If You Want to Honor Women’s Equality Day, Start by Re-evaluating the Performance Feedback You Give Women at Work

As we mark Women’s Equality Day, we will see our social media feeds filled with inspirational quotes, platitudes and disappointment in how far we are still from achieving true equality. With this year’s theme being “inspire inclusion,” it can often feel daunting and overwhelming to consider how we can make an impact in our workplaces. So how can we inspire inclusion?

When it comes to women’s advancement, we study, chase and sometimes feel perplexed by metrics that show the inequities in our workforce. We wonder: Why aren’t there more women in leadership positions? Why are men being promoted at a faster rate than women? Why aren’t more women staying here to continue to grow their careers with us?

Here’s one way we can inspire inclusion as leaders and help with women’s advancement: re-evaluate, challenge and reconsider the performance feedback we give women in our organizations. The biased feedback and lack of quality feedback can over time negatively impact women’s careers. Consider the following three ways we can start mitigating our bias when it comes to how we evaluate women’s performance.

Related: 3 Ways Women Founders Can Leverage Their Value on Women’s Equality Day — and Beyond

1. Start by understanding the data

According to a new report from Textio, 76% of top-performing women received negative feedback from their bosses compared to just 2% of top-performing men, and 88% of these same women also received feedback on their personalities. Only 12% of the men received similar feedback.

“Men are mostly receiving feedback about their work. They’re developmental observations, they’re constructive. And then when you look at women, the positive observations are not generally about the work. They’re about the woman’s demeanor, personality or disposition,” says Kieran Snyder, co-founder and data analyst for Textio. “We tend to relate to women in the workplace based on how they make the people around them feel, rather than the work that they’re doing. That means we comment on how friendly, collaborative, difficult and likable they are. Those qualities don’t necessarily relate to the quality of the work that she’s doing.”

As leaders, when we judge women more harshly than men, this can also translate into fewer promotions. Another study showed that women are “consistently judged as having less leadership potential” than their male colleagues. This made them 14% less likely to be promoted year over year. In the study, even though women had better performance ratings, their leaders tended to rank them as low potential, indicating how much they believed they would grow and develop.

We can’t change what we don’t believe to be true. Start by understanding the data available in the marketplace and share this information with your colleagues. Ask human resources and your legal team if you have similar internal data you can start reviewing as a team on how the feedback women are given vs. men, and how that translates into performance ratings, promotions and ultimately compensation.

Related: 4 Unconscious Biases That Distort Performance Reviews

2. Interrupt your own biases

In my book, Reimagine Inclusion: Debunking 13 Myths to Transform Your Workplace, I talk about the importance of interrupting our own biases when evaluating performance and watching out for biased language we and others may use.

Ask yourself if you have ever been in a conversation where a woman’s performance was being judged using the following language.

• Is she being judgmental or honest?
• Is she being abrasive or direct?
• Is she taking up too much space or expressing her opinion?
• Is she too quiet or being an active listener?
• Is she angry or disagreeing?
• Is she impulsive or decisive?
• Is she too mean/being a bitch or being firm?
• Is she disruptive or a disruptor?
• Is she emotional or passionate?
• Is she not collaborative or taking credit for the impact she made?
• Is she a showoff or has deep expertise?
• Is she a troublemaker or surfacing concerns?
• Is she bossy or leading?
• Is she a pushover or being a team player?
• Is she aloof/cold or is she focused on delivering?
• Is she pushy or assertive?
• Is she difficult or sharing a different opinion?
• Is she not committed to her career? Or is that our perception because she’s a mother? Do we question fathers on their commitment to their careers?

Next time you see any of the above happening, try reframing the question and ask yourself and others if you would use the same language when evaluating men. Interrupting our own biases is a key step to ensuring women are being given fair and equitable feedback based on their performance.

Related: Are These 17 Biases Affecting You as a Leader? The Answer Is Likely Yes — Here’s How to Address Them.

3. Ask open-ended questions to help others

Once we start the work to interrupt our own biases, we can then help others mitigate their biases and have them re-evaluate the feedback they are giving. Asking open-ended questions can help with this. Consider the following questions and statements to help leaders self-reflect:

• What do you mean when you say she doesn’t have enough gravitas for the role?
• How has her “not being nice enough” impacted her performance?
• Tell me more about why you think she’s not likable enough for the team to follow her.
• Help me understand why you think she is overconfident.
• What do you mean when you say she’s angry and difficult?

Create an environment where you can challenge each other with kindness and respect to ensure you evaluate all talent equitably. When we can hold ourselves accountable for giving women fair and actionable performance feedback, we will start to make a change in women’s advancement in our workplaces.