The fear of assessors appearing biased can hinder the performance assessment of women
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Managers may give female employees exaggerated and inaccurate performance reviews if they fear they will appear biased against women. according to a study by researchers at Washington State University.
This link between overly positive performance reviews and “protective paternalism” – the belief that women should be treated with care and protected from negative interactions – can hold women back and cause them to miss out on opportunities for advancement, the researchers found.
“If women don’t get honest feedback, they’re only going to fall further behind. That’s the clear, negative result,” says Leah Sheppard, lead study author and researcher at Washington State University’s Carson College of Business. said in a statement“It will never be the right thing, or even the nice thing, to spare someone in the areas where they obviously need to improve.”
In one study, Sheppard and colleagues divided 486 participants into two groups based on gender. Participants completed a survey that measured their motivation to appear non-judgmental toward women. The survey included statements such as “Being non-judgmental toward women is part of my self-image” and “Because of today’s politically correct standards, I try to appear non-judgmental toward women.”
Participants then read a performance description of a hypothetical, gender-neutral employee and selected positive and negative statements from a list to give the employee feedback.
One week later, participants viewed the same performance description, but the employee had a male or female name. Study participants were asked how they would feel about providing feedback, including whether they would feel they needed to protect the employee from harm, and then selected feedback statements from the list used in the previous scenario.
Overall, the research team found that participants who expressed a stronger external motivation to appear unbiased (“due to today’s politically correct standards”) were more likely to say they had a desire to protect the employee from harm. These beliefs also led raters to provide more positive feedback than in the gender-neutral scenario. This occurred regardless of whether the participants themselves were women or men.
Sheppard and colleagues said the findings could have implications for diversity, equity and inclusion efforts and could also help redesign performance appraisals in the workplace.
“We need to get much better at performance reviews and maybe even move away from the traditional language. So instead of a scary ‘performance review,’ it could be about coaching or mentoring,” Sheppard said. “That could be a way to normalize mistakes. Everyone has areas where they’re weak and could improve.”
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