Canadian HR Reporter

CanaDian hr reporter october 6, 2014 8 NEwS more likely to receive negative wording or comments about their personality traits. "Women received plenty of straight constructive criticism too. It wasn't all personality. But where personality feedback oc- curred, it occurred almost exclu- sively in women's reviews. Men only got the constructive stuff. Women got both," she said. at type of negative personal- ity feedback occurred only twice in the 83 "critical" reviews belong- ing to men; it occurred in 71 of the 94 critical reviews received by women, found Snyder. Sadly, those findings didn't come as a surprise. "I've worked in tech a long time. I've seen some terrible examples of institutional bias," she said. e results were just one more example of something Marina Ad- shade has experienced in the edu- cation sector for quite some time. "While there may not be a lot out there about reviews done by firms for their employees, there's an enormous amount of research being done about how students evaluate their teachers, based on their gender," said Adshade, an economist and lecturer at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. "We hear this all the time that a lot of the behaviour that is rewarded in men is actu- ally penalized in women." Conversely, when students evaluate their professors, the big- gest rewards are given to women who conform to gender stereo- types, said Adshade. "Deviating from gender stereo- types actually really hurts you in the classroom. And I suspect this is true at work as well." Adshade did her own experi- ment last year, using a course she's taught several times and consis- tently received good reviews for. "I thought I would try an ex- periment in light of this thinking about conforming to gender ste- reotypes. So what I did is I taught the entire term wearing a dress. Because, I figured, nothing says, 'I conform to gender stereotypes' quite like a dress and pantyhose, which professors don't normally wear. And I saw my course evalu- ations jump up by half a point on a five-point scale," she said. "It was really shocking — in fact, it's the highest marks I've ever been given for a course. Now, it's not a controlled experi- ment, but I thought it was a re- ally interesting outcome... What's even more interesting was the course that I was teaching was ac- tually 'Women in the Economy' and 85 per cent of my students were women." Evaluator's gender makes no difference That raises another interesting point — and a key one — in Sny- der's findings. One-quarter (25 per cent) of the performance re- views she collected were written by women. And female managers accounted for just over 23 per cent of the negative feedback. "I actually consider this the breakout finding of the study," she said. "I went back and looked at reviews that I had written after completing the analysis. Guess what? I follow the pattern too. I was tougher on women in my crit- ical language than I was on men, even though they statistically got the same review scores. I didn't use the specific word 'abrasive' but my criticism of women on my team reads tougher to me." Both women and men can have these unconscious biases because they're so embedded in the way we think, said Carolyn Lawrence, president and CEO of Women of Influence in Toronto. "e gender lens is really criti- cal in both recruiting and also per- formance evaluations processes. What's really interesting in the work that we do in evaluating cor- porate culture, you can see how if it's male-dominated, it's not just in the culture, these processes are actually (embedded) in how you hire and promote people, and in succession plans," she said. "If I'm a man, and I'm evaluat- ing a man, I'm naturally marking him on the same markers of suc- cess that I evaluate myself (with), and probably embedded into the job description. So if I'm a man and I have a female employee, I'm marking her on my perception of success. "Even more than that, if she is then trained to performance eval- uate her employees, she's trained in the male way." Even really good and meticu- lous HR departments are gener- ally not resourced to monitor for bias at the level of review lan- guage, said Snyder. "e best departments look at statistical variation in numeric scores. Lots of places do that now. But the language that we use to describe our colleagues is another layer," she said. "If you're constantly getting rewarded for a particular behav- iour, you'll show more of it. If you're constantly being punished, you'll do less of it. Using negative language to characterize a behav- iour is a form of punishment. We talk about sticks and stones, but names do undermine." And whether it's words like "abrasive," "bossy," "strident" and "emotional" or more positive de- scriptors, relying on personality feedback is evidence an appraisal system is broken, she said. "Any kind of personality feed- back, whether you're calling someone abrasive or emotional or brilliant or collaborative, is in- herently subjective... It's true that performance reviews are always going to be a little bit subjective but 'delivered X' is a lot less sub- jective than 'You are brilliant but impatient.' We should be aiming for objective analysis. Personality adjectives are never going to be objective." To begin identifying and ad- dressing this, HR should take an active, critical look at the language used in reviews, said Snyder. "(One) guy I used to work with requested that his HR department publish guidelines on review lan- guage. He acknowledged that not every manager would use them actively, but the mere fact of their publication would give employees and managers a framework for discussion," she said. And — though it may be a bit uncomfortable — it's important to take a long, hard look at the per- formance reviews you've written, said Adshade. "Unless people are encouraged to think about the way they them- selves are behaving, it's always 'the other' — 'e other person is be- having this way, it's not me behav- ing this way.' 'ese other people are bad, but I would never do that.' What people need to do is they need to be prodded into thinking about this themselves," she said. "For example, what would be re- ally useful... is if people went back and sat down and read through all their evaluations they've pro- vided in the past, and see if they can observe this for themselves. I think that would be a good learn- ing experience for people — self- evaluation is the only way that this is ever going to change. Just telling people that other people do this is never going to be enough, because they all assume it's not them." PERFORMANCE < pg. 1 Take critical look at your own review language No one ever expects to have cancer. When it strikes, having CAREpath as part of your benefit package shows your employees and their families how much you really care. Employees diagnosed with cancer are assigned a personal oncology nurse providing guidance and support throughout every stage of their cancer journey. CAREpath is the only complete cancer navigation provider in Canada. No one ever expects to have cancer. cancer? Does one of your employees have We'll be there. 1-866-599-2720 www.carepath.ca THE CANCER ASSISTANCE PROGRAM Anita McGowan, RN, CON(C), OCN Head Oncology Nurse Manager ORDER TODAY! 416.862.4512 or bot.com/surveys COMPENSATION REPORTS ATTRACT AND RETAIN GOOD TALENT 2014 2015 Are you paying too much or not enough for your talent? Latest market data is now available! Combating bias in performance appraisals It's common for everyone — not just managers — to have unconscious biases we're not aware of, said Rick Lash, director at Hay Group in Toronto. And it's particularly common for managers, when conducting performance appraisals, to have "unconscious filters" that influence how they perceive people's past performance. The crucial first step toward combating this is education and training, he said. "The first thing is the manager has to be trained in how to do proper performance appraisals (and) the importance of relying on what I would call objective behavioural examples," he said. "They should be collecting specific examples to back up their evaluations so that when they get together with their staff, they're not providing their own subjective opinion as to whether they've done well or haven't done well. "The other critical piece is the importance of obtaining evidence from multiple sources, so that as a manager you won't be relying on your examples or your perspective. You should ensure that you're also gaining information from other people (whom) the employee might have been working with throughout the year, so that you're able to 'triangulate' — get multiple different points of view so that you really do have an accurate picture of the employee's performance from multiple different perspectives throughout the organization."

• Cover