Love them or hate them, performance evaluations are staples of the modern workplace. Quantitative ratings have long been touted as impartial tools for measuring worker quality and ensuring fairness in promotion and compensation decisions.
One Way to Reduce Gender Bias in Performance Reviews
Love them or hate them, performance evaluations are staples of the modern workplace. But research shows that quantitative performance ratings are far from objective; while they may make the task of comparing workers easier for managers, they are riddled with gender bias. One solution might be a simple change the rating scale you use to evaluate employees. In an experiment that compared a 10-point rating scale to a 6-point one, researchers found that people were equally as likely to give high ratings to men and women using the 6-point scale. When presented with a 10-point scale, however, they were much more likely to only give 10s to men. Why? The cultural connotations the number “10” has, and how it’s “excellence” been coded by gender over time.