Erica: Hey, girl. By now, you know I have HER Collective, my online community for ambitious women who are done doing it alone. HER Collective is for the women who are smart, capable, and driven, but they find themselves stuck on the sticky floors like self doubt, burnout, and waiting for permission that quite honestly never comes. Inside HER, you get more than motivation. You get real support, real strategies, and real momentum.

Erica: We work on things like clarifying what you want now and what's coming next, building confidence without burning yourself out, navigating hard conversations, career moves, and leadership moments with clarity, and surrounding yourself with women who actually get it. This isn't about hustling harder. It's about moving intentionally with the right tools and the right people in your corner. If you're ready to stop spinning, start choosing yourself, and build a career and life that actually feels aligned, I'd love to welcome you inside HER Collective. You can learn more and join us at www.joinhercollective.com.

Erica: Because honestly, girl, you were never meant to do this alone. Welcome to the Glass Ceilings and Sticky Floors podcast, the podcast where we get real about the challenges women face in work, life, and leadership. I'm your host, Erica Rooney, HR executive, keynote speaker, and executive coach, and I'm on a mission to get more women into positions of power and keep them there. This is the space where we call out the paradoxes, being told to lean in but not too far, to speak up but not too loudly, ambitious but not too ambitious. Sound familiar?

Erica: Yeah. We're over all that. Here, we break down the sticky floors that keep us stuck, from imposter syndrome and perfectionism to burnout and fear, and give you real strategies to shatter those glass ceilings once and for all. So if you're ready to rewrite the rules, own your power, and take your career and life to the next level, you're in the right place. Today's guest is a senior researcher at the Women and Public Policy Program at Harvard Kennedy School and an internationally recognized expert in advancing women and promoting gender equality in organizations.

Erica: She specializes in identifying practical, evidence-based strategies to close gender gaps at work, not through checking a DEI box, y'all, but by redesigning systems to be fairer for everyone. Her insights have been featured in the New York Times, Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, and more. Whether she's advising global companies or speaking on the main stage at events like the Women's Forum Global Meeting or the DEI Innovation Summit, y'all, she's helping leaders move beyond performative gestures to real, sustainable impact. Please welcome Siri Chilazi to the show. Siri, how are you?

Siri: Oh, Erica. I'm so great, and I'm thrilled to be here with you. Thank you so much for that incredibly generous introduction. I'm so excited in particular because I truly share your mission of getting more women into positions of leadership and power and keeping them there. So I'm really looking forward to our conversation.

Erica: Oh my gosh. Look, I saw your name, your book title, and I was like, we've got to get this woman on the show. But let's talk about your story, because you went from physics and chemistry to public policy to workplace fairness and gender equality. How did we get there?

Siri: So the physics and chemistry was in college, and you're absolutely right, that was my major. I was always a science geek growing up. Loved it. Loved studying those subjects, but also realized in college that I didn't actually love doing lab research in those topics or making it my life's work.

Siri: So I went into management consulting after college, learned a lot, and also came face to face with all the gender inequities and biases and gaps that I'd only read about until then. But at least in my case, the educational system had done a pretty good job of insulating me from the worst manifestations of those gender inequities. And as soon as I entered the world of work, I went, oh my goodness, this is still very real.

Siri: I can't believe all this stuff is happening. And that's what really ignited the fire in me to say, these are the things I'm most passionate about working on, and I want to figure out a way I can spend my life helping to close these gender gaps so future generations don't have to deal with this stuff anymore. That's ultimately what brought me back to graduate school and then led me to academia, where I've been for the last ten years, doing research on the concrete ways we can make our organizational processes and practices more fair. Processes like hiring, performance evaluation, promotions, informal practices like how we run our meetings, how we write emails, how we structure social events at work, but also formal policies around parental leave, flexible working, sexual harassment reporting, and things like that.

Erica: I love all of that. I love that you touched on entering the workforce thinking, I don't know if any of this gender stuff is still there, and then getting smacked in the face with it. Tell me a little more about that moment, because I had one myself, and I tell everybody it splits everything into a before and after, when you're living in this fantasy world where you think it doesn't exist, it's not going to happen to me.

Erica: And then you find that you're a woman trying to navigate all of this. What was your moment?

