Morning Advantage: Treat Job Candidates Like Footwear

To avoid gender stereotyping in hiring, try evaluating job candidates as a group, rather than one at a time. HBS Working Knowledge reports that researchers from Harvard Business School and Harvard's Kennedy School of Government have found that we are much less likely to stereotype by gender when we use a process called an "evaluation nudge" — an intervention aimed at overcoming biased assessments, in which people are evaluated jointly rather than separately. At the risk of oversimplifying, the reasoning goes like this: when we evaluate candidates one by one, our primary frame of reference for each individual is what's in our own minds, including whatever biases may be cemented there. When we evaluate candidates as a group, however, we focus what we actually see. "If you look at one pair of shoes, it's hard to evaluate the quality of those shoes," says Kennedy professor Iris Bohnet. "You will be much more likely to go with stereotypes or heuristics or rules of thumb about shoes. But if you have several pairs of shoes available, you're much more likely to be able to compare different attributes of the shoes." (Note: this research can also be manipulated to help justify bulk orders from Zappos.)

AN INSTANCE OF "REPRIORITIZATIONALISM"

European Leaders Rethink Their Commitment to Renewable Energy Sources (Oxford Analytica)

EU governments are scaling down their support for renewable energy as the costs of increasing its usage rise, report the experts at Oxford Analytica. This raises questions about the EU's ability to meet its 2020 target of all energy consumption being 20% renewable, and means that the European Commission is unlikely to obtain rapid agreement for its post-2020 policy on this area.

IT'S NOT MY FAULT: THE TPS REPORTS GOT CAUGHT IN THE SPAM FILTER

10 Leading Tech Culprits of Time-Wasting (CIO Insight)

"You have an issue," writes Don Reisinger. "As more and more technology comes into the workplace, the sheer number of ways that employees can distract themselves is growing at a rapid rate." From Facebook to Hanging with Friends, there are far too many options that can affect productivity. But before we go wagging too many fingers at workers, we need to realize companies may be as much to blame as employees. Among the biggest tech time sinks are enterprise-driven: outdated hardware and software, clumsy web filters, and password complexity to name three.

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Hacking for All

Creating a New Generation of Female Programmers (Good) How Starbucks Is Turning Itself into a Tech Company (VentureBeat) Where LinkedIn Is Headed Next (Fortune)