This post originally appeared on Forbes on May 25, 2023.
Work hard, produce stellar results, receive a top performance rating and a promotion is on the horizon. That's how it should work, but this process doesn't happen consistently. According to a study out of MIT Sloan which looked at 30,000 employees at a large retail chain, women, on average, received higher performance ratings than their male colleagues — yet still were marked as having less potential than said colleagues. This resulted in women being 14% less likely to be promoted than their male colleagues.
This begs the larger question of how we decide who to promote. What biases are leading us to make the wrong decisions? And, more importantly, how does this lack of promotion exacerbate the gender pay gap?