Flummoxed by women’s hesitation to raise their hands for promotion, one senior Google engineer jury-rigged his own solution. He began sending out regular “nudge” notes—an email to all technical employees explaining the research and urging women to nominate themselves. We “tell them for God’s sake, nominate yourself for a promotion, because you’re holding yourself back!” as Bock put it. The nudge notes have proven to be remarkably effective. When they go out every six months, the number of women nominating themselves for promotions soars. Once, when the engineer forgot to send the note before a
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Wow, cool that just a reminder email erases much (most/all?) of the hesitation that women feel about making their own promotion case. I had heard that google saw much lower rate of promotion of women with the self-directed promotion approach, but did this equalize?
