Editorial summary. This is our text summary of an article published by gnews-performance-review. Charts, figures, and the author’s full voice are at the original — read it there .
Editorial verdict
Credible field research. The natural experiment design is methodologically sound and the findings on anchoring effects are compelling — but the race gap persistence in manager ratings is the critical finding organisations cannot afford to overlook.
Executive summary
This article summarises a peer-reviewed field study published in the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization (2025), co-authored by Iris Bohnet, Oliver P. Hauser, and Ariella S. Kristal of Harvard Kennedy School. The study investigates whether gender and race disparities in performance appraisals stem from employees' self-ratings, managers' evaluations, or the interaction between the two. Leveraging a natural experiment at a multinational financial services firm — a 2016 software glitch that prevented managers from viewing self-evaluations — the researchers analysed four review cycles (2015–2018) to isolate the causal effect of self-rating visibility on final performance scores. Key findings indicate that women, particularly women of colour, consistently assigned themselves lower self-ratings; managers rated people of colour lower regardless of self-rating visibility; and concealing self-ratings reduced anchoring effects but did not eliminate demographic disparities because managers substituted historical ratings as an alternative anchor. Notably, newcomers with no rating history who also had hidden self-ratings showed reduced gaps for women of colour. The article concludes that addressing performance rating bias requires both process-level interventions (withholding self-ratings) and manager-level interventions (structured criteria, bias interrupters, and demographic auditing).
Key insights
- 1Women, and especially women of colour, consistently self-rate lower than men — a pattern attributed to social norms and anticipated backlash against self-promotion rather than actual performance differences.
- 2Race-based penalties in manager ratings persisted even when self-evaluations were hidden, indicating that managerial bias operates independently of self-rating anchoring and is not resolved by process design changes alone.
- 3When self-ratings were hidden and no historical rating data existed (newcomers), women of colour achieved parity with white women and men — suggesting that anchoring on past scores is a secondary mechanism that perpetuates inequity.
Practical takeaways
- Withholding self-evaluations from managers until after initial ratings are submitted can reduce anchoring effects, with the strongest benefit observed for employees without prior rating histories.
- Because race gaps in manager ratings persist independently of self-rating visibility, demographic outcome auditing and structured calibration processes represent a distinct and necessary layer of intervention beyond process sequencing changes.
References
- Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization (2025).Can gender and race dynamics in performance appraisals be disrupted? The case of social influence.
Source & Provenance
gnews-performance-review
Not specified
October 8, 2025
Research Study
Multi-Region
Original source metadata is preserved. AI analysis is generated separately.
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