It has become fashionable for modern workplaces to relax what are often seen as outmoded relics of a less egalitarian age: out with stuffy hierarchies, in with flat organisational structures. But the problem with the absence of a formal hierarchy is that it doesn’t actually result in an absence of a hierarchy altogether. It just means that the unspoken, implicit, profoundly non-egalitarian structure reasserts itself, with white men at the top and the rest of us fighting for a piece of the small space left for everyone else. Group-discussion approaches like brainstorming, explains female leadership trainer Gayna Williams, are ‘well known to be loaded with challenges for diverse representation’, because already-dominant voices dominate.78 But simple adjustments like monitoring interruptions79 and more formally allocating a set amount of time for each person to speak have both been shown to attenuate male dominance of debates. This is in fact what Glen Mazarra, a showrunner at FX TV drama The Shield, did when he noticed that female writers weren’t speaking up in the writer’s room – or that when they did, they were interrupted and their ideas overtaken. He instituted a no-interruption policy while writers (male or female) were pitching. It worked – and, he says, ‘it made the entire team more effective’.80
Caroline Criado Perez in Invisible Women