A fairness myth we frequently encounter is what one of the leading decision-making and negotiation scholars, Max Bazerman, calls the “mythical-fixed-pie mindset”: the often-incorrect assumption (also called zero-sum thinking) that one person’s gain has to equal another person’s loss, or that there is only a finite amount of resources to go around.
In some cases, this is, of course, true. The number of people who can win in the Olympics is finite; the number of spots available in most legislatures is fixed; and when haggling with a merchant, a lower price for you equals less money for them.
But in most workplace situations, more issues are at play, allowing for creative solutions where all parties end up being better off. And the more we are stuck in the fixed-pie mentality, the harder it is to spot the opportunities to expand the pie for everyone’s benefit.
While genuine zero-sum situations are relatively rare, zero-sum beliefs are not, and much research suggests that our zero-sum beliefs can be limiting. In three studies, men’s zero-sum thinking increased when they were exposed to information highlighting the gains women have made in education, politics, and the workplace over the last century. This, in turn, increased sexism and lowered men’s support for workplace policies promoting gender equity.
Another study supporting these findings showed that people’s zero-sum beliefs about gender at work tend to reflect broader zero-sum beliefs about women’s gains coming at the expense of men across different domains, including politics and family life; such beliefs were more pronounced among men than women.
And yet the United States economy has benefited tremendously from being able to draw from a larger talent pool today than, say, in the 1960s, when 94 percent of all doctors and lawyers were white men.
It is an unequivocally good thing that today, all law school graduates can go on to practice law—in contrast to Sandra Day O’Connor, who would go on to become the first female justice on the U.S, Supreme Court but who could only get a job as a legal secretary when she graduated from Stanford Law School at the top of her class in 1952.
Up to 40 percent of economic growth per person post-1960 is due to a better allocation of talent. As former U.S. commerce secretary Gina Raimondo stated in the context of America’s infrastructure workforce, “It’s an economic necessity to figure out how to attract, train, and retain women into these fields if we’re going to get the job done.”
The more we are stuck in the fixed-pie mentality, the harder it is to spot the opportunities to expand the pie.
As another example of how fairness is not about taking away from one group and giving to another, consider the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of disability and aims to ensure that people with disabilities have the same opportunities as anyone else to participate in everyday life.
Among many provisions, the law includes regulations about making public spaces more accessible for people with mobility challenges, such as by having elevators, installing access ramps, and lowering curbs. At the time of the law’s introduction, approximately 4 percent of the U.S. adult population—over 8 million people—had a mobility disability and directly benefited from these changes. Today that share has grown to more than 12 percent, or approximately 30 million people.
But actually, everyone benefited. Have you ever taken public transportation with a suitcase in tow? Pushed a child in a stroller or wheeled your groceries in a cart? Walked your bike while out and about? A redesign of the physical environment that was inspired by the experiences of people who differed in their ability turned out to make life better for everyone because it built fairness into how we do things.
There is extensive evidence in behavioral economics and social psychology of the positive impact fairness has on cooperation, trust, performance, and many more desirable outcomes. So if we finally figure out what a truly fair employee experience looks like and if we move from lamenting the lack of progress on fairness to actually making some, it will be a win-win for the world: a world where talent—no matter what it looks like or where it comes from—can flourish; a world where each of us can interact with and learn from our fellow humans; and a world where organizations can benefit from a historical wealth of previously overlooked talent.
Making work fair can expand the pie for all of our benefit.
Note that while we want to debunk the myth of a zero-sum world, this is not a call for making the business case for fairness. As organizational behavior scholars Robin Ely and David Thomas write in a Harvard Business Review article aptly titled “Enough Already with the Business Case,” the business case sends the message to traditionally underrepresented colleagues that they are only valuable if they improve the organization’s bottom line.
More practically, the business case can be counterproductive. Oriane Georgeac and Aneeta Rattan found that the business case—and, to a much lesser extent, the fairness case—can cause underrepresented groups to anticipate a lower sense of belonging in the companies. As a result, LGBTQ+ individuals, women in STEM, and African Americans were less interested in joining those organizations.
The authors summarize: “Don’t justify your commitment to diversity at all. . . . If you don’t need an explanation for the presence of well-represented groups in the workplace beyond their expertise, then you don’t need a justification for the presence of underrepresented groups either.”
It is only the people not in power today . . . who are asked to make the case for why they deserve to be there.
We had an epiphany about this while watching the documentary RBG, in which the second woman on the U.S. Supreme Court, the late justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, describes her experience of starting Harvard Law School as one of only nine women in a class of over five hundred men in 1956. At a dinner the dean hosted for these nine women, recalled Ginsburg, “He asked each of us to stand up and tell him what we were doing taking a seat that could be occupied by a man.”
The realization hit us like a lightning bolt: Men have never been asked to justify their presence in any position of power. It is only the people not in power today—including women and members of other underestimated groups—who are asked to make the case for why they deserve to be there. This is fundamentally unfair and fundamentally wrong.
Until the day that someone makes the business case for why white men, who in the United States constitute 30 percent of the population, should occupy nearly 90 percent of Fortune 500 CEO positions and approximately 60 percent of both the U.S. Congress and corporate leadership, we will take the rationale for fairness as a given. As scholars Sonia Kang and Sarah Kaplan powerfully note: “To make progress in achieving gender equality, we must declare the discussion on whether and why we should pursue equality to be over.”
We could not agree more. Making work fair is unequivocally the right and smart thing to do—and a win-win for us all.
From the book Make Work Fair: Data-Driven Design for Real Results By Iris Bohnet and Siri Chilazi Copyright 2025 by Iris Bohnet and Siri Chilazi. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
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