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Is it possible to create a performance review system that somebody won't complain is sexist?

• tptacek 9y ago
  Obviously, yes. Problems like this are endemic to zero-sum schemes like stack ranking.
  • SamReidHughes 9y ago
    How? Edit: The parent post was edited. Are other employee evaluation schemes free of appearance of sexism (or actual sexism), or is it harder to see?
    • tptacek 9y ago
      The edit wasn't necessary to support the first sentence. There are thousands of tech companies, large and small, and most of them monitor employee performance. Meanwhile: allegations of sexist bias in review processes are infrequent enough to be newsworthy. QED.
      • SamReidHughes 9y ago
        A quick google immediately shows pages like this one [] which frets about sexism without including the words "stack" or "ranking." It has the usual citing of questionable concepts like implicit bias, or the Bloomberg article's "unconscious bias." What I would like to know is, suppose you need to make a system in a large organization in an attempt to lay off your 10% worst employees. It's pretty reasonable to expect sexist rankings, even made by non-sexists, and to also expect beliefs by individuals, wrongly held, that their personal low rank was the result of sexism. How do you determine whether an organization's ranking system is sexist, in which direction, and by how much? [] https://blog.impraise.com/360-feedback/how-performance-reviews-are-reinforcing-gender-bias-5-steps-to-fight-against-it-performance-review https://blog.impraise.com/360-feedback/how-performance-revie... Edit: By non-sexists, I mean, like, non-garbage people.
        • tptacek 9y ago
          You asked a simple, straightforward question with an easily obtainable answer, which I provided. I'm not interested in the new tangent you're trying to start here, sorry.
          • SamReidHughes 9y ago
            Yeah but your answer was so weak, talking about lawsuits that have made the news. I have also seen, personally for example, allegations of sexism regarding employee ratings that didn't turn into a news article about a lawsuit. That means you can't use notoriety of lawsuits to precede the use of "QED."
      • linkregister 9y ago
        Translation: “I don’t see sexism so it isn’t a problem.” On a serious note, tech companies, large and small, have varying amounts of lawsuits and news coverage. I agree that stack ranking and other rating methods make illegal discrimination more likely. I do not agree with your assertion that unreported discrimination based off sex doesn’t occur.
        • tptacek 9y ago
          That is not the assertion I am making. You've also shifted the goalposts: you're talking about sexism in the workplace, which I agree is rampant in our industry, and I'm talking about performance review systems that are structurally or endemically biased against women, which obviously also exist, but pretty clearly don't exist everywhere.
          • linkregister 9y ago
            Sorry, I missed the distinction.
      • kansface 9y ago
        You claim the correlation between companies with allegations of sexism in employee review (covered by the news), and companies that do stack ranking are sufficiently strong to declare a causal relationship between the two - in fact, strong enough that the former is universally a consequence of the later?
    • eridius 9y ago
      If you rate employees using objective metrics, then you can avoid sexism. The problem with stack ranking is, as the article said, it forces managers to use subjective measurements to rank employees because they're forced to put the employees in a particular order (instead of saying two employees performed the same). Once you start using subjective measurements, it's almost impossible to avoid having biases creep in.
      • SamReidHughes 9y ago
        The problem is you can't rate employees by objective metrics (like, line of code count) without them getting gamed, unless you can tie them directly to company success.
        • eridius 9y ago
          But you can rate them by metrics such as are they completing all their assigned work in a reasonable amount of time, and are they producing code that's up to the quality standards of the team (which could be measured by tracking whether they're introducing new bugs).
          • SamReidHughes 9y ago
            You can do that, and it sounds like a good idea as a backstop for subjective evaluations, but if this metric becomes important to the process, then people fight over estimates and game the bug tracker.
          • gaius 9y ago
            But you can rate them by metrics such as are they completing all their assigned work in a reasonable amount of time No you can't, unless you have a method for dividing a project up into blocks of exactly equal difficulty. The person who takes more time to do genuinely difficult things is probably closing fewer JIRAs than the one quickly cranking through easy ones, which would score more highly on that metric, but which is the more valuable to your organisation?
  • ImSkeptical 9y ago
    Young women (20-35) are more likely to get pregnant and take significant time off from work than their male counterparts. What ranking system could negate the difference that results from men working x hours more per year? Is that desirable or fair?
    • tptacek 9y ago
      I am really not interested in a new first-principles explication of the inferiority of women as a workforce demographic in the tech industry. Sorry.
      • ImSkeptical 9y ago
        Your comment seems unfairly antagonistic. I'm talking about a well documented phenomenon. Men typically work more hours than women. One of the reasons is pregnancy and maternity leave. https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2015/mobile/time-spent-working-by-full-and-part-time-status-gender-and-location-in-2014.htm https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2015/mobile/time-spent-working-... If men work more hours, shouldn't you expect ranking systems to consistently favor men? You can try to pretend like this observation is sexist, but you're just refusing to answer the argument by doing so. Please, explain why I'm wrong and I'll happily change my mind. I don't think women are inferior. I think they work less, because that's what I've read. One reason they work less is because of pregnancy and maternity leave. Even when equal leave is offered to men, women tend to take more of it, which makes sense as women are the ones who are actually pregnant. So, given the equality of men and women, and that men tend to work more hours, ranking systems that measure by output should be expected to put men ahead of women on average.
