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Siri Chilazi is a senior researcher at the Women and Public Policy Program at Harvard Kennedy School. Iris Bohnet is a professor of business and government at Harvard Kennedy School and co-director of the Women and Public Policy Program. Whats the big idea? Fairness is not merely a choice; it is a way of moving through the world. For life and work to exhibit more fairness, people need to embed fair behavior into everyday choices, routines, and systems. Everyone can show up in ways that allow for a diversity of people to be seen, heard, and valued at the table. Below, co-authors Siri and Iris share five key insights from their new book, Make Work Fair: Data-Driven Design for Real Results. Listen to the audio versionread by Siri and Irisin the Next Big Idea App. 1. Fairness must be embedded in our systems. At some hotels, room key cards both unlock doors and control the lights. This little bit of technology makes it more likely that the lights are off when leaving the room. This is our vision for fairness as well. We want to embed it into everything we do. Fairness is not a program, it is a way of doing things, but it does not happen automatically. Only a few years ago, Swedish engineer Astrid Linder and her team developed the first crash test dummy built in the form of a womans body. And during COVID-19, personal protective equipment (PPE) was not made for everyone: not for those with small hands or large feet, and not for cultural dress codes that did not correspond with standard overalls. Unfairness can creep in anywhere: cars, protective gear, artificial intelligence, data for decision-making, and workplace procedures. A few years ago, we were approached by one of the largest employers in Australia. People had applied to positions of leadership at this organization and they sent those who were not chosen an email inviting them to reapply. They found that men were about twice as likely to reapply than women. Why was this and what could they do to not lose that talent? We asked the organization, who exactly are you writing to? They responded that they only asked the top 20 percent of applicants to reapply. This was our opener. Given that women have been found to be less self-confident, we suggested that we run a randomized control trial. Some applicants still got the email that was normally sent, but for others, we added one sentence sharing that they were among the top 20 percent of applicants. This edit completely closed the gender gap in reapplication rates. We fixed the system and equalized the playing field for all. 2. Make fairness count. Ros Atkins, a TV presenter at the BBC, made fairness count when he realized he had no data to know if he featured women and men with equal frequency as experts on his nightly primetime news show. Atkins and his team decided to generate that data. They began spending two minutes at the end of each nights show counting how many women and men had appeared on screen during their one hour on air. This counting exercise illuminated that women made up only 39 percent of experts on aira much lower share than they had anticipated. They set themselves a target of reaching 50:50 gender representation and became more thoughtful about featuring a diversity of experts on air. Within four months, they hit their target and maintained it for years. They also inspired hundreds of other BBC content-creating teams to join them in what has globally become 50:50 The Equality Project. Even though it wasnt an organizational mandate, Ros Atkins and his team made fairness count in their work. They simply knew that for journalism to be of the highest quality, it needed to represent the world they reported on. They tweaked their everyday ways of working to better deliver on that goal. Even though it wasnt an organizational mandate, Ros Atkins and his team made fairness count in their work. Another great example is Google, which discovered a few years ago that women were leaving the company at higher rates than men. A deeper dive into the data revealed that new mothers drove this pattern. Google tested a solution: increasing the length of leave available to all new parents from 12 to 18 weeks. Google continued to monitor the data and discovered that this solution worked to close the gender gap. To make fairness count, we need to use the same tools we rely on to manage our daily work on incentives and accountability. Accountability, in particular, is critical because research shows that its one of the most powerful influences on behavior. For the 50:50 project, this meant that all participating teams could see each others data. When humans know that our actions are being watched, were more likely to be on our best behavior. 