Siri: Yeah. It was actually pretty soon after I started, at the onboarding training. A couple weeks in, my firm was global. I'm starting in my own office, looking around.

Siri: I'm seeing roughly fifty-fifty women and men around the office, a lot of diversity of all kinds. I'm working in New York, so it's not so surprising. Then I go to the global onboarding training that pulls in new joiners from all the offices. I actually distinctly remember walking into the room. I got there straight from the airport, just in the nick of time, they were about to start.

Siri: I'm the last person to walk into the room, and I do a quick scan, and it's about 30 to 35 people, and I'm one of four women. It just struck me, and I thought, this is different from what I was seeing in my own home office. This says something about the company's culture. Then, as I'm there for a couple of weeks, months, I start to know the lay of the land, who's who, and I realize that while it's about fifty-fifty at the entry level, less than 10% of partners globally are women.

Siri: This, by the way, is still very accurate for a lot of professional services firms in the US and around the world. Then, as you advance, you're looking around, seeing who's getting the promotions, who's getting access to the high-profile projects, who tends to lead them. You start to see the gender gaps emerging there. Gender gaps start to emerge in pay. Now, I didn't know what everyone was getting paid, but I did know what I was getting paid, along with a few colleagues, and I had the distinct sense I was being underpaid.

Siri: So wherever you look, you start to see the disparities. At the same time, you're working hand in hand with these people every day, and you look at the women and think, they're fantastic, they're at least as fantastic as the men. I'm seeing their work product, and there's no discernible reason why they'd be paid less, or not given access to the highest-profile assignments, or not getting promoted as quickly as the men.

Erica: That's so interesting to me, because when I first entered the workforce, I only reported to women in the beginning. My entry into corporate America, I was very naive to that for the first, like, eight years of my career. Even after that, I had another female leader, and it wasn't until I had my first male leader that I noticed how different it was, and how many other women were experiencing that from the jump, like you.

Siri: Was that your moment, Erica?

Erica: Oh, my moment? Girl, my moment was when my male boss walked into an executive meeting and pitched my idea as his own. It was a big old slap in the face. And like you said, since then you just start seeing these little things, and noticing, would you say that to a man, or is that how you'd approach a woman? You start noticing inequities all around.

Erica: Some of them are made with the best of intentions. I remember people asking me, who's going to watch your kids when you have to do all this travel? Nobody was asking my husband that.

Erica: In the beginning, I didn't quite see it. Then, as I started to climb that ladder, I noticed it more and more, especially in comparison to my husband and what he wasn't having to deal with.

Siri: Yeah. And it's even the small, everyday interactions and things people say. There was a senior man who got promoted around the time he'd had a baby, and he made this joke, totally intended as innocuous and funny. He said, well, now that I have a kid, I'm tied to the company forever, I have to stay here because I'm the breadwinner now.

Siri: I just chuckled. But in my head I thought, wait a second, that's not the assumption made about women. What does the fact that you chose to have a kid have anything to do with your professional competence or whether you should be at a higher or lower level? These things shouldn't have any bearing on each other.

Siri: But it goes to show you how people are still thinking.

Erica: And also, what message is it sending? To the people hearing it, to your children, to the people in your neighborhood, all of it.

Siri: Yeah.

Erica: But Siri, you've worked with so many organizations on their DEI strategies. I want to know, in your opinion, what's missing from most traditional approaches?

Siri: So many well-intentioned people doing so much good work. What I'm obsessed with, as a behavioral scientist and social scientist, is data and results. Let's test something. Let's test a practice and see if it actually moves the needle.

Siri: Let's see if it works to do the things we want it to do. Where we've gone a little off the rails in the last several years is that a lot of the practices we've spent time, money, and attention on, however well intentioned, have decades of research behind them suggesting they don't always work to do what we want. A good example is diversity trainings, unconscious bias trainings. They've been super popular. They've also been around in different forms since the 1960s.

Siri: So we've had more than half a century to study their effects, and the research is consistent across hundreds of studies that these trainings don't actually help people change behaviors. Concrete actions. They do often raise awareness.

