of workplace sexual harassment and sex based harassment complaints to the Commission. The Commission reported a record number of complaints during the 2022 to 2023 year since the Act’s introduction, which is highlighting the heightened awareness and willingness of individuals to come forward following the changes. One of the notable initiatives established in 2023 to support these reforms is the Respect at Work Information Service. It’s a national trauma informed service that provides crucial information and referrals related to sexual harassment and associated issues. In the same year, we also witnessed the implementation of major reforms following the Commission’s Set the Standard report, which focused on promoting respectful behaviour in federal parliamentary workplaces. This issue, along with the development of workplace culture partnerships with the Australian Defence Forces, the Australian Border Force and the Australian Federal Police, demonstrates a broad commitment to improving workplace environments across various sectors, but in particular, the public service. |
| 00:11:11 | DT: | So I guess the question is then, how do you fulfil this primary duty, right? How do you perform your positive duty to eliminate this kind of behaviour before it occurs? There’s a cultural aspect to that. There’s an incentives approach to that, I suppose, to think of with our behavioural economics hat on. And your team is approaching that from a behavioural science and a behavioural insights perspective. Can you explain for our listeners what behavioural insight is, what behavioural science is, beyond the domains that we talked about at the top of the episode and how you might apply behavioural insights and interventions, another term we use at the top of the episode, to prevent workplace sexism and sexual harassment? |
| 00:11:49 | KT: | Yeah, absolutely. So as I mentioned before, behavioural insights is the application of behavioural science knowledge. Behavioural science is social psychology, cognitive psychology, behavioural economics… Those insights can be used to design what I’ve been calling interventions, but you can also just think of them as initiatives; changes to existing systems or introduction of a campaign or a new initiative and using those to influence behaviour in a positive way, and yeah, as I said, it can be across the whole gamut of behaviours, uptake of services, compliance with workplace policies, and we’ve applied these behavioural insights, these concepts across a whole lot of the equity, diversity and inclusion challenges. So today we’re talking about workplace sexual harassment, but we’ve successfully used insights into behaviour to design interventions that encourage men to take more parental leave, to encourage employers to advertise flexible working. It really is applicable anywhere that there is human behaviour. So, in the context of sexism and sexual harassment in the workplace, we tend to use these insights into human behaviour, why people take action and what to do to change behaviour. We use them to create strategies to improve systems like reporting systems, policies, all workplaces should have a sexism and sexual harassment policy, and design specific interventions like the bystander intervention that we’re going to be talking about. So that overall, it does shift that workplace culture and create a more respectful workplace culture, and I’m happy to talk about some specific examples of identifying behavioural barriers and changes that we’ve made if that’s helpful. |
| 00:13:36 | DT: | Yeah, that would be fantastic, and I’m especially interested in the bystander intervention work that you’ve been doing. I think that’s fascinating. Before we get onto that, I just wanted to make the observation and see if it’s correct, that is something that distinguishes a behavioural intervention from say, a more traditional approach to a problem in the workplace or a public policy problem, that it’s not the traditional kind of discouraged behaviour with the threat of sanction approach that we might commonly see introduced by the legislature or by an employer? So you might see, for example, this behaviour is not acceptable at work. If you breach the sexual discrimination, harassment policy here, you will be fired. That’s not really a behavioural intervention. It’s a threat of sanction and it doesn’t really get to the root of why people behave the way they do. It just expects that people will avoid the sanction, avoid the stick, and when I think of effective behavioural interventions, I often think of some of the work that your sister organisation in the UK has done as sort of evocative examples. Things like improving timeliness of making tax payments in the UK by saying “most of your neighbours have already paid”, or reducing the incidence of antibiotics prescriptions by telling doctors not, “you can’t prescribe any more antibiotics”, but “most of your colleagues don’t prescribe as many antibiotics as you”. Isn’t that interesting? I think. So it’s a softer approach than the threat of sanction. I suppose, would you say it can be a more effective one because it goes to the natural biases, heuristics, shortcuts in our thinking that tend to guide our behaviour? |
