# An Agent-Based Simulation of How Promotion Biases Impact Corporate Gender Diversity
## 5 Results
### Experiment 3: The Impact of Removing All Biases  
Many companies nowadays have implemented diversity management policies in an attempt to create an inclusive environment for women and members of underrepresented minorities. One of the most important policies targeted at lowering managerial bias in promotions is diversity training. However, most of the research that examines the efficacy of diversity training such as seminars and workshops reveals that implementing diversity training as a single initiative will not lead to a more diverse organization, at least not in the short run [41; 55; 56]. Some studies show that bias awareness training could even cause biases to be strengthened after the training [57]. We wanted to test what would happen in our simulation if we completely removed all biases (hiring and promotion) for a company that was already showing a significant gender imbalance. In other words, we wanted to see whether creating equal hiring and promotion opportunities by eliminating all biases is sufficient to undo the gender imbalances originally caused by the biases. To test this, we repeated two of the same scenarios we tested in Experiment 1, but we set the promotion bias to zero after 10 years of operations. Once the promotion bias drops to zero, the promotion score is solely based on an employee's seniority, meaning that advancement depends only on how long an employee has been at a given rank, and not on gender. The results are shown in Figures 7 and 8. The scenarios we chose for this experiment used the same parameters used to generate Figure 4 (promotion bias of 0.3) and Figure 5 (promotion bias of 0.5). Figures 7 and 8 show that even if all biases could be removed, it can take a very long time to \"undo\" the damage done, especially at the upper levels. Specifically, we can see in Figure 7 that, after ten years of operations with a gender bias of 0.3, men occupy 80% of the positions at the executive level, 75% at the VP level, 60% at the manager level and 45% at the entry level (as we mentioned earlier, the reason why there are more women than men at the entry level is because more women are left behind as men have a higher chance of being promoted to the manager level). When all biases are removed after ten years, we see that the entry level and the manager level return to 50-50 within three years, as women are quickly promoted from entry level to manager level. However, it takes nearly ten years for the VP level to return to approximately a 50-50 level. As to the executive level, we see a gradual decline over the two decades following bias removal, but even after a full 30 years, men still maintain a 60-40 majority over women. The results are similar when the promotion bias is initially set to 0.5: as shown in Figure 8, after ten years, the representation of men across the four levels is about 40% (entry level), 70% (manager), 85% (VP) and 90% (executive). As in the previous example, the two lower levels return to a 50-50 gender balance within about three years, the VP level reaches parity in just under ten years, while the executive level takes about 12 years to drop from 90% to 70%, but then declines only very gradually, and is still around 60% after three full decades without bias. These results are relatively easy to understand when we think about the compounding effects of two different factors. First, as explained in an earlier section--and as is generally the case in real companies--the average tenure of employees is related to their rank, with employees at higher ranks staying longer than employees at lower ranks. Hence, it simply takes longer to \"flush out\" the imbalances at the higher ranks. Second, simply removing promotion biases does not cancel the existing disparities. Consider for example what happens at the manager level in Figure 8: just when the biases are turned off in year ten, 70% of the managers are male.