        • tptacek 9y ago
          I'm no more interested the second time than the first, sorry.
          • ImSkeptical 9y ago
            Do you comment on all topics you aren't interested in? Were you under the impression I was waiting to see if you were interested? Your comments in this thread are unnecessary and inappropriate.
  • alexasmyths 9y ago
    "Problems like this are endemic to zero-sum schemes like stack ranking." Stack ranking is nothing more than a more aggressive form of regular hiring promotion and advancement. Moreover, it's just as likely that female managers prefer females. There's nothing inherently sexist about 'stack ranking' - rather, possible sexism is derived during performance reviews - which are commonplace.
• tomjen3 9y ago
  Possibly, but I doubt it is possible to create a system that is worse than stack ranking.
• moduspol 9y ago
  Probably not, but your lawsuit risk is a lot higher if it's sexist against the wrong sex. It's probably easier to just make your performance review system sexist against the correct sex.
  • deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
• dragonwriter 9y ago
  It's possible to create one that fewer people will complain is sexist, and for which there will be less justification for such complaints. One where no one ever will complain? No, but so what?
• munchbunny 9y ago
  At a large enough scale, you can't avoid all complaints of sexism, because job performance doesn't exist in a controlled-experiment vacuum. To some extent your job performance always depends on how well you can work with colleagues, so if your company culture has sexism problem, there will always be a sexism problem whether or not it's openly discussed. But absolutely eliminating sexism isn't the bar most people are held to. Most people are held to the bar of taking reasonable steps to mitigate the issue and improve culture. In the vast majority of cases, you can iterate your way to a fair system with a clear rubric that controls for unconscious biases and establishes a substantial trail of evidence to support each judgement of performance. Actually doing that, especially when giving criticism, tends to be a matter of managerial skill.
  • stinkytaco 9y ago
    > In the vast majority of cases, you can iterate your way to a fair system with a clear rubric that controls for unconscious biases and establishes a substantial trail of evidence to support each judgement of performance. Actually doing that, especially when giving criticism, tends to be a matter of managerial skill. I'm not sure this is true. A system with a clear rubric that will control for unconscious bias will be accused of reducing people to pure numbers and not consider factors that cannot be quantified. It's also entirely possible that the rubric may control for unconscious bias on the part of the manager, but introduce a whole new set of biases against one group or another. This isn't to say we should make the effort. I actually feel that your point about managerial skill is perhaps the most important. Middle managers, the ones to whom ranking and performance evaluation fall, are often promoted from lower positions and do not have the background or training to be good managers. I'm not sure how to solve this problem, but in most organizations I've worked at this only way up is to management. Good workers turn into bad managers.
• BearGoesChirp 9y ago
  I doubt it. At least in the society I grew up in, there are gender differences in social expectations completely outside the job market that lead to different incentives in the job market. Any ranking system will have to deal with the results of two different demographics who have, on average, different incentives.
• geofft 9y ago
  Trying to build a system where nobody will complain about sexism is like trying to build an infrastructure where nobody will compare about security bugs. In turn, giving up on building a less sexist system because people will always complain is like giving up on building a more secure infrastructure because people will always complain. Unless you are extraordinarily lucky at both the humans building what you're building and the inputs to your system (constraints about language and tech stack and problem domain on the security side; constraints about hiring sources and existing culture/public reputation and leadership on the employment side), you're always going to have security flaws in your infrastructure, and you're always going to have sexism in your employment processes. And even if you are this lucky, you're not going to eliminate people poking at your system and suggesting places where it seems to fall short. The important question is what you do about it, how severe the problems are now, and how the severity changes over time. Just like there are plenty of ways to write software that take it as a given that implementors will screw up and attackers will be clever, there are also plenty of ways to design a performance review system that takes it as a given that some fraction of humans in your organization will have biases (conscious and unconscious) and will treat their coworkers according to their biases. Honestly, some of the mitigations are the same: the first thing I'd reach for is defense-in-depth and auditing. If your system is consistently giving different results (whether it's hiring, or retention, or promotions, or salary) to people in different demographic groups in a way that seems to disprove the null hypothesis that the demographic is irrelevant to job performance, look very hard at it, add additional reviews to make sure the results are consistent even when different people are involved, and keep measuring. There might be good reasons that the disparity is legitimate (just like there might be good reasons that one of your servers is regularly opening outbound TCP connections to random machines in China), just make sure you are actually noticing that something unexpected is going on and try to find an explanation for it.
• fullshark 9y ago
  It's impossible to create any system with actual consequences to human livelihoods that's free from complaints. Whatever their flavor.