| 00:15:11 | KT: | Yeah, absolutely. And often policies, programs, and services, they’re designed with the assumption that we act as rational decision makers all the time that we will weigh up the costs and benefits of a particular action or decision very carefully and then take the best possible course of action for our future selves. But we can do that, but we don’t always do that. We often act on mental shortcuts, heuristics, biases… And so, where this behavioural science approach adds to existing approaches and interventions to behaviour change, is it adds that nuance of human behaviour. So not treating everyone as a… always completely, rational decision maker who has weighed up the costs and benefits of the decision. So you mentioned sanctions and punishments. Well, there are lots of traditional tools around behaviour change around information provision, taxes and incentives, legislation, and these are effective to a point, but the behavioural science interventions or behavioural science lens provides more nuance and really sharpens those tools. So it makes existing incentives more impactful, or as you mentioned, information provision, so you can tell someone they should do something, but if they don’t know how to do it, you really do need to tell them how to do it. And even if they know how to do it, they might not be motivated to make that change, and drawing on the evidence, as you mentioned, social norms and something that we’ll talk about today, knowing what those around you are doing… we don’t always think it influences us, but it often does. |
| 00:16:46 | DT: | Absolutely, and for those of our listeners who are advising employers on these amendments, it’s been 18 months so hopefully a lot of that advice has been delivered… But for those who are still looking at how they ensure compliance with the Respect at Work legislation, this is another tool that our listeners can be recommending. I think the past, the low credit answer might be, “well, update your sexual harassment policy at work, send it around the office, make it clear that it’s a fireable offense and continue to shake the big stick at bad actors in the workplace”. The distinction answer is, “well, what other tools can we introduce in the workplace to effectively drive this behaviour change rather than just threatening the behaviour with sanction?” |
| 00:17:31 | KT: | Yeah, absolutely. And I think it really comes down to understanding the workplace environment and understanding what behaviours you’re trying to change, and what behavioural barriers are in place. So we know that some employees, they might hesitate to report harassment, and that could be because they fear retaliation or it might be that they don’t know how to report harassment. Or, they may know how to report harassment, but they don’t actually trust that the process will lead to any meaningful change. All these challenges will require a different approach. And a really interesting psychological effect that you see in a lot of workplaces, in society in general, is something that we call pluralistic ignorance, which is basically, some employees will witness a reportable incident. They might privately object to that behaviour, but they might also believe that their colleagues are completely fine with it. So they don’t realise that most of their colleagues actually hold that same private objection. So by identifying that as a behavioural barrier in a workplace, in a group, then there are some initiatives that you can put in place to overcome them. So you can demonstrate that most people in the organisation disapprove of harassment, that often encourages people to intervene, but also you’ll notice when you look into behavioural insights, we’re always looking for ways to simplify and make things easy. And so, in this case, anytime there’s a reporting process or a policy, there are some really low hanging fruit in terms of making them more effective around using plain English, making them more accessible, making sure people are aware of them, simplifying the process to make reporting more straightforward. Yeah, there’s a number of different ways that you can take what’s already there and enhance it to make it more likely that people will recognise harassment and then report it. |
| 00:19:24 | DT: | Fantastic. Well, I’d love to hear about some of the work that your team has been doing, some of these real life case studies and interventions that you’ve delivered. |
| 00:19:31 | KT: | Yeah, sure. Well, you mentioned bystanders before, and that is a really important area to focus on. So something that we try and do is draw very heavily on the evidence base on what the academic literature and what studies in other parts of the telling us, and a very promising evidence based approach to preventing sexual harassment is encouraging witnesses or bystanders to take action either in the moment or even after the fact.So either by calling out the perpetrator at the time, or by reporting it or encouraging the target to report it after the fact. And so that’s something that we pay a lot of attention to and we design initiatives around. I should say the reason that bystanders are so important is their ability to discourage the perpetrator and discourage perpetrator