If you want to celebrate Women’s Equality Day, start by re-evaluating the feedback you give women at work

As we celebrate Women’s Equality Day, our social media feeds shall be filled with inspiring quotes, platitudes, and disappointment at how far we are from achieving true equality. This yr’s theme is “inspire inclusiveness” It can often feel overwhelming and intimidating to consider how we are able to impact our workplaces. So how can we encourage inclusivity?

When it comes to women’s advancement, we investigate, pursue, and sometimes feel bewildered by the metrics that show inequality in our workforce. We wonder: Why aren’t there more women in leadership positions? Why men get promoted faster than womenWhy do so few women stay to develop their careers with us?

Here’s one way we are able to encourage inclusivity as leaders and help advance women: reassess, challenge, and reconsider the performance feedback we offer to women in our organizations. Biased feedback and a lack of quality feedback can negatively impact women’s careers over time. Consider these three ways we are able to begin to mitigate our biases when it comes to how we evaluate women’s performance.

1. Start by understanding the data

According to recent 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 those self same women also received feedback about their personalities. Only 12% of men received similar feedback.

“Men get mostly feedback on their work. It’s developmental observations, it’s constructive. And then when you look at women, the positive observations are usually not about work. They’re about the woman’s behavior, personality or disposition.” Kieran Snyder saysco-founder and data scientist at Textio. “We tend to identify with women in the workplace based on how they make the people around them feel, rather than the work they do. That means we comment on how friendly, collaborative, challenging, and likable they are. Those traits don’t necessarily relate to the quality of the work she does.”

As leaders, if we judge women more harshly than men, it might also translate into fewer promotions. Another study found that women were “consistently rated as having lower leadership potential” than their male colleagues. This made them 14% less likely to be promoted yr after yr. In the study, despite the fact that women had higher performance rankings, their leaders tended to rate them as having low potential, indicating how much they believed they’d develop.

We can’t change what isn’t true. Start by understanding the data available in the marketplace and share that information with your colleagues. Ask HR and legal if you have similar internal data that you can start reviewing as a team on how women receive feedback compared to men and how that translates into performance reviews, promotions, and ultimately compensation.

2. Break your individual prejudices

In my book, Reimagine Inclusion: Debunk 13 Myths to Transform Your WorkplaceI talk about the importance of overcoming our own biases when evaluating performance and being attentive to biased language that we and others may use.

Think about whether you have ever been in a conversation where a woman’s behavior was assessed using the following language.

• Is she judgmental or honest?
• Is it harsh or direct?
• Does it take up too much space or express too much of its opinion?
• Is she too quiet or does she listen actively?
• Is she offended or does she disagree with you?
• Is she impulsive or decisive?
• Is she too mean/too bitchy or too assertive?
• Is she destructive or destructive?
• Is she emotional or passionate?
• Is she unwilling to cooperate and take credit for the influence she exerts?
• Does she like to exhibit or does she have a wealth of experience?
• Is she a troublemaker or does she cause concern?
• Is she bossy or leadery?
• Is she submissive or is she a team player?
• Is it indifferent/cold or is it focused on getting the point across?
• Is she pushy or assertive?
• Is she difficult or does she have a different opinion?
• Is she not committed to her profession? Is that our perception because she is a mother? Do we query fathers for their commitment to their profession?

Next time you see any of the above happening, try rephrasing the query and asking yourself and others if you would use the same language when evaluating men. Disrupting our own biases is a key step to ensuring that women receive fair and equitable feedback based on their performance.

3. Ask open-ended questions to help others

As we start to work on disrupting our own biases, we will help others soften theirs and reevaluate the feedback they supply. Asking open-ended questions will help with this. Consider the following questions and statements to help leaders self-reflect:

• What do you mean she doesn’t have enough authority for the role?
• How did her “not being nice enough” affect her performance?
• Tell me more about why you think she’s not well-liked enough for the team to want to follow her.
• Help me understand why you think she’s overconfident.
• What do you mean she is bad and difficult?

Create an environment where you can challenge each other with kindness and respect to make sure you are evaluating all talent fairly. When we are able to take responsibility for giving women honest and actionable feedback on their performance, we’ll begin to make a difference in advancing women in our workplaces.