Your Dislike of Performance Reviews Is Justified

Think back to your last performance review: how did you feel afterwards?

Chances are it wasn’t warm and fuzzy. After all, unless you’re Superwoman (or your boss is too timid to criticize anyone), you probably received at least some negative feedback to go with that long list of kudos. And even if you know you should embrace the opportunity to identify your weaknesses in a swallow-your-medicine kind of way, being criticized still isn’t fun.

If you want permission to go ahead and hate performance reviews, here it is: according to a new study from three Harvard professors, they’re biased against women. Companies that have formal review processes are less likely to have women in management roles.

This is funny, because (as the authors point out) performance reviews were initially implemented to prevent bias against women. They were supposed to give us all an objective way to measure who’s succeeding and who’s not—but of course, on the objectivity measure, we know from both anecdotal and empirical evidence that performance reviews do not meet expectations (zing!).

So if formal review processes aren’t cutting it, and may in fact be holding women back in the workplace, how should companies recognize and reward performance instead? We’d love to hear your ideas in the comments!

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About the Author

Julianne Helinek is Take The Lead's blog editor and writer of the newsletter Take The Lead This Week. She thinks the women she knows are too talented not to be running the world, and she’s especially interested in bringing more men into the gender equality conversation. Julianne is an MBA student at NYU’s Stern School of Business. For more on feminism in the business school world, follow her on Twitter at @thefeministmba.