from doing the same again later. These bystanders, they’re sometimes called active bystanders. They can support the person that’s targeted either emotionally or by encouraging reporting, offering to accompany them to report. But one of the really powerful things and the reason active bystanding can be so effective is that they often clearly and publicly demonstrate that sexual harassment is not acceptable in this particular workplace. The challenge, however, that we found with encouraging bystander action is that people often don’t have the practical strategies to know what to say in the moment or to know what action they can take to be helpful, what legitimate actions they can take to discourage the perpetrator and to support the target. So I can tell you about a really interesting study that we did that was very promising and encouraging bystander action. We found that we were able to help bystanders to take action when they witnessed sexism and sexual harassment, and it was a great piece of work that the team did with VicHealth, with the Office for Women and the University of Melbourne, and what we did was we used behavioural insights to design what ended up being quite a simple initiative in the end; it was an email campaign. So it was a series of five behaviourally informed emails that we designed to encourage both staff and students to take action when witnessing sexism or sexual harassment. And we sent these emails to about 30,000 staff and students at the university and the key ingredients in the emails, the two key things that helped make the emails effective, were that we provided participants with very clear know-how about how to intervene. We gave them helpful tips on how to act in the moment, how to act after the fact, and we made them really concrete to try and make them very real and bring them to life and make it seem very doable. So, for example, in one of the emails, we said “in the moment, you can call out the joke or comment, let the person who made it know that it was unacceptable… after the moment’s passed, even if you didn’t say anything in the moment, it’s not too late to act, you can reach out to the person who made the joke or comment and let them know it’s unacceptable.” And importantly, we also provided example wording and phrases that could be used so that it was something that the recipient of the email could imagine themselves doing. The second key component, as we’ve been talking about, was the social norms message. So we wanted to give participants, we wanted to give staff and students at University of Melbourne, the social permission to act. So we included a social norms message that stated that the majority of staff and students at UoM said that they themselves would take action after witnessing these behaviours. And we used a different social norm message in each to give a concrete example of what that looked like. One of the messages that we’ve used was that “most of us at University of Melbourne think it’s right to call someone out for making sexist jokes and comments, and 78 percent said that they themselves would intervene if they saw sexism and sexual harassment.” And so this draws on a concept that we’ve looked at previously around social identity. If the recipient of the email identifies with University of Melbourne, then they’re more likely to pay attention to what others at University of Melbourne say, think, and do, and that can be a really powerful influence on behaviour. But I should say that it is important that the social norms messaging that you use in your campaigns is accurate and recent. So we got those social norms messages from a survey that we conducted on campus earlier in the year so that it was very relevant and very believable. |
| 00:24:27 | DT: | In other words, if you can demonstrate that the desired behaviour is a feature of the recipients sort of identity, right, that this norm is a feature of the identity that they aspire to have or with which they identify, then performing the behaviour is something that they want to do because not doing it is distancing them from the group that they want to be a part of. |
| 00:24:51 | KT: | Absolutely, and it brings the internal thoughts around not supporting a particular behaviour, but not seeing it enacted. It allows it to be expressed and it’s been used in many different areas to work quite effectively, and it did in this case as well. So we ran an evaluation as a randomised control trial. So we had a control group that didn’t receive any of the emails. And we had some different treatment groups that received different versions of the email campaign, and we found that those who received the email campaign that had both the know-how and the social norms messaging, it was a statistically significant increase compared to the control group of those who took action after witnessing sexism and sexual harassment, compared to those who didn’t receive the email campaign, and it was about a 30 percent increase relative to the control. So it was a very, very good result. |
| 00:25:43 | DT: | Sorry, did you say a 30% increase relative to the control? |
| 00:25:46 | KT: | Yes, yeah. |
| 00:25:47 | DT: | Yeah, that’s actually a remarkable difference. When you said a statistically significant difference, I was like “oh, that might be a, like a solid, like single digit.” |