3. Make fairness stick. For fairness to stick, we must build changes into existing practices and procedures. Consider the resume: perhaps a benign document describing our educational and work experience, but whoever decided what a resume should look like? Two of our collaborators, Ariella Kristal and Oliver Hauser, took this to heart and tested the impact of a redesigned resume. They were interested in one specific issue: how we describe work experience. They explored the impact that different ways of framing work experience on resumes have on the likelihood that an applicant will be invited to an interview. They responded to job postings by more than 9,000 employers in the United Kingdom and presented job history either by displaying a single number indicating how many years a job was held or (as it is commonly done) by indicating the dates during which the applicants worked in a given job. The change in framing made the applicants acquired expertise salient while obfuscating employment gaps. When prior work experience was shown by the number of years worked, without any dates, it increased the likelihood that a candidate would be invited to an interview by 15 percent. This finding held for women and men. While this reframing is gender-neutral, it will disproportionately benefit those more likely to have had career breaks: women. 4. Make fairness normal. Before the pandemic, flexible work was typically a special accommodation available only by request and not always granted. For decades, research has shown that providing flexible work options for everyone improves retention, employee satisfaction, and productivity. Studies in the U.K. and Switzerland even showed that job postings advertised as flexible received up to 30 percent more applications, especially from women. It took COVID-19 for most organizations to accept flexible work as a default option for all their workers. Closing perception gaps shifts what people view as normal and, therefore, what they end up doing. Employees and job seekers pay attention to company signals about their norms and culture. Drivers do the same. In Montana, 85 percent of drivers reported using seat belts, but they estimated that only 60 percent of other drivers would do so. In Saudi Arabia, married men similarly underestimated the share of other husbands who support their wives working outside the home. Eighty-seven percent of Saudi men said they were supportive, but they believed only 63 percent of their peers would be. Closng perception gaps shifts what people view as normal and, therefore, what they end up doing. Like in meetings, if your workplace has a culture of rampant interruptions, it can be hard to get the full benefit of everyones ideas. One simple way to shift this norm is to interrupt the interrupter like this: I look forward to hearing what you have to say, but please let Nicole finish her point first. Soon, interruptions will likely become less common because they are no longer tolerated or viewed as normal. 5. Make fairness personal. In the film Hidden Figures, Katherine Johnson, Mary Jackson, and Dorothy Vaughan were three brilliant mathematicians who worked for NASA during the space race in the 1960s. Jackson became the first female African American engineer at NASA, Vaughan was the space agencys first African American supervisor, and Johnson conducted crucial research on flight trajectories for various space shuttle missions. Role models matter. Seeing is believing. A few years ago, India amended its constitution with the provision that a third village head position had to be held by women. Seeing women in leadership changed what women in these villages thought was possible for themselves. They became politically active, spoke up in town hall meetings, and were likelier to run for political office. The role models inspired parents who reported that one of the core career aspirations for their daughters was to become a politician. You can be one of these role models. You can also change the portraits on your office walls to ensure they represent everyone. You can inspire others to dare. The crux of making work fair is that it must be part of every single persons job. No matter your role, seniority, or activities, there is something that you personally can do to make work more fair. We liken this to communications. Most companies have a dedicated corporate communications department that handles high-profile press releases and CEO speeches. But simultaneously, every employee writes emails, speaks in meetings, and creates slide decks daily. Make small changes in the way you work and share them with others. Shift what people see as normal or what people expect as the way to do things. Together, we can get further faster and see real results unlike ever before. This article originally appeared in Next Big Idea Club magazine and is reprinted with permission.
