The next stop in the journey is to help employees take greater ownership to build their own perspective, helping them to avoid the same blind spots that create Manager bias. Many performance management frameworks have a self evaluation element to them and it often kickstarts the process for employees to self evaluate their work to date. It sounds great in theory but this can be the very practice that starts the bias in the process, that leads to some of the more worrying trends, such as gender pay gap challenges.
One of the challenges that should be considered is that your female workforce are far more likely to bias their own self evaluation with modest and under rated performance than your male workforce. Consider the studies from the National Bureau of Economic Research where Christine Exley and Judd Kessler tested the hypothesis of whether women undersell themselves when it comes to their own self assessment.
They found that women, despite doing better than men on average, rated themselves lower on the self assessment questions. The differences were striking. “ when asked to agree with subjective statements such as “I did well on the test” on a scale of 0 to 100, men averaged a rating of 61 while women scored a mere 45.
Intriguingly, the authors assert that the gender gap was not a function of confidence. Even when participants were told how many questions they got right and how they fared relative to others, the gap in self-promotion persisted. Thus, despite being provided with “perfect information about their absolute and relative past performance”, women were more likely to belittle their achievement when asked to evaluate their own performance on the very same test. (Gender Equality at workplace: Promoting Self- Promotion in Women, Financial Express).
Many other studies point to women’s modesty in self evaluation and reflection of their own performance and we can’t ignore the impact on the perception of the receiver of same. If managers receive self evaluation that indicates a poorer performance than warranted, we already bias their view and condition to them to consider that employee may warrant a lower rating than deserved.
So how can the future of performance avoid the bias, and ensure that equality exists for all to ensure that their performance process doesn’t bias the outcome.