| 00:25:53 | KT: | Yeah, it was about a 10 percentage points increase and about, yeah, a third increase relative to the control. |
| 00:25:59 | DT: | One thing that struck me from your description of the content of some of those emails was that they focused on calling out the behaviour and speaking to the person who exhibited the behaviour. I think something that I’ve observed in workplaces in the past, and that I think will resonate with some people listening is there’s often an instinct or a drive to speak to the target of the behaviour, to denounce the behaviour to them privately, to announce their solidarity with the person who experienced the behaviour. Why is it so important to be speaking to almost confronting the person who has engaged in the behaviour rather than supporting the person who’s suffered the behaviour? |
| 00:26:42 | KT: | There are many different ways that you can be an effective active bystander. If you can call out the behaviour in the moment, then that can be very powerful. That can really discourage the perpetrator from doing something similar in the future. But that being said, there are other effective actions to be an effective active bystander. You can talk to the perpetrator after the fact, if you don’t want to call them out in the moment, and you can report, absolutely, you can be an active bystander by reporting the behaviour, but also it is really helpful to support the target of sexual harassment and sexism, expressing your disapproval, asking if they’re okay, offering to help progress the report. So it’s important to do what you feel comfortable with, but it’s also important to understand what more you can do for the next time that you witness sexism or sexual harassment. |
| 00:27:35 | DT: | I imagine this can get more challenging when you introduce some other dynamics in the workplace. So if you think about a kind of situation where a student sees another student engage in behaviour that they would call out. They don’t have a close relationship with that student. There’s no relationship of formal power or even sort of soft power between them. They feel comfortable in calling that out because they’re emboldened by the social norm that they understand. How does that work in a workplace where the behaviour might be perpetrated by someone in a position of seniority to you, or even more tricky, someone who’s not in a position of seniority but who enjoys a kind of privileged social position in the workplace, a kind of soft power that can be sometimes even more effective in securing their position than hard power can be, or even if they’re a friend or a longstanding colleague, all of these things that might act as countervailing effects against this social norm that might otherwise encourage behaviour? Have you identified any strategies to not combat, but I guess address some of those competing priorities that respondents might have? |
| 00:28:44 | KT: | Yeah, so I think this is one of the reasons why it’s so important to understand the workplace culture and the workplace that you’re in when trying to design interventions and initiatives to combat workplace sexual harassment, because not all workplaces are at the same point, and really before implementing any of these interventions or deciding how you’re going to act, understanding whether the foundational bricks are in place. So if you’re going to try and encourage reporting, you need to have a reporting mechanism and you need to have a good and clear reporting mechanism, and you could have a workplace with a great workplace culture. But if the policies aren’t clear, or if the reporting system is ineffectual, then you’re doing your employees a disservice if you’re encouraging them to report or if you are reporting, but the reporting mechanism isn’t sufficient. So I think workplaces where there’s a lot further to go or where there’s a pretty low starting base should start with looking at the foundational policies and procedures and reporting mechanisms. |
| 00:29:50 | DT: | I suppose it seems intuitive to me that a reporting mechanism, even in an environment where there’s a fairly low degree of confidence in the workplace culture around you, where you feel a motive to act to do something about the behaviour that you’ve witnessed, but you don’t feel confident that the people around you denounce it sufficiently for you to call it out in the moment. You don’t feel comfortable confronting a supervisor or someone who, for reasons political or practical, you need to stay on the right side of… It seems intuitive to me that reporting is the thing that that person would look at doing in that environment where they’re not so far along in the journey of creating a culture of respect at work. What goes into a good reporting system from your observation? |
