How companies can help ‘repair’ the career ladder for women
03/06/2025
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Despite many efforts to combat this problem, women continue to face disadvantages in the workplace. To explain this phenomenon, an often-overlooked factor needs to be taken into account: what are the criteria used to evaluate performance at work? Do they correspond to a more masculine than feminine vision of success?
Women continue to face disadvantages in the workplace. This phenomenon is often referred to as the “glass ceiling”. However, the notion of a ceiling does not do justice to the problem because it implies that women only face issues taking that final career step, for example, in getting to the VP or CEO position.
In fact, women encounter obstacles to advancement at all stages of their career. This has far-reaching societal consequences, as these differences at work translate to a gender wage gap and a disadvantaged position in the world.
One critical factor provoking such problems stems from the way organizations evaluate employees and decide whom to promote. This process in most organizations is in fact stacked against women for a variety of reasons. Very recent research, including some of our own, sheds light on how we can overcome this.
What kind of employees are evaluated highly?
First, this problem relates to the question of what kind of employees are evaluated highly or what do people believe a highly valued employee “looks like”. The answer to this question is important because a valuable employee may be more likely to get promoted.
Recent work shows that men did not consider a person’s character – showing accountability, collaboration, drive, humanity – as important to their potential success as a leader, while women did. This means that if women show character, they are unlikely to benefit from it because men do not value these traits and men are still often the evaluators.
Second, women could attempt to act more in accordance with characteristics that businesses (and men) stereotypically value, for example, showing their focus on growth, taking initiative, showing optimism, and treating everything as an opportunity for improvement.
Lower pay offers for the same job profiles
In this recently published work, however, it was found that women did not benefit from this kind of behavior. Women with the above characteristics were compared to identical male counterparts in terms of how they were evaluated. For example, managers who participated in this study evaluated a job applicant’s video and then indicated how much salary they would offer the candidate. Managers offered the female candidate a lower salary than the identical male candidate.
Third, many organizations nowadays try to identify who are their “star” employees – those “possessing rare, desirable qualities that enable them to produce exceptional outcomes”.
Fewer women are assigned to the star category
The problem with this practice is that people tend to associate those star characteristics with employees of the male gender. In other words, when we think “star” what automatically comes to mind is “man”. These findings explain why there are fewer women assigned to the star category. Once identified, stars are given more opportunities to shine. In this way, who actually becomes a star turns into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
In current times, we are witnessing a paradoxical trend of organizations rolling back diversity initiatives in an attempt to be seen as fairer. In these companies, managers feel that the job should go to the most qualified person first, which they feel would guarantee, in their opinion, the promotion of people from under-represented or minority backgrounds. And, according to these critics, diversity policies give unfair priority to certain groups of employees. This is a direct result of organizations using diversity initiatives for impression management, without backing them with concrete actions or quantifying their return on investment.
For instance, companies often engage in performative attempts such as establishing hiring quotas for women to enhance representation, but this is not followed up with talent development measures or policy changes, which causes female representation in leadership positions to shrink.
The ‘Glass Cliff’ phenomenon
Another example is hiring women in ‘precarious leadership roles’ for short-term signaling (the infamous glass cliff phenomenon), which reinforces biases against female managers’ performance, exacerbating the barriers for their career growth.
So what can organizations do to create more gender inclusive performance management programs?
The origin of these sorts of problems is a stereotype, a biased belief that people may have about what a good or great employee looks like. Stereotypes are learned, which suggests that we might be able to un-learn it.
First, organizations at a minimum could teach their managers to be aware of their biases when evaluating performance of female employees. Here, diversity training aimed at reducing stereotypes and increasing bias awareness can be particularly helpful. However, such training can have adverse effects, such as backlash from participants, and therefore, organizations have to be mindful of how these programs are designed and how their impact is communicated to all stakeholders.
Organizations can enhance the buy-in for such initiatives by offering clear and quantifiable evidence of return-on-investment (ROI) metrics such as higher employee engagement, retention, and attraction. Finally, organizations should position diversity training in terms of its benefits for all employees in enhancing their decision-making, self-awareness, and leadership capabilities, rather than as being targeted for only specific groups.
Female role models
Second, organizations can introduce female role models, by highlighting successful women and their meaningful contributions to the company. Via company events and newsletters, companies can spotlight the achievements of female employees and over time, this could lead to a dilution in people’s biases about women’s performance potential. In fact, organizations can use these exemplars to challenge assumptions about “star” performers and expand the boundaries of what is typically valued, instead of reinforcing masculine stereotypes about performance.
Third, organizations should use performance management systems with KPIs that are not just outcome-based (increasing market penetration or achieving 100% of the target growth) but also include relational and social outcomes such as developing and mentoring others, inspiring cooperation, and creating a positive team climate.
These qualities are critical for effective leadership but often overlooked in categorizing high performers. By developing more inclusive performance criteria, organizations can introduce more equity in their performance metrics while also generating more long-term benefits for the organization.
Finally, forging strong informal social networks through mentorship programs can support women to effectively navigate the power hierarchies and influence structures in organizations. Social networks connections are an important source of resources and opportunities for advancement and growth in organizations.
Informal power dynamics in organizations play a huge part in who gets noticed and who gets picked for plum opportunities. Women typically have less diverse professional networks and gain less benefits from these networks than men, which negatively can influence their performance perceptions and career growth potential.
Melvyn R.W. Hamstra, Professor in Leadership and Organizational Behavior, IÉSEG School of Management et Gouri Mohan, Organizational Behavior; Leadership; Diversity, IÉSEG School of Management
This is the English version of an article originally published on the Conversation France, which is available here.
