For better or for worse, humans are always judging one another. These judgments can be positive (judging someone to be a nurturing parent) or negative (judging an employee to be incompetent). Our judgements of others may happen unconsciously. But conscious or not, it stands to reason that judgement in the workplace can have a significant impact on the career of the individual being judged.
I wanted to know what impact certain perceptions (gender stereotypes and the choices employees make in how they balance their work and home responsibilities) have on employees and their careers. As someone who has judged others in the past for their professional decisions and certainly also been judged myself, this is a topic that has long interested me. When the pandemic hit in March of 2020 and most office employees found themselves teleworking, these employees suddenly had a much more intimate view into the lives of their colleagues. This made me even more curious to understand if and how employees were judging one another, and the consequences associated with this judgement in the workplace.
This paper examines the impact of both positive and negative judgement by others in the workplace, and speculates as to what impact this may have on an employee’s career. I took existing research on how stereotypes related to gender and motherhood influence perceptions, and considered how these are playing out in the context of the 2020-2021 office working environment. More specifically, my goal was to learn if and how gender influences judgement of warmth and competence during a pandemic in which telework is giving employees new insight into their colleagues’ tendency towards integration or segmentation. I then speculated about the impact of these perceptions on career growth.
When the results of my research came in, I was not surprised to learn that gender was a factor in the judgement of an employee’s competence but I was taken aback to discover how it played a role. My research revealed that the gender of the person doing the judging is what matters, not the gender of the person being judged. Employees of both genders who integrate their work and home responsibilities are judged more harshly by women as being less competent and less promotable than employees who segment. This is significant. It suggests that women are punishing those who demonstrate traits associated with femininity (i.e., traits on which women have historically been judged negatively). Women in positions of power who make these judgements have the capacity to influence the career trajectories of their subordinates.
To change, we must first become aware of the problem, and there is a clear problem when it comes to promoting women to the highest levels of management. The pandemic has diminished employees’ capacity to segment and reduced privacy around home life, thus making employees more vulnerable to judgement on the basis of segmentation-integration (a difficult balance that continues to predominantly affect mothers). If we educate leadership, especially female leadership, about the implicit biases uncovered in my research, we can help them identify their own unconscious judgement and we can begin to neutralize any negative impact this may have.
Telework is here to stay. It can be immensely useful for some employees who find it facilitates the balance of professional and domestic/family obligations. But we must be careful that as we inadvertently gain insight into employees’ home lives, we do not invite baseless judgements that could impact their careers.
Alexis Gaiptman (EMBA 2021) is the Executive Director - Canada Handicap International - Humanity & Inclusion. (HI) is one of six founding organizations of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL), the co-winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997 and the winner of the Conrad N. Hilton Award in 2011. HI takes action and campaigns in places where “living in dignity” is no easy task.
Cover photo by Charles Deluvio on Unsplash