| 00:30:35 | KT: | Sure. Well, there are many ways that you can improve a reporting system. One of them would be, as I mentioned before, making it very clear who can report. So often, or sometimes bystanders don’t realise that they also can report sexism and sexual harassment. They think it’s just for the target of the behaviour. The other thing that you can do is increase the operational transparency. So one of the reasons that people don’t report is that they don’t know what’s going to happen to the report, so they aren’t sure what the process will be. And you can see in lots of different examples, when you increase the What we call operational transparency, so knowing what will happen behind the scenes, that can reduce anxiety and uncertainty. So we’ve seen that in, for example, emergency departments where people get anxious and uncertain about the process that’s going on behind the scenes and they don’t think anything’s happening or they don’t know who’s going to be told what, and simply by providing that information, a simple flow chart, it can really reassure people. So I’d say those are a couple of the ways that you can really improve a reporting system. The other thing would be in Behavioural Insights, we’re often quite obsessed with friction costs and trying to reduce frictions. And so it is really important to reduce the administrative burden and make sure that it is easy to report, but also you need to be very careful where you need to add frictions in. So for example, a good reporting process will have a check or a friction or a prompt to ensure that before the disclosing of any identities permission has been sought and that they aren’t disclosed inadvertently. So there are lots of different insights that you can apply to these processes to make them better. |
| 00:32:26 | DT: | Something you said before that I thought was interesting is that when you’re talking about the provision of information, it’s not just the information that you provide, but the timing of when you provide that, can be really influential. If you tell someone all of these things about how they can report behaviour that they observe at work alongside a hundred other things on the day that they start work and you never tell them again, that’s probably pretty ineffective. If you tell them how the reporting process is going to work after they’ve made a report, it’s not really going to help to encourage someone who’s wavering. So what is the best way to deliver this information? What’s the best time to deliver this information? |
| 00:33:02 | KT: | You make a very good point. When we start work and we complete all the induction training and processes, we’re so overwhelmed by information that it can be hard to recall in the moment that you need it, what you need to know around responding to the sexism and sexual harassment. So that’s one of the reasons why we chose to do the email series. The five emails came out, I think it was a week apart or two weeks apart. So it was just something that was quite brief and reminded people in their day to day, as they were going around the day to day business, what could be done. But you also see in workplaces, there are campaigns, there are posters, there are ways to provide this information. But I think it’s also worth noting that the timing matters and feedback loops matter, but also being very careful about the information, what information is provided and how it’s framed can really affect how well the initiative works. So with the social norms campaign, where we said that most people disapprove of the behaviour, that was an effective social norms message. If you implement a social norms message badly, if you design it poorly, then you can actually make things so much worse. So social norms messages really do need to reinforce the positive behaviour and the beliefs of the majority that the positive, because unfortunately you do see, sometimes you’ll see it in public service announcements that try and give weight to an issue by saying that not enough people are taking action almost as a plea to act. So you can imagine a work health and safety campaign that’s trying to encourage reporting of near miss incidents. The campaign makes a big deal about how no one is reporting near miss incidents. It’s a big problem in this workplace. That message, you’re trying to encourage people to act, but it’s more likely to inadvertently signal to employees that it must be normal in this workplace to report near-miss instances. |
| 00:35:03 | DT: | Yeah, it’s kind of a social licence to do nothing with the information, right? “Well, I won’t get in trouble, like everyone else is doing it.” |
| 00:35:09 | KT: | Yeah, and even worse, it can actually signal that there might be a reason people are not reporting, and so I better not risk it. |
| 00:35:15 | DT: | Yeah, the wisdom of the crowd. There must be some good reason why someone’s doing this. |
| 00:35:19 | KT: | So you need to make use of behavioural tools, but you also need to have a good understanding of the evidence base and how to apply them well. |
