Watch Out for These 3 Gender Biases in Performance Reviews

Three kinds of bias often creep into the performance-review process, in ways that disproportionately affect women, especially when they choose to take advantage of the flexibility offered by hybrid and remote work. These biases are experience bias, which leads reviewers to overvalue tasks that are easy to define; proximity bias, which leads them to think that people in their immediate orbit do the most important work; and in-group/out-group bias, which leads them to give preferential treatment to people they feel belong to a group they identify with. This article, based on the author’s study of a large multinational consulting group, explains the nature of these biases and offers suggestions for how to combat them.