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E-Commerce
Who wouldnt want a DOGE dividend? Such an idea is evidently being floated at the highest levels of government. DOGE, or the Department of Government Efficiency, is currently slashing through the federal budget in what it says is an effort to weed out waste and fraud, lower the budget deficit, and claw back money for the taxpayers. As part of that, one idea that made its way to Elon Muskwho is (or perhaps is not) leading DOGEwas that some of the savings that DOGE is finding could be returned to taxpayers in the form of $5,000 checks, or DOGE dividends or “stimulus,” as some are calling them. On X this week, Musk said that he would “check with the president” about doing it, and President Trump himself has since said hes open to the idea. While most Americans would no doubt love to have an extra $5,000, how realistic is the idea? Not very, say experts. Could DOGE even send out checks? While the infrastructure exists to send checks to taxpayers, the executive branch can’t do so on its own. Congress would need to step up first, says Zachary Liscow, a professor of law at Yale Law School who served as chief economist at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) at the White House in 2022 and 2023. In terms of technical feasibility, can the government send out a bunch of $5,00 checks? The answer is yes, Liscow says. But there are major challenges with doing so, he adds, first and foremost being that this would need to be a statute passed by Congress. Its not in the ability of the executive branch to send out checks without authorization from Congress. Additionally, Liscow says that the money, or savings that DOGE is finding, simply isnt there. Its wildly unfeasible, it is impossible, for Musk to save $2 trillion in a year and a half, which Musk said, at one point, was DOGEs goal. The federal government spent $6.75 trillion during fiscal year 2024, which ended in September, and most of that was mandatory spending. DOGE would be looking to cut discretionary spending, which would include National Parks, defense spending, border security, and much more. Even with wide-ranging cuts or proposed cuts, DOGE still wouldnt even come close to shaving off $2 trillion, Liscow says. You add it all up, and theyre going to be orders of magnitude off. It strikes me as a stunt. Its fake math, he says. Fast Company has reached out to DOGE for comment. What is DOGE actually up to? If DOGE is unable to deliver on its promises of saving trillions, then the question becomes: What exactly is it doing? So far, it seems like the answer is clear: Trollololol. Thats according to Martha Gimbel, executive director and cofounder of the Budget Lab at Yale, a nonpartisan policy research center that analyzes federal policy proposals and their potential effects on the economy. In effect, even as DOGE has caused a lot of waves in recent weeks, it hasnt really done anything to further its goals. It is incredibly unclear how much spending DOGE has actually cut, and how much spending they have legally cutand those are two separate questions. The best data we have about how much the government is spending, you cant see any impact at all. So theyve accomplished basically nothing, except the degradation of government services. By Gimbels calculation, even if you assume DOGE has cut $8.5 billionwhich is what it claims to have cut so fartaking that and sending out a check to each taxpayer would net them around $50, nowhere near $5,000. Not only that, but it would run counter to DOGEs stated goal of decreasing federal spending. Technically, they keep saying the point of DOGE is to cut the deficit, which is quite large. If you were going to plow any savings back to the taxpayer, then youre still left with the deficit problem. Youre not doing anything at all, Gimbel says. This is all to say that, no, you should not expect to receive a DOGE dividend check anytime soon, and certainly not a $5,000 one, despite what youre hearing from those in and around the White House. We really are in a situation where theres a lot that is being promised to Americans, but none of its being delivered, Gimbel says. There are ways you could do this in a way that makes the government function better, be more efficient, and get better outcomes for the taxpayer. Instead, theyre slashing and burning.