| 00:35:26 | DT: | Is the secret ingredient in a good social proof message that it is about, as you said, dispelling that pluralistic ignorance, making it clear that there is a norm that most people already subscribe to, but may not be aware of? Because I keep thinking about the distinction between one of our listeners advising a client in a workplace that has made strides towards a more positive and inclusive workplace culture, where these norms might be broadly held, where they might be able to encourage behaviour in bystanders, like the behaviour that you described in your work in VicHealth and University of Melbourne, and I’m also thinking about the reverse of that; one of our listeners who’s advising a client on how to comply with the Respect at Work legislation from a really low base and how they get to a point where they can start to use some of these tools where maybe they don’t have the data about what social norms are widely held amongst the workplace. Is that the starting point, that you need to have the data on what your employees believe before you can start communicating about it? |
| 00:36:32 | KT: | Yeah, absolutely. And that collection of data is really important, both with the social norms messaging, but also just generally, so when trying to understand the workplace, there is a lot of data that organisations already hold that can be really, really helpful. TIP: In 2014, the Law Council of Australia released the National Attrition and Re-engagement Study, or the ‘NARS’, and the study aimed to investigate the progression, attrition and re engagement rates of male and female lawyers in our legal profession in Australia, and identify gendered trends within that profession. And to date, it’s still one of the most comprehensive studies that’s been conducted on the Australian legal profession. One of the most notable takeaways from the NAS was that it found that approximately one in four women reported that they had experienced sexual harassment in their legal workplace. a few years later, in 2018, the International Bar Association conducted the largest ever global survey on bullying and sexual harassment in the legal profession. And in May 2019, they released their findings in the report called Us Too, Bullying and Sexual Harassment in the Legal Profession. Now on page 87 of that report, it stated that policies targeted at bullying and sexual harassment are more widely used in Australian law firms and other legal workplaces than they are globally. 66% of Australian respondents reported that their workplace has relevant sexual harassment policies compared to a national average of 53%. But, despite that prevalence of policies about the issue in Australia, Australian legal professionals reported a higher rate of sexual harassment than the global average. 47% of female respondents in Australia indicated that they had been sexually harassed compared to 37% globally. And 13% of male respondents indicated that they had been sexually harassed compared to 7% globally. There’s also been some smaller domestic reviews conducted in recent years, including a review of sexual harassment in Victorian courts in 2021 and in South Australia in 2021, both of which similarly detailed a continued prevalence of sexual harassment in the Australian legal profession in those jurisdictions. So, of course, there are direct measures around reports of sexual harassment and what bystanders did in the moment, but then also you can have a look at indirect measures around gender equity and promotions and the gender pay gap and employee satisfaction information from exit interviews. So collecting that overall picture through the existing data is really important. But then when you want to implement something like a social norms campaign, it’s really important that you’re communicating accurate, and reliable percentages and statistics, otherwise you lose credibility. It would be very tempting, I’m sure, to just make up a norm that you want to be true, but that’s not an effective way to change behaviour. That will definitely backfire, and so what we did in this case and what we do in all the social norms campaigns is we conduct a survey with the population that we’re interested in. So in the case of the example I was talking about, University of Melbourne staff and students, and collect their reports on what they’ve done, but also what they believe and importantly be very specific. So I think something that we see in surveys around bystanding is that often the survey will ask if people have the intention to act. As we know, intentions don’t always lead to action. And in fact, it’s called the intention action gap, and so what we did in this instance was, made the survey much more specific. So not just saying, “have you witnessed sexism or sexual harassment?”, but actually naming the behaviours say, “has someone stared at a person in a way that made them feel intimidated or comfortable? Has someone made sexual comments or jokes that made another person feel uncomfortable? Has someone used unwelcome physical contact?” So by being more specific, you can improve the data that you collect. So I think looking at existing data sources, but also thinking very carefully about the design of new data sources that you’re collecting is important. And the behavioural survey that we used in this particular initiative is up on the VicHealth website, so if anyone wants to have a look at it, they’re very welcome to. |
| 00:40:46 | DT: | Oh, fantastic. We’ll include a link to that in the show notes so that our listeners can check that out. Is there a risk where you ask those more generic questions, broad questions about intention or about unspecified behaviour, that you end up with results that reflect the answers your employees believe they’re supposed to give, that kind of signal the things that they believe they’re supposed to signal, and so you might get the social norm result that you wanted, but it’s not an especially rich or even an accurate portrayal of the norms of the workplace? |
