Research shows that inclusive companies consistently outperform their competition. Data from Bersin by Deloitte shows that inclusive companies are 6 times more likely to be innovative, 2 times more likely to meet or exceed financial targets, and 6 times more likely to be agile. So, when it comes to creating a high-performing culture, organizations have to make their people feel included, especially with fair and equal access to growth opportunities.
When it comes to diversity and inclusion initiatives, we see companies releasing detailed reports on diversity, but inclusion hasn’t been so easy to pin down and measure. No matter how much organizations focus on diversity metrics, they won’t see the benefits of better retention, higher performance, and increased engagement if they don’t focus on building an inclusive culture in tandem. It’s time to move the dial on inclusion by equipping organizations with a way to measure it.
The Impact of Gender-Based Feedback Inequality
This post in our Zugata Insights series will dig into the role feedback plays in creating inclusive cultures, what we’ve learned from analyzing customer data, and why you need to take steps to reduce bias in your feedback and performance management process.
There are many elements that go into being an inclusive culture, but feedback is an important place to start. While there are many types of bias*, our initial analysis will focus on gender-based unconscious bias. Research shows that the quality of feedback written about women vs. men differs vastly. Gender bias easily creeps into feedback exchanges, leaving women with unequal access to high-quality feedback. More of the feedback is negative and subjective as well as personality-based rather than work-based.
If women and men are being described and measured with different filters, the impact can be far-reaching. Not only does this create an environment where gender impacts treatment, but the feedback itself gives women and men unequal opportunities.
This harms women in two ways:
- Personality-based or vague feedback impacts women at review time when feedback is taken into consideration, keeping them from promotions and raises dependent on work-based traits
- Personality-based or vague feedback limits the helpful feedback women receive that spurs growth and development, leaving them with less insight needed to work on key skills
When feedback works in the favor of men, so will the opportunities. For a company to truly exemplify a culture of inclusion, it has to start with how men and women are receiving feedback.
A Look at Our Data
Using Zugata Insights, we ran feedback data from one of our customers through a machine-learning algorithm to surface the top attributes used to describe men and women. Our algorithms identified the key attributes, de-duped them, and kept track of frequency. Attributes were also categorized as either related to a person's work output (think: job knowledge, skills) or about their personality (think: aggressive, nice). We found that men and women were, in fact, described differently in unstructured feedback fields.
Below is a breakdown of work-based vs. personality-based feedback in three departments of one company:
In Department 3, the gap between men and women is notably higher, so we got curious and took a closer look. Even in departments that require more personality-based skills, there shouldn’t be such a large gap between men and women. Our algorithm surfaced the attributes describing each gender.
Below are the top five attributes for each in order of frequency:
These are powerful insights about your organization. People leaders can take this information into consideration when looking into career development or before going into calibration sessions. While this data doesn't tell the whole story, companies can now look inward to reflect on why men and women are being described differently. By measuring these key differences, organizations are now equipped to measure and manage their unconscious gender bias.
What’s Next
The first step to combating unconscious gender bias is awareness and taking steps toward following feedback best practices. This helps reduce unconscious bias by influencing behaviors of feedback-givers, creating new habits of actionable and skills-based feedback. However, don't stop there; companies need to continue to monitor bias and adjust your practices based on the data you collect.
At Zugata, we believe in meritocracy, and enabling employees to achieve excellence regardless of gender, race, background, or identity. We know these insights are only one piece of the puzzle, and there can’t be just one metric to measure inclusion. But, we hope you stay on this path with us as we continue to find other ways to measure and mitigate bias to help organizations and individuals reach their fullest potential. Stay tuned!
*We know gender identification is not as binary as male and female. We haven’t been able to tap into enough data for employees not conforming to narrow definitions of gender, but we hope to uncover these biases in the future.
