HBR Women at Work Series Collection (3 Books)

17

How Gender Bias Corrupts Performance Reviews

by Paola Cecchi-Dimeglio

The annual performance review already has many strikes against it. Harried managers end up recalling high and low points on the fly; employees often get unclear direction.

Here’s another flaw: Women are shortchanged by these reviews. In my forthcoming book on race and gender bias in the workplace, Diversity Dividend, I present scores of successful interventions I have used in large domestic and international professional services firms to level the playing field for women in appraisals and promotions, among other areas. One of my findings, using content analysis of individual annual performance reviews, shows that women were 1.4 times more likely to receive critical subjective ...