| 00:41:17 | KT: | Yeah, I think that’s a very important consideration and something that you have to be very careful of is that you are measuring what you think you’re measuring. The example that I was giving around asking about specific behaviours, that was inspired by a study that found that when you ask women if they’ve experienced sexual harassment, then 10 to 25 percent will say that they have. But if you ask women if they’ve experienced specific behaviours such as unwelcome physical contact or inappropriate sexual comments, then the response goes up to about 30 to 60 percent. So it is very important that you measure what you want to measure, but also in terms of creating those social norms messages, it becomes very clear very quickly if the statistic is not right. Like if you go into a workplace and you say 100 percent of people disagree with this and 100 percent of people would act, and then you don’t see that, then it can undermine the campaign. So you do need to make sure that the statistics are accurate and descriptive to make them more effective. |
| 00:42:24 | DT: | I suppose people have an intuition about what seems authentic and realistic in their own workplace. I suppose, especially if there is a cultural problem with this sort of behaviour, and if they see that kind of overwhelming response or strong denunciation where they haven’t seen that in the halls of the workplace, that they’re going to be suspicious of it. |
| 00:42:45 | KT: | Yeah, absolutely. |
| 00:42:46 | DT: | One thing I’m thinking about is from a research perspective, you might design the intervention, conduct it, measure its success and report on the success or failure of that intervention. For workplaces who are looking to use this sort of methodology as a means of one, complying with the legislation they’re supposed to comply with, but two, providing safer, more fulfilling workplaces for their employees, it’s more like a program that kind of never ends, right? They’ve got to do this forever, or at least until their culture is so positive and strong that they’ve eliminated this behaviour for all time, which doesn’t seem likely, unfortunately. What does this look like as a continuous program? How do you implement this, measure it, and then continue that on indefinitely so that you’re continuing to communicate the messages that drive the right behaviours? |
| 00:43:35 | KT: | Yeah, absolutely. So I’ve been talking about an example of a randomised control trial, and it is really important to robustly evaluate effectiveness of initiatives, but you also don’t have to evaluate every single initiative that you put in place. So there is a wealth of knowledge from around the world for what works. And so having a whole toolkit of approaches that you can try, mean that you can continue to implement different approaches and implement initiatives that have evidence based behind them. So, for example, the email campaign series, you can continue to implement initiatives like that. New research comes out all the time, so there is always more that you can do that can be done. And in terms of measuring, I think it’s important to regularly keep track of how the workplace is doing and an important part of that is thinking about what questions you ask. There’s always routine surveys. Often there’s survey fatigue in organisations, there are so many workplace surveys. But because of that you have to be very mindful of what questions you choose to include. So I think it’s important for the HR team, the equity, diversity, inclusion team, the people and culture team to make sure that what they want to measure is included in those company wide employee surveys so that they can keep track of it as well. |
| 00:45:00 | DT: | Karen, a lot of your colleagues at the Behavioural Insights Team have backgrounds in academia, you yourself hold a PhD of course. What’s some of the research or future work you and your team and some of your colleagues are doing in the field of workplace conduct that you’re really interested in and excited about? |
| 00:45:16 | KT: | So much. So in terms of the work that we’re doing on equity, diversity and inclusion at the moment in workplaces, there’s so many interesting areas. I’m really passionate about the work that we’re doing around encouraging men to take more parental leave, and we’ve successfully run trials in the UK and Australia using social norms messaging to make public, those private beliefs about how long men should be on parental leave and share the care. In terms of future innovations and future research in BI and workplaces, I’m going to be cliche and say that I am really excited about what artificial intelligence can do. So I’d say on balance, I’m more excited about the opportunities that AI presents than some people are, though, obviously wary of what could happen in the future. But I think in terms of AI and machine learning, there’s so much that can be done around providing real time feedback to people. So I was talking the