Siri: People often love these trainings because they feel like they've learned new things. If you ask them on the way out the door to rate the training one to ten, people say eleven out of ten, I learned so much, I love the facilitator. But when you follow up with these people twelve or eighteen or twenty-four months later and ask, okay, who's speaking in meetings?

Siri: Who are these people hiring? Who are they promoting? How do their team members feel about the culture on this team? We just don't see changes in those concrete metrics. That's my biggest thing about what's missing.

Siri: It's a focus on evaluating what we're doing, actually testing if our practices are having the intended effect, and then focusing on the practices that have been shown to be most promising in the first place.

Erica: I love that. It's a yes-and, because my brain's going in two directions here. You, as a behavioral scientist, know all of this. We teach it. We have the trainings. People go out into the real world.

Erica: But it's really hard to get people to change, especially if you're trying to do this at a company level. I hear in a lot of your work that the key is debiasing systems, not people. I feel like that's where we tie it in here. Can you break that down for me? What does debiasing systems mean, and what does it look like in practice?

Siri: Yeah. I think this is one of the most exciting insights from behavioral science. We know human brains are biased. Unconscious bias is just the shortcuts and patterns and heuristics we use to make millions of decisions per moment, per second. Our brain resorts to those unconscious patterns to make sense of a lot of information really quickly.

Siri: That's unconscious bias. It's how human brains operate. That's not going away. But with our biased brains, we've also created systems to guide our work daily. Things like, how do we hire?

Siri: Do we ask people to submit resumes? Who reviews those resumes? In what order? Do we have guidelines and rubrics and criteria for how to review those resumes? You see my point?

Siri: Systems don't have to be some big, crazy thing. It's all the small practices that guide what we do daily. Science has shown that those structures and systems we've created are actually a lot faster and easier and simpler to debias than our brains. Because those systems influence our behavior so much, when we debias those systems, we're able to make more objective, better, fairer decisions, even without debiasing our brains. Let me give you a really concrete example.

Siri: Just on resumes, since we're talking about hiring, I'm guessing everyone listening has a resume, and I'm guessing most of you have it in a format where you list past work experience and educational experience with specific dates attached. Management consultant, 2010 to 2013. What that format makes obvious, often unintentionally, is if you had any gaps. If you took time out of the workforce for any reason, maybe you traveled the world for a year, took a sabbatical, stepped away to care for kids or elderly parents, or tried a new startup that didn't pan out and you don't want to mention it.

Siri: There are a lot of reasons people would have these gaps. And empirically, we know, new data came out a week or two ago, that employers still today penalize candidates with career gaps. They assume them to be worse employment prospects than folks with a continuous work history. That's a bias, unconscious or sometimes conscious, that employers have. Our colleagues in the UK tested a small tweak to the resume format where you don't use the specific years, but express your experience with total number of years instead of dates.

Siri: So: management consultant, three years. Business school, two years. Researcher, ten years. In that new format, you don't lose any information needed to assess the person's skills and competence for the job.

Siri: Because we still know where they worked and for how long. But what's now obscured are any potential gaps in their work history. This study was able to show, across more than 9,000 real companies hiring for real jobs, who didn't know they were participating in an experiment, that changing the resume format increased both women's and men's likelihood of getting called in for an interview and advancing in the hiring process, because the bias against resume gaps was no longer there. That's an example of a really small tweak to our systems, in this case how we present information on our resumes, that helps companies and recruiters actually find better matches for the jobs they're looking for.

Erica: Amazing. So the way I'm trying to make sense of it in my head is, by putting all of these systems in place, it's almost as if we're reducing the opportunity for our unconscious bias to show.

Siri: That's a great way of putting it. For those biases to influence our decisions.

Erica: Yeah. And what I talk about with so many people, I think it's ingrained in us that bias is bad, especially unconscious bias, and people try to cover it up and hide it and pretend they don't have it. And it's like, no, no, no.

Erica: It is there, and it's there to stay. You have to know what to do with it. I love this idea of corporations and organizations putting these systems in place so your bias doesn't have to come out, so you can at least mitigate some of it. So interesting. Siri, one of the things we talk a lot about on this podcast are sticky floors.

