Passionate About Work? It May Hold You Back—If You’re A Woman

This post originally appeared on Forbes on April 22, 2025.

High-potential programs are a main feature of many companies’ learning and development curricula and are a key mechanism for developing their future leaders. In fact, over 70% of Fortune 500 companies have such a development program in place. But what if these programs were doing more harm than good for women?

There is an argument to be made that these programs can unintentionally imply the opposite of high potential; suggesting that without these programs, women wouldn’t be capable of ascending to a leadership role. Regardless, women first must be flagged as having high potential to gain entry—and that’s where researchers have located a gendered problem.

Recent research published in Organization Science has found that these programs can penalize women by limiting entry while simultaneously advantaging less than exceptional men. Researchers looked at the talent review data from over 4,000 employees at a large international engineering firm, where passion was a rated attribute in the performance review process. Employees were then also evaluated on their potential. While men and women were perceived as equally passionate, men were still much more likely to be designated as high potential than women.

Read the rest on Forbes.