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E-Commerce
Information on the internet might seem like its there forever, but its only as permanent as people choose to make it. Thats apparent as the second Trump administration floods the zone with efforts to dismantle science agencies and the data and websites they use to communicate with the public. The targets range from public health and demographics to climate science. We are a research librarian and policy scholar who belong to a network called the Public Environmental Data Partners, a coalition of nonprofits, archivists and researchers who rely on federal data in our analysis, advocacy and litigation and are working to ensure that data remains available to the public. In just the first three weeks of Trumps term, we saw agencies remove access to at least a dozen climate and environmental justice analysis tools. The new administration also scrubbed the phrase climate change from government websites, as well as terms like resilience. Heres why and how Public Environmental Data Partners and others are making sure that the climate science the public depends on is available forever. Why government websites and data matter The internet and the availability of data are necessary for innovation, research and daily life. Climate scientists analyze NASA satellite observations and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration weather records to understand changes underway in the Earth system, whats causing them and how to protect the climates that economies were built on. Other researchers use these sources alongside Census Bureau data to understand who is most affected by climate change. And every day, people around the world log onto the Environmental Protection Agencys website to learn how to protect themselves from hazards and to find out what the government is or isnt doing to help. If the data and tools used to understand complex data are abruptly taken off the internet, the work of scientists, civil society organizations and government officials themselves can grind to a halt. The generation of scientific data and analysis by government scientists is also crucial. Many state governments run environmental protection and public health programs that depend on science and data collected by federal agencies. Removing information from government websites also makes it harder for the public to effectively participate in key processes of democracy, including changes to regulations. When an agency proposes to repeal a rule, for example, it is required to solicit comments from the public, who often depend on government websites to find information relevant to the rule. And when web resources are altered or taken offline, it breeds mistrust in both government and science. Government agencies have collected climate data, conducted complex analyses, provided funding and hosted data in a publicly accessible manner for years. People around the word understand climate change in large part because of U.S. federal data. Removing it deprives everyone of important information about their world. Bye-bye data? The first Trump administration removed discussions of climate change and climate policies widely across government websites. However, in our research with the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative over those first four years, we didnt find evidence that datasets had been permanently deleted. The second Trump administration seems different, with more rapid and pervasive removal of information. In response, groups involved in Public Environmental Data Partners have been archiving climate datasets our community has prioritized, uploading copies to public repositories and cataloging where and how to find them if they go missing from government websites. As of Feb. 13, 2025, we hadnt seen the destruction of climate science records. Many of these data collection programs, such as those at NOAA or EPAs Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program, are required by Congress. However, the administration had limited or eliminated access to a lot of data. Maintaining tools for understanding climate change Weve seen a targeted effort to systematically remove tools like dashboards that summarize and visualize the social dimensions of climate change. For instance, the Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool mapped low-income and other marginalized communities that are expected to experience severe climate changes, such as crop losses and wildfires. The mapping tool was taken offline shortly after Trumps first set of executive orders. Most of the original data behind the mapping tool, like the wildfire risk predictions, is still available, but is now harder to find and access. But because the mapping tool was developed as an open-source project, we were able o recreate it. Preserving websites for the future In some cases, entire webpages are offline. For instance, the page for the 25-year-old Climate Change Center at the Department of Transportation doesnt exist anymore. The link just sends visitors back to the departments homepage. Other pages have limited access. For instance, EPA hasnt yet removed its climate change pages, but it has removed climate change from its navigation menu, making it harder to find those pages. Fortunately, our partners at the End of Term Web Archive have captured snapshots of millions of government webpages and made them accessible through the Internet Archives Wayback Machine. The group has done this after each administration since 2008. If youre looking at a webpage and you think it should include a discussion of climate change, use the changes tool in the Wayback Machine to check if the language has been altered over time, or navigate to the sites snapshots of the page before Trumps inauguration. What you can do You can also find archived climate and environmental justice datasets and tools on the Public Environmental Data Partners website. Other groups are archiving datasets linked in the Data.gov data portal and making them findable in other locations. Individual researchers are also uploading datasets in searchable repositories like OSF, run by the Center for Open Science. If you are worried that certain data currently still available might disappear, consult this checklist from MIT Libraries. It provides steps for how you can help safeguard federal data. Narrowing the knowledge sphere Whats unclear is how far the administration will push its attempts to remove, block or hide climate data and science, and how successful it will be. Already, a federal district court judge has ruled that the Centers for Disease Control and Preventions removal of access to public health resources that doctors rely on was harmful and arbitrary. These were put back online thanks to that ruling. We worry that more data and information removals will narrow public understanding of climate change, leaving people, communities and economies unprepared and at greater risk. While data archiving efforts can stem the tide of removals to some extent, there is no replacement for the government research infrastructures that produce and share climate data. Eric Nost is an associate professor of geography at the University of Guelph. Alejandro Paz is an energy and environment librarian at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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