The post-pandemic workplace has brought inequities between men and women into sharp view. From the burdens of unpaid labor, which women are shouldered with more often than men, to their stop-start return to work as childcare options run dry, and the ongoing struggle to navigate rigid expectations of female leaders, there’s plenty to tackle when it comes to women’s equality at work.
Equal pay has long been a rallying cry for gender equity advocates, and rightfully so. The fact that women on average earn 80 cents to every dollar a man makes has been a stubborn gap. Now with the recent passage of California’s pay transparency law and the new pay transparency law going into effect in New York City, there is hope that this transparency will lead to greater pay parity.
In some ways, it will. But to reach true pay equity in the workplace, we need to be honest with ourselves about the limitations of pay transparency, and where more work needs to be done.
Women aren’t only losing out on salary. They also face a significant promotion gap. For every 100 men promoted to manager, only 86 women will follow suit. Seeding doubts about competency and belonging, missed promotions start early and snowball. Only one in four women across all career stages report feeling fully included in the workplace. Over a lifetime, this contributes to hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost earnings and a weighty cognitive toll as well. Promotions inform our self-image and in turn —both psychologically and practically—the ability to reach the upper echelons of industry leadership.
One often cited explanation for the gender promotion gap is a shortfall of confidence. Women tend to be reluctant to apply for roles unless they meet 100% of job criteria and, by contrast, men will apply when meeting about 60%. But as lived experience would suggest, the reasons women are continuing to miss out on deserved promotions extend well beyond a failure to “put themselves out there.”
The burden of invisible work
To start, important workplace contributions made by women are being overlooked by managers.
When it comes to internal employee resource groups (such as those supporting LGBTQ employees or focusing on mental health, DEI, etc.), women are more likely to assume a leadership role than men. Despite the demonstration of leadership and management skills and the known benefits ERGs bring to company culture, these activities frequently go unnoticed come promotion time, due to lack of directly measurable business output.
Women are more likely to take on the office “housework,” that is: tasks from scheduling to note taking that need to be done but do little to support career progression. While men may feel comfortable declining such tasks, women report feeling pressure to accept and having concerns about negative ramifications should they opt out. And while women tend to acquiesce to these non-promotional tasks, managers are also 12% more likely to ask them to do so in the first place as opposed to their male colleagues.
Creating a more transparent promotion structure requires managers to be more attuned with how opportunities in both administrative work and more promotable work are being assigned. Managers could consider implementing a “round-robin” approach for assigning administrative work to ensure that all employees, regardless of gender, are being equally assigned types of tasks, both big and small.
Battling proximity bias
Visibility into who is doing what work is crucial for managers looking to address equity in promotions. But they need to also be aware of their blind spots. With the very nature of work undergoing a transformation, women are disappearing from the physical office.
As flexible and remote work offerings are fast becoming a necessity for talent retention, women are significantly more likely than men to prefer remote work. Relevant factors range from women having disproportionate responsibility for childcare and household labor, to the impact of physical work environments where they do not feel welcomed or represented.
Ultimately, this makes women vulnerable to proximity bias, wherein company and team leaders show favoritism and are more inclined to promote employees they have more face-to-face time with, as opposed to virtual workers.
As offices adopt flexible and hybrid work policies, the implementation of safeguards can ensure workplaces don’t turn into “male only” spaces. Requiring, for example, that every member of the team be in office on certain days and work from home on other days helps level the playing field so that flexibility isn’t perceived as a women’s only benefit.
Further, for promotion assessment, a cross-team evaluation process that brings in leadership from other departments to consider each employee’s eligibility will not only incorporate more diverse perspectives, but also can help beat back proximity favoritism, allowing for a more even criteria scoring process.
Facilitating performance conversations across teams has the added benefit of helping leadership get a holistic view of their talent pool for the sake of succession planning, while also providing up and coming leaders with the opportunity to connect and understand business goals at the corporate level, without the blinders that can come from being siloed in a specific team or function.
Redefining ‘leadership potential‘
Women are forced to overcome entirely subjective notions about what a leader looks like. A study in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, for example, found that people implicitly view men as more likely to be “brilliant” than women. In another study of evaluation and promotion data conducted by Yale, researchers found that women are more likely to receive low “growth potential” scores, despite receiving higher performance scores than men, negatively impacting opportunities for promotion.
Traditional growth potential characteristics such as assertiveness, execution skills, charisma, leadership, and ambition are subject to bias and are stereotypically associated with men, creating room for promotion bias against women. By contrast, women in leadership often score higher than men in attributes such as conscientiousness, reliability, and trustworthiness.
One way to counter this is to develop a unified promotion criteria that takes into account both hard stats like revenue growth as well as benchmarks for equally important soft skills. Unified criteria not only creates more equitable assessments come promotion time, but also combats biases in attributes which can directly correlate to perceptions of capabilities to rise in the workforce.
But above all, none of these efforts will be complete if not codified through transparent policies. Just as pay transparency provides individuals with an equal footing entering salary negotiations, transparency around promotion processes and assessment criteria provides employees with tangible insights into how their performance will be measured, while also holding managers accountable for their decisions.
By collecting and sharing yearly promotions data by gender, companies can set important benchmarks to ensure that the policies and practices designed to promote gender equity—like pay transparency—are having a definable impact.
Sian Beilock is the president of Barnard College and president-elect of Dartmouth College. Margo Cook, CFA, is an independent board director.
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