Six years ago, I wrote an article arguing that women weren’t unrepresented in the leadership ranks due to their unwillingness to “lean in” or inability to lead, but because of our failure to effectively weed out incompetent men. In that article, which has become one of HBR’s most-read pieces, I argued that instead of lowering our standards for women, we had to raise the bar for men. That article touched a nerve, and it continues to do so.
As Long as We Associate Leadership with Masculinity, Women Will Be Overlooked
So long as we continue to associate leadership with masculine features, we can expect female leaders to be evaluated more negatively even when their performance is higher than that of their male counterparts, and even when those who evaluate them are women. We still have a lot of work to do if we want to see a bigger proportion of talented women emerge as leaders. As much as we understand the theoretical importance of leadership as a key driver of organizational, business, and societal success, we are still living in a world where most leaders are not evaluated objectively, and where discussions around the performance of leaders tend to be diluted to a matter of preferences, politics, or ideology. Subjective evaluations rule, and perceptions trump reality. Until this is fixed, there is not much benefit in improving our leader selection process. Even if we were using a data-driven system, it wouldn’t do much good if we proceeded to judge the performance of those same leaders via subjective, prejudiced, or biased human opinions. In other words, removing bias at the selection point will fix nothing if there’s still plenty of bias contaminating our performance management systems.