These three gender biases can affect performance reviews in your business

by Paola Cecchi-Dimeglio

Because women continue to bear most of the burdens of caregiving, many have benefitted from the flexibility of hybrid and remote work, which has allowed them to remain part of the full-time workforce while spending more time at home. In theory, this is good news, because full-time employees tend to be promoted more often and let go less often — but in practice that’s not what’s happening. Why? Because when women take advantage of hybrid and remote work options today, they become subject to biases that creep into the performance-review process and cause them to be judged unfairly.

I witnessed this problem firsthand during a consulting project I did recently for a global company with hundreds of thousands of employees worldwide. During the project, which took place as the company (which I’ll call HAPI Consulting, to preserve its anonymity) was in the midst of a large reorganisation, I was reporting to the CEO, his executive, and the board. With their support, I gathered and analysed data on performance reviews given in a hybrid work environment (pre- and post-pandemic), and in that context, I identified three specific kinds of bias that were hurting women and their career prospects. I’ll explore them in turn below.

Experience bias

The first bias I observed was experience bias, or overvaluing tasks that are easy to define. At HAPI Consulting, men, on the whole, had chosen work that was much easier to recognise. They spent more time on highly visible external tasks, such as speaking at industry conferences. Meanwhile, women spent more time on much less visible internal tasks, such as boosting team cohesion. These tasks had longer timelines and were harder to evaluate in the short term.