Evaluating inequality: how women navigate and understand performance evaluation
Date
2024
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
Many corporations have focused resources and energy on increasing their workplace “diversity,” though they have not seen significant progress. Simultaneously, marginalized workers often remain on the bottom rungs of the organizational hierarchy and move into positions of influence slower than their white man counterparts, if at all. Scholars of organizational inequality in workplaces have attended to the many mechanisms that maintain inequality once employees are embedded in an organization. Performance reviews are one mechanism through which these inequalities are reproduced, but little prior research has focused on how employees understand their own performance evaluation processes, how they use the evaluation to determine what career outcomes are attainable, and how organizations evaluate employees in a broader sense. I use a relational inequality theoretical (RIT) lens to connect ascriptive inequality to organizational-level characteristics and illuminate local inequality regimes. Through 24 semi-structured interviews of women employed or formerly employed at one US-based tech organization, which I refer to as App Plus, I discuss how the status of particular jobs within the organization influences women’s experiences in understanding performance expectations and opportunities for career attainment. I find that higher status jobs provide women with alternate paths to career attainment compared to lower status jobs, which have fewer opportunities for upward mobility. This is mediated through how employees and managers understand the formal evaluation process, how women’s voices are policed, and how they understand realistic career attainment through communication and collaboration expectations. Higher status jobs are evaluated with a broader understanding of performance, and lower status jobs are evaluated more stringently according to numeric quotas. Together, these create disparate outcomes for women’s career attainment. I discuss the implications of these findings and contribute to a more expansive understanding of performance evaluation in the inequality at work and organizations literature.
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Keywords
Organizational inequality, Performance evaluation, Relational inequality theoretical, Organizations literature