'Robotics Barbie' part of push to promote women's professional development

Robotics Barbie is a lab-coat-and-glasses-wearing robotics engineer, a far cry from the 1992 “math class is tough” version. Appropriately, she’s also part of a Mattel Inc. initiative to promote new jobs for girls, in line with a public pledge the company made earlier this year.

In February, Mattel Senior Vice President Lisa McKnight joined 40 executives onstage at the Makers women’s diversity conference to make a range of commitments toward improving women’s professional lives. McKnight promised 10 such dolls this year; advertising group UM said it would double the number of women of color at every level of its organization; LinkedIn said it will add job coaching for returning moms.

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These kinds of public diversity pledges have in recent years become a kind of progressive calling card for companies looking to keep and attract young talent. There’s a promise for every interest group, with a wide range of commitment and accountability.

Some 300 CEOs have signed on to the CEO Action coalition, which seeks to share successful diversity initiatives. Many members of that group are also part of Paradigm for Parity and Parity.org, which have similar missions to increase all forms of workplace diversity.

The Thirty Percent Coalition, 3% Movement, and 2020 Women on Boards ask signees for a commitment to specific levels of female representation. Others focus singly on LGBT rights, or ethnicity, veterans or the disabled or in a specific field such as the Tech Inclusion Pledge.

“There are strong social norms right now around committing to these kinds of goals,” said Dolly Chugh, an associate professor of management and organization at the NYU Stern School of Business. She has studied how public pressure changes diversity behavior. “If you’re among the minority of CEOs who isn’t signing the pledge or promise, you’re violating a norm and norm violations make people very uncomfortable.”

By most measures, two decades of increased efforts to improve diversity have slowed or stalled. Parity for women in boardrooms is still at least three decades away. Women and people of color are dramatically underrepresented in top management. At the CEO level, white men still occupy 95 percent of the seats.

In some specific areas, though, public commitments have prompted change. Formed in 2011, the 3% Movement was named after the ratio of women creative directors in the advertising world to men. (They now make up 29 percent.) The 2020 Women On Boards and the 30% Club also say they’re close to success. (Peter Grauer, chairman of Bloomberg news parent company Bloomberg LP, is the founding chairman of the U.S. 30% Club, and Bloomberg LP has participated in several diversity pledges.)

The more the merrier, says Shannon Schuyler, who heads up corporate responsibility at PwC. The professional services company started CEO Action for Diversity & Inclusion a year ago. Almost 90 percent of the organizations either have or are planning to add unconscious bias training. “This is about the CEO saying that they will put themselves out there, to really be able to make the change happen,” Schuyler said. “They’re the ones we believe can move the lever.”

An important aspect of any pledge is that it be tangible and measurable, said Mark Lipscomb, who heads up human resources at 23andMe Inc. The consumer genetic testing company also pledged in February to raise the share of women in its science and technology jobs to roughly 50 percent from 38 percent today.

“If you look at our overall gender diversity, the company is very strong in pretty much every area except engineering,” Lipscomb said. “I didn’t want to do a pledge that was just soft and fluffy. For us, this is a hard one, but it’s also measurable, so we can see if we’re getting better.”

Robotics Engineer Barbie, which comes with a humanoid robot and laptop, will partner with the Tynker game platform and Black Girls CODE to encourage girls to embrace computer science, according to Mattel. The company says it’s introduced 17 dolls focused on careers and female role models, more than the 10 promised.

Among the other companies on the Makers stage with specific goals included Adobe Systems Inc., which promises gender pay parity at all locations by the end of this year, and is at least 80 percent there already, said Donna Morris, executive vice president of the customer and employee experience at the maker of Photoshop.

AT&T Inc. and L’Oreal SA promised at Makers to improve their representation of women in their advertisements, as measured by progress on the scorecard generated by #SeeHer, an organization that has its own pledge to improve the portrayal of women by 20 percent, as measured by viewers, by 2020. So far, 70 companies with $45 billion in advertising spending have signed up for that goal.

“People really, really, really value keeping a promise,” said Ayelet Gneezy, an associate professor at the Rady School of Management at the University of California, San Diego, who has studied how people react to promises honored and broken.

“It’s really about the value of trustworthiness and reliability,” Gneezy said. “So there’s also a risk to not keeping the promise. I don’t really care what they tried to do, I care what they did.”

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