other day to someone about the importance of rapid feedback, and she was telling me that already her virtual meeting software tells her in real time statistics about what percentage of time in meetings different people speak for, whether she’s interrupted anyone, whether she’s using gendered language. So while this is not a trial that we’re working on, it’s an example of how innovations and new technologies can have the potential to provide in workplaces really effective interventions. Another example would be around educational programs. So If you think about the technology that seemed new, but is now a bit outdated virtual reality. If you think about how classic training modules for say, respect at work, they’re often delivered through e-learning. That e-learning is of varying quality. It’s very heavily text based, while workplaces, of course, there’s a lot of communicating through the written word, it’s also about behavioural conduct. So the ability to role play those behaviours and responses, how you to when you witness sexism and sexual harassment, role playing is much more effective, but it’s also really awkward. So you can imagine that having something like virtual reality allows for individuals to practise these difficult conversations or practice bystander action. Basically, I’m excited about a future where anything that better simulates the situation that you’re facing and improves that speed of feedback is something I’m really excited about. |
| 00:47:49 | DT: | Absolutely. Well, on that topic, our listeners, when they finish this episode, go and try the virtual interview for this episode, which will allow them to, yeah, try out some of those skills in a virtual setting. Karen, I normally end every episode with a question about how young professionals can get started in the field that we’ve been talking about. I wanted to do a slight adjustment to that question here. Young professionals are in a unique situation in responding to this sort of behaviour in a workplace. On the one hand, they’re most likely to hold the views and beliefs that this conduct should be denounced and called out. On the other hand, they probably feel the most insecure in position and authority in the workplace and the most apprehensive about speaking out to someone who is either from a formal reporting lines perspective or just from an age and experience perspective, they’re senior. Do you have any tips for a young professional, maybe a young lawyer in a law firm on how to respond to the sort of behaviour we’ve been discussing today, sexism and sexual harassment in the workplace, when they see it? |
| 00:48:53 | KT: | Yeah, absolutely. So I can provide some resources with links in the show notes. There are so many different strategies that we’ve been talking about that individuals can do, but I think it’s also really important to affect the system and the workplace culture as a whole. So essentially taking to the HR team, the people and culture team, the EDI team, evidence of what works in other organisations and how it can benefit an organisation. And there are some really great resources on the Human Rights Commission website. They provide some really, really useful and helpful resources around affecting leadership and the workplace culture. And so I think it’s important for individual action, but also important to affect the system as a whole. So I’d very much recommend that they talk to their HR team in their organisation to not just make sure that there is compliance with the legislative changes, but that the team’s going above and beyond to really foster that positive workplace culture. |
| 00:49:55 | DT: | Those are great tips. And as you said, we’ll include those Human Rights Commission resources in the show notes for the episode. Well, Dr. Karen Tindall, thank you so much for joining me today on Hearsay. |
| 00:50:02 | KT: | Thank you so much, it was a pleasure. |
| 00:50:14 | DT: | As always, you’ve been listening to Hearsay the Legal Podcast. I’d like to thank my guest today, Karen Tindall, for coming on the show. Now, if you’re looking for more behavioural insights related content, we’ve had Dr. Alex Gyani from the Behavioural Insights Team on the show before. His episode is called ‘Don’t Shove – Nudge: Promoting Better Choices in the Legal System and Legal Practice.’ That’s episode 66. If you’re an Australian legal practitioner, you can claim one continuing professional development point for listening to this episode. Whether an activity entitles you to claim a CPD unit is self assessed, as you know, but we suggest this episode entitles you to claim a practice management and business skills point. More information on claiming and tracking your points on Hearsay can be found on our website. Hearsay the Legal Podcast is brought to you by Lext Australia, a legal innovation company that makes the law easier to access and easier to practise, including your CPD. I’d like to ask you a favour, listeners. If you like Hearsay the Legal Podcast, please leave us a Google review. It helps other listeners to find us, and that keeps us in business. Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you on the next episode of Hearsay. |
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