Erica: Sticky floors are the limiting beliefs and toxic behaviors that keep you stuck. In my work, I found that everyone has sticky floors, but they impact women on a completely different level, from imposter syndrome to perfectionism. I wanted to know, do you have a sticky floor you've overcome in your journey, whether that's imposter syndrome, perfectionism, burnout, or just the pressure to perform at the highest level in an elite space?

Erica: Hey there, listeners. If you've ever felt stuck, held back by self doubt, perfectionism, or that pesky inner critic, you're not alone. We all face those sticky floors that keep us from reaching the heights we dream of. But guess what? It's time to shatter those limiting beliefs and toxic behaviors to uncover infinite possibilities. My book, Glass Ceilings and Sticky Floors, is your ultimate guide to smashing through barriers, overcoming limiting beliefs, and stepping into your full potential. This book has been endorsed by none other than Mel Robbins, bestselling author and motivational powerhouse.

Erica: It's also been featured in Success Magazine, so you know it's packed with insights that work. Inside, you'll find real-life sticky floor stories, practical strategies to help you navigate your own sticky floor moments, and a whole lot of inspiration to keep you climbing. This isn't just a book, it's your roadmap to success, confidence, and freedom. Grab your copy of Glass Ceilings and Sticky Floors today at www.ericaandersonrooney.com.

Erica: Whether you're in the boardroom, the classroom, or just starting out, this book is for you, because no one, and I mean no one, deserves to stay stuck. No one deserves to feel small, and you have glass ceilings to shatter. Let's do this.

Siri: The first example that comes to mind is actually from my first job in management consulting. I entered wide-eyed and naive. This was my first full-time job in my whole life. I'm thinking, of course you need to focus on doing the best work you can, putting your head down, being a great team player, doing all of these things. Then once it's time for you to get promoted, someone else will recognize your fabulous work and decide to promote you.

Siri: So the time will come. Part of the reason I thought this is because the processes around how to get promoted are often not written down anywhere in organizations. When you start a new job, you get this 60-page employee handbook, which, by the way, I did read cover to cover very diligently. It talks about time reporting and vacation time and expense policies and dress codes and all these other things. But it doesn't actually tell you a lot of the key details you'd need to know to be successful in your everyday job.

Siri: Things like, how do I get promoted? What's the performance evaluation process? How should I position myself over the course of six months so that when the biannual performance evaluation comes, I'm likely to get the highest score? Do meetings start on time? Is it okay to challenge senior leaders in meetings, or is that viewed negatively in the culture?

Siri: So I just went about my day, wasn't even thinking about promotions, nine months in, until one of my project managers, a man, actually, who is a wonderful sponsor and mentor, said, Siri, you're really good, you should go up for promotion. And I said, what do you mean, go up for promotion? He said, yeah, you should apply for it in the next cycle. And I said, okay, pause.

Siri: Is there a cycle? What's the cycle? When is the next cycle? What do you mean, apply for a promotion? How do I apply for a promotion?

Siri: That was the moment I realized, oh my goodness, there's all this hidden knowledge that some people know and some people don't. It's definitely not written down anywhere it would be democratically accessible to everyone about how to advance. You have to be in the driver's seat of your career at all times, plotting your next move, asking where next, asking where your gaps are, what skills you need to develop. If you're lucky, like me, you might encounter managers and senior people who take a proactive interest in your career development and help you with some of that.

Siri: But you can't count on that. You need to be asking the questions. You need to be seeking out the opportunities. That was a huge lesson for me, and I was lucky to get it at the outset of my career. But this connects to a bigger theme in the research, which is that this knowledge and these opportunities today in organizations are not distributed equally and fairly.

Siri: Some people have those mentors. Some people's parents might have worked in that industry, so even growing up at home before entering the workplace, they understand what networking looks like, how promotions happen, what you need to know to get on the high-profile projects that position you for advancement. One of the things we need to do to give everyone an equal opportunity to succeed, what we need to do to make work fair, is equalize access to that information and those opportunities. That could look like writing it all down and sharing it with everyone as part of onboarding, or having a centralized system for work allocation so everyone gets a chance to work on both the big, high-profile projects and the unglamorous small projects in the background.

Siri: Instead of some people consistently getting the sexy assignments and some people being forced to do the grunt work.

Erica: Okay. What would you say to the woman who isn't in a position where she can influence, let's say, the handbook? She goes to her leader and says, look, I want to talk about the promotion process.

