This article is written by Dr Kim Louw, Principal Behavioural Advisor, Behavioural Insights Unit, New South Wales Department of Customer Service

Organisations around the world have been actively trying to increase the representation of women in their senior leadership. However, a persistent stumbling block is that women are less likely to apply for these senior roles compared to their male peers.

To understand this difference, many professionals are turning to highly cited research suggesting that women generally hold off on applying for roles until they meet close to 100% of the selection criteria. By contrast, men tend to apply when they meet around 60% of the criteria.

This can often lead to the conclusion that the problem is at the individual level, and that it requires an individual-level solution, such as mentoring or training for women. And while this is part of the story, it forgets that our established systems and processes also have the power to change people’s behaviour.

In the NSW Government’s Behavioural Insights Unit we’re all about understanding, building and testing ways to improve policies, processes and systems that support behavioural change. For the last couple of years, the Behavioural Insights Unit has been applying behavioural insights to support the Premier’s Priority to increase the proportion of women in senior leader roles in the NSW Government sector to 50% by 2025.

We found that women were less likely than men to reapply for a senior role after they had narrowly missed out on a role

Since 2015 (the year the target was created), the representation of women has steadily grown from 33% to 40%. While this increase is an important step, there is still a considerable way to go.

Like many organisations, our research in the NSW Government Sector showed that while women were more interested than men in applying for and taking on a senior role, they were less likely to do so. We also found that women were less likely than men to reapply for a senior role after they had narrowly missed out on a role.

In a cross-sector collaboration with the Public Service Commission and several NSW Government agencies, we used behavioural insights to help address these gender differences. We designed and tested two behaviourally informed interventions, an email and a phone call, to increase the proportion of women reapplying for senior roles in the NSW Government. The email and phone call focussed on encouraging candidates to re-apply and let them know how far they had made it through the recruitment.

Together the email and phone call interventions increased the likelihood of women reapplying for a senior role by 27% and significantly reduced the gender gap between men and women reapplying for senior roles from 45% to just 4%. Not only did the interventions lead to a significant reduction in the gender gap in reapplication, but they also significantly increased satisfaction with the recruitment process for both men and women.

These simple, low cost interventions are now being scaled across the NSW Government, making better candidate care part of business as usual. Developing innovative new strategies to increase gender equality using behavioural insights is just one way the NSW Government is delivering on being a world class public service.

Read more about our latest trial here. — Kim Louw

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