How Gender Bias Corrupts Performance Reviews, and What to Do About It
Fairer data is better data, for employees and for companies.
April 12, 2017
Summary.
Annual evaluations are often subjective, which opens the door to gender bias. These biases can lead to double standards — a similar situation gets a positive or a negative spin depending on gender. For example, one review described a woman as seeming “to shrink when she’s around others and especially around clients.” But a similar problem — confidence in working with clients — was given a positive spin when it was a man who was struggling with it: “Jim needs to develop his natural ability to work with people.” A content analysis of individual annual performance reviews shows that women were 1.4 times more likely to receive critical subjective feedback (as opposed to either positive feedback or critical objective feedback). But when organizations implemented gender-neutral, real-time feedback tools, such biases were reduced. Asking for real-time feedback about employees from a range of observers — clients, colleagues, managers — could result in both men and women getting more objective performance appraisals.
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