We know many leaders—not surprisingly, mostly men—believe they have little to no control over gender inequality. They also choose to believe their organizations are meritocracies, where success comes from hard work and merit alone.

Yet working women know and experience something quite different. As we explained in our recent article, seemingly small and insignificant parts of the entrenched workplace systems, processes, and practices organizations foster inequity and ultimately compound over time. Add the ongoing consequences of systemic biases and gender-based obstacles, and many women discover that their career progression plateaus.

Our third book, Beyond Bias: The PATH to End Gender Inequality at Work, presents a new approach to solving workplace gender inequality. The PATH forward outlines a four-pronged approach:

• Prioritize the elimination of exclusionary behaviors.
• Adopt discrimination-resistant methods of personnel decision-making.
• Treat inequality in the home as a workplace problem.
• Halt unequal performance reviews, career advice, and leadership development opportunities.

Equal opportunities at work depend on parity for men and women in the approaches to performance reviews, career advice, and chances for leadership development.

How to Redesign Company Processes to Stamp Out Inequality

It’s not just fairness and gender neutrality that matters, but also an affirmative effort to prevent women from being tracked in jobs and responsibilities that do not serve as stepping stones to reach higher positions. Men are routinely advised to reach for stepping‐stone positions, encouraged when they do, and provided the comprehensive support they need to reach the next level. 

Women also must receive the same advice, encouragement, and support, as men. How? Below are ways leaders can institute and effect real change in their organizations.

1. Standardize Performance Reviews and Evaluation Discussions

Performance reviews provide employees with a comprehensive look at their strengths and weaknesses over a set period and share specific action-oriented advice on how to improve. 

Yet the review process can be tainted by discrimination. 

Assessing employees’ performance should be determined by the results the organization wants to achieve. Unfortunately, structural discriminatory influences undermine not only objective performance metrics but the very roles and responsibilities men and women have. Before a review ever happens, many women experience the (unconscious) assumption that men are better at tackling more-challenging tasks, undertaking leadership roles, and demonstrating the ability to work on projects that demand sustained commitment and perseverance. 

To level the playing field, managers need the appropriate training to provide fair assessments and future-oriented suggestions for improvement. This includes learning how to:

• Build positive working relationships based on mutual respect with their direct reports.
• Establish written expectations that outline each employee’s role in determining business success.
• Define criteria clearly, with no ambiguities or contradictory requirements.
• Identify unique roles and provide the rationale for those choices.
• Collaborate with employees to specify evaluation criteria.
• Provide straightforward, unbiased, and candid assessments of performance, as well as task-based recommendations for areas of improvement. Guidance needs to be actionable and directly tied to specific organizational outcomes.
• Remove gender-based language, especially gratuitously negative comments like “inept, frivolous, gossipy, excitable, scattered, temperamental, panicky, and indecisive” from the evaluation. 
• Review language to ensure the tone of the evaluation is measured, neither overly critical nor obsequiously positive.
• Offer women the same direct feedback and opportunity to improve as is offered to men.

These tactics are particularly important for women. Candid advice gives men an advantage, allowing them to correct and adjust their performance. Women cannot advance on equal terms with men unless their performance reviews are equally unbiased, with no advantage in terms of content given to either women or men.

2. Provide Equal Opportunities for Career Advice

Leaders need to ensure their managers are advising, coaching, and encouraging women with respect to their careers just as vigorously as they do for men. This means managers need to explicitly address career goals and discuss how employees can achieve them. Periodically, managers should have focused discussions with employees that outline how to build on their talents, what sorts of assignments and responsibilities they need to take on to advance to the next career level, and one-, two-, and five-year goals. Managers also must provide the support, training, and monitoring employees need to reach their goals.”

Simply providing objective and straightforward performance reviews will not improve women’s chances of advancing into senior leadership unless they are coupled with career advice, counseling, and encouragement that is as likely to point women toward the C‐suite and NEO positions as it does men. 

Creating equal chances calls for candid conversations involving not only unfiltered assessment of current strengths and weaknesses but also honest, unbiased appraisals of where employees are in their careers and what they need to do to keep advancing within their organization. As Peter Capelli and Anna Tavis note in the Harvard Business Review, these sorts of conversations need to “keep revisiting two basic questions: What am I doing that I should keep doing? and What am I doing that I should change? Organizational leaders also need to focus on a career advice process that ensures that equivalently talented, high‐potential women are put on precisely the same leadership tracks as men, and that they receive the support, encouragement, and opportunities to reach the top. 

3. Design Gender-Neutral Leadership Development Programs

Assuring that women and men receive top-quality, specific, focused, and helpful performance reviews and similar career advice means that women also need comprehensive, gender‐neutral leadership development opportunities. They also need the same strong support and coaching that men receive at each stage of their careers. 

Affinity bias is a major obstacle to achieving this result. Because most senior leaders are men—only 15% of senior executives at Fortune 500 companies are women—men receive more leadership development opportunities, so they are more likely to advance into increasingly senior leadership positions.

In addition to affinity bias, women face several other serious obstacles to advancing to the higher and more challenging ranks of senior leadership and being accepted and fully supported when they do. Among them: 

• The paucity of female role models from whom to learn effective female leadership styles, behaviors, and identities. 
• Being more frequently tracked into positions that are not stepping stones for senior leadership (that is, line and operations positions).
• Having networks that are weaker and less capable of opening leadership opportunities, providing visibility, and generating recognition.
• Being increasingly seen as outsiders, exceptions, and “others” as they move up the leadership ladder. 
• Increasingly being subjected to greater scrutiny, criticism, and isolation than their male counterparts.

Organizations need to design gender-conscious leadership development programs specifically aimed at countering the discriminatory situations women face as they seek to climb the leadership ladder. These programs provide women with the equal and realistic opportunities men have, including: 

• Specific occasions to perform as leaders at increasingly senior levels.
• Explicit career coaching, as well as mentoring, and advice from a senior leader that is specific and appropriate for their career aspirations.
• Opportunities to participate in safe women‐only spaces to discuss gendered obstacles to leadership opportunities, exchange experiences, and share advice for dealing with these obstacles.
• Support and specific recognition at higher leadership levels. 

To create truly inclusive workplaces, leaders must champion these kinds of substantive changes in how managers make personnel decisions and provide career guidance. By eliminating the subjective discretion that drives so many outcomes, companies will create a strong and justified sense of fairness among their employees. And that will drive radical change—without a radical shift in how companies operate.