On 12 March, Jamie Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan Chase, described the company’s diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) approach as “merit hiring based upon your brain, your heart, your soul, your capability, your background and stuff like that” at BlackRock’s Retirement Summit.

Inspirational words from a leader not afraid to stand by his organisation’s values and strategy, even in these turbulent times around DEI. But how do we keep organisations moving toward merit, when the exact programmes designed to make progress are under fire?

To address exactly this question, I welcomed Harvard scholars Professor Iris Bohnet and Siri Chilazi to London Business School (thanks to the generous funding of the LBS Leadership Institute). Their new book, Make Work Fair, reveals how organisations can use data-backed, actionable solutions to build fairness into the workplace. In their approach, the goal is to focus less on convincing individuals to do the right thing, and more on system-wide fixes that build equity into the structures, processes and practices of everyday workplaces.

Even when DEI is debated, what we can all agree on is that work should be meritocratic. At the book talk, the authors summarise how their book provides concrete examples of system changes that can advance this goal.

One such intervention is deceptively simple: listing total years of experience on a CV instead of specific dates. In a study they cited, both men and women were 15% more likely to be called for interviews when this change was implemented. It worked by removing cues that might activate age- or gender-based assumptions—a small tweak with statistically significant effects.

In another case, one of Australia’s largest employers discovered that after being rejected for leadership roles, men were almost twice as likely to reapply as women. A single sentence added to the rejection email—accurately informing candidates that they had ranked in the top 20% of applicants—eliminated the gender gap in reapplications. The finding aligns with broader evidence on gender differences in self-perception and self-assessment: women tend to underestimate their performance relative to men. A small structural nudge created greater equity.

This is no side project

Even everyday decisions, such as who gets to speak in meetings or present ideas, drive perceptions of fairness, so it is incumbent on everyone working for an organisation to consider the impact of their decisions on workplace fairness. Fairness must be integrated into the core of organisational practices rather than treated as a side project, as DEI has been treated for far too long.

Integrating fairness into core practices is not necessarily something that will happen overnight. There is the issue of human bias encoded into AI systems, as well incomplete datasets, and these issues impact underrepresented communities—and especially those who fall at the intersection of identities—the most (for example, racial minorities, LGBTQ+ individuals and those with disabilities).

Plus, norms and expectations vary across regions, and practices must be localised without abandoning the underlying principle: equality of opportunity.

A key insight of Bohnet and Chilazi’s book is that any individual can lead change to make work fair, no matter their position in the company. Take the BBC’s 50:50 Project: more than 600 BBC teams have engaged in progress toward gender equity in the media because one journalist got annoyed listening to a ‘manel’ on a long drive.

BBC journalist Ros Atkins decided to take action on the issue of gender representation in the news, starting within his scope of influence on his show. He asked his colleagues on his nightly primetime news programme Outside Source to track who they included as experts in their reporting just for a month to start—and the team was shocked to discover they fell well below parity.

Within just four months, Ros and his production team had increased representation from 39% women to 50%. By April 2019, 74% of the English-language programmes that had been involved in 50:50 for a year or more had reached 50% female contributors on their shows.

While the counting practice varies based on show frequency, topic and local context, this method for tracking the data and motivating change has helped more than 145 partner organisations across 30 countries to make work—and the media—more fair.

The goal of DEI efforts has never been diversity for diversity’s sake. It has always been meritocracy—a genuine version of it. With the release of Make Work Fair, organisations now have a guidebook at the ready to help them make progress even in times when individuals’ attitudes toward DEI are uneven. In a moment when DEI is contested ground, fairness may be the common ground that we all need to move forward.

Aneeta Rattan is professor of organisational behaviour at London Business School