Erica: This is what I've been doing. How can I get promoted here? And they say, we don't really have a process for that. Because I've worked in plenty of organizations where there's no process, there's no rhyme or reason.

Erica: What do they do?

Siri: Right. So there's always a process. It might not be formal. When someone says there's not a process, what it means is these decisions are made ad hoc, at unknown times, by certain people who you might not know are in the room deciding.

Siri: So that's what it means to not have a process. There's still a process. It's just incredibly informal.

Erica: So true.

Siri: So, okay. How does knowledge of that help you? It means you need to talk to more people, not just your direct boss.

Siri: If they're not being helpful or forthright, maybe that person's boss, maybe people at your level, maybe your boss's peers, maybe people in other functions of the company. Someone somewhere will know who the decision makers in the room are when this happens. I always frame this as, you asking these questions and being interested is also showing agency and initiative, which are qualities of leadership organizations often say they're looking for. We want people who are seeking out the next thing, who are looking at how they can help the organization further. So that information gathering is essential, because you need to know the lay of the land.

Siri: Once you know who these decision makers actually are, do you have to apply? Does that application just entail you saying, hey, X, Y, and Z reasons make me think I'm ready to get promoted, I'd like to go up for this now? Or do you have to write a memo to someone?

Siri: Do you have to produce a ten-page slide deck detailing your accomplishments over the last year? Then you start to get into the nitty gritty, and ideally, through your conversations, you form a coalition of people who can be your amplifiers, allies, and supporters, who'll be pounding the table on your behalf in the rooms you're not in, saying, yes, Erica is that go-getter. She's taking initiative. I've seen her in action. Her work is impeccable.

Siri: Let's give her this next-level opportunity.

Erica: Oh my goodness. Alright, I'm going to take a small left turn, because all the work you've poured into this book, Make Work Fair, I look at it very similar to my book, Glass Ceilings and Sticky Floors, in that when I wrote it, it's now more relevant today than when I started writing it two years ago. I imagine it's much the same for you, with all the pushback happening around DEI right now.

Erica: How does that make you feel about the hope for women and truly making work fair?

Siri: Yeah. I agree with you wholeheartedly. Books, of course, take two or three years to write before they come out. When you finish writing them, it's another nine to twelve months before they're published, because it has to get proofread and printed and all of that. You never really can predict the moment your book emerges into the world.

Siri: Make Work Fair, which I co-authored with my colleague, Iris Bohnet, came out in January 2025, and it turns out it was the timeliest moment ever to be talking about these topics. So the universe does work in its own ways to make things happen at the right time. I think we're having important conversations right now, which Iris and I very much encourage, about what is working and what hasn't been working. How can we maximize our limited resources, whether that's money, time, attention, or goodwill? These things don't come in unlimited supply. So how do we use those resources most strategically on the things that do work, that are most likely to give us the real results we're looking for?

Siri: The research is really consistent that the most effective practices are, just like the resume example, small tweaks to the things we're already doing to make them fairer and smarter. If you think about your everyday work, how do you spend 99% of your time? Probably not going to networking events. Probably not doing trainings. It's writing emails, sitting in meetings, engaging with your customers, sometimes hiring, promoting, sometimes giving informal feedback to colleagues, making decisions about who should work on which project.

Siri: That's the core of our everyday work. So if we're going to make that work more fair, it's those everyday practices and processes, however formal or informal they are, that we need to tackle. That's what making work fair is all about.

Erica: And we've got to make work fair, y'all. This is my question for you too. Right now we're getting a lot of skeptics out there, people who think workplace fairness is all about lowering the bar.

Erica: We're checking boxes. What do you say to the people who are resisting this type of change at the system level?

Siri: Part of the reset we have to make in this moment is clearing up some of those misconceptions and being very clear about what fairness is about. Fairness is about ensuring everyone gets to play on the same level playing field and gets an equal opportunity to succeed to their full potential. That doesn't mean everyone is going to get the promotion or become the CEO, because people have different capacities and skills. People also have different preferences and priorities. Some folks want to work eighty to a hundred hours a week, and that's often what it takes to become CEO.

