![]() ![]() This resulted in substantial discrepancies in net performance: When they knew they’d be ranked, male participants solved almost 40% more problems than female participants. But when they were explicitly told that they would be ranked, men performed better than those who weren’t told anything, while women performed a lot worse. When participants weren’t told that they’d be ranked, men and women performed at essentially the same level. Nevertheless, we found that just anticipating that they would be ranked significantly impacted participants’ performance, and that the impact was noticeably different for men and for women. To be clear, the only thing that changed between the two groups was whether they were told beforehand that they would be ranked - both were financially incentivized in exactly the same way. Then, we told one group of participants that a peer would rank them against each other based on their performance, while participants in the other group weren’t told anything, enabling us to isolate the effects of social status ranking. This meant they were all equally incentivized to solve the problems, and were thus not competing for financial resources. ![]() The participants were asked to complete simple problems in which they searched for numbers and added them up, and they were told that they would receive one Euro for each problem they completed. ![]() To better understand how social status ranking affects men and women differently (and how these assessment systems may, as a result, be hampering organizations’ efforts to retain women), my colleagues and I conducted a series of lab experiments with students in Spain, which I later replicated in Italy and the Netherlands. Performance rankings don’t necessarily involve competition for tangible resources, but they do create competition for another kind of resource: social status. Prior studies have shown that men and women can respond differently to competition, but these studies have mostly looked at environments in which people compete for scarce physical or financial resources. How could an ostensibly objective, unbiased evaluation system foster inequity? A performance management system in which employees are ranked against one another creates a particular kind of competitive environment. Prior research has explored various pros and cons of these systems, but one area that has remained largely unexamined is their impact on gender representation. Specifically, many companies employ some form of ranking mechanism to assess employees’ performance relative to each other, and then determine advancement accordingly. Of course, there are many reasons for this - but one of the key, systemic factors driving this ongoing challenge lies in how companies approach performance assessments and promotions. Unfortunately, while these initiatives can help organizations get more female candidates in the door, they often fall short when it comes to retention and development. Much effort has been spent on improving gender equity in hiring. Based on these findings, the authors argue that organizations should build awareness of the potential harms of ranking employees, and that they should consider either adapting or totally overhauling existing performance evaluation systems to focus more on individual progress, and less on social comparisons. They suggest that this likely stems from deeply-ingrained stereotypes that lead men to believe they are better than women in competitive environments, and that lead women to prioritize avoiding harming others. In this piece, the authors discuss their recent research on this topic, which found that competitive evaluation systems in which employees are ranked against one another can cause men to perform better and women to perform worse (on a task for which their performance would otherwise be roughly the same). But to achieve more equitable representation, it’s also critical to examine disparities in how employees are evaluated and promoted once they’re on board. ![]() When it comes to gender equity in the workplace, many organizations focus largely on hiring more women. ![]()
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