Siri: Other people are happy doing their best work for thirty-five or forty hours, but they still have a lot to contribute to the organization. We should have a way of harnessing everybody's talents. That's what fairness is all about. The other way I think about this, and why fairness is so essential, is that no matter what kind of business or organization you work in, whether it's a two-person small business or a 200,000-person global behemoth, your people are the key to your success. If you're going to develop the best products, produce the most widgets, serve your clients in the best way, you need the best people in the right roles at the right time, doing their best work.

Siri: And that's actually not possible without fairness, because in order to have the best people in the right roles, it requires us to be able to spot talent everywhere it exists. It requires us to have hiring practices that allow the best talent to come through the door in the first place. Once we have people in our organization, we need to be able to evaluate them objectively and fairly, so we know who should stay and who should go, who should get promoted, who should be put on what types of assignments, both so they can grow, but more importantly, so they can contribute to their fullest extent to our organization's success.

Siri: So fairness is actually underpinning all the things we're doing already anyway. It just enables us to do those things better.

Erica: Well, I've read the book, Make Work Fair. You guys did an amazing job. I think I read it in like one week, because of course.

Siri: Oh my gosh. Bless you.

Erica: That's very much speaking my love language, girl. But I've got to know, what's the one piece of advice you'd give to the woman who feels like the system just isn't built for her success?

Siri: The first thing I'd say, this isn't advice, but just reassurance, it's not you. There's so much data to back up people's anecdotal experiences of, wait, I think I'm getting paid unfairly. Yes, there's a big economy-wide pay gap, so it's quite likely that you are. I feel like I'm not getting the same information as other people.

Siri: I'm not getting access to the same networks. That may well be true, because there's a ton of research to back that up. You feel like you're a high performer, but somehow the guys to the left and right of you are still getting promoted faster. Yes. There's research to show that even when women and men get the same performance evaluations, the same scores, it translates to faster advancement and higher monetary rewards for men than for women.

Siri: So the playing field is unlevel today. It's been conclusively proven. It's real, and it's not about you. I think that's the first thing, because it gives us the reassurance that, wait, I'm not crazy.

Siri: This stuff is real. So then the question becomes, what to do about it? This is where Iris and I hope to offer the message with Make Work Fair, that no matter who you are and where you sit in the organizational hierarchy, how senior, or what kind of role, there is something you can do to make your work more fair, and in doing so, help make the whole organization more fair for you and for other people. Maybe you're the most junior person on the marketing team, and your job is to update the company's website and run the company's social media. That actually gives you quite a lot of power to decide what kind of images to use, whom to feature in your content, how representative that content is of the people already in your organization, the customer base you're serving, and the people you're trying to attract to work for you going forward.

Siri: That's all within your control if you're managing social media and updating the website. If you're the manager of a team and you have people reporting to you, how do you ensure you're giving equal time and attention to your direct reports? There was a wonderful study done at Novartis, the global pharmaceutical company, looking at how to increase sense of inclusion and psychological safety on teams. Psychological safety is people's willingness to take interpersonal risks, the comfort they feel.

Siri: For example, going up against a senior leader or raising a contrarian opinion. They found that when managers were asked to conduct their one-on-ones in a way where they spoke less, listened more, and gave more space to their direct report to direct the conversation and surface their needs and aspirations, that increased sense of inclusion and psychological safety. It also led to an increase in the number of one-on-one meetings managers were having with their direct reports, and team culture improved. So it's something as simple as that, making small tweaks to how you do your work every day.

Erica: I love it, because that's all we need, a small tiny step we can all take, and it adds up to that big one-degree shift, which then has massive changes. Siri, thank you so much for sharing your expertise, for talking about how we can make work fair, and also what we can do as individuals if we don't feel like it is. I appreciate that. Thank you so much.

Siri: I so appreciate you having me on, Erica. I love all the work you're doing, so it's been a joy to share this time together. And thank you to everyone for listening.

Erica: Yes. And if today's conversation lit a fire under you, here's your next move. Don't keep this episode to yourself. Share it with a friend, drop a review, and let's keep the conversation going. Remember, your potential is limitless, and the only thing standing in your way are those sticky floors.

Erica: But guess what? You have the power to break through them. So go out there, let's take up space, and let's shatter some ceilings together.