Assignments Are Critical Tools to Achieve Workplace Gender Equity
Work assignments can be a powerful means of propelling employees’ growth but — unless managed deliberately — they can also undermine efforts to build a diverse workforce.
Facing unprecedented levels of employee burnout and historic quit rates, how can companies lead with a model that attracts and retains talent? This period of transition, and the lessons learned from the pandemic, offer organizations a unique opportunity to improve and refine their diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) strategies.1 It is imperative that leaders consider the landscape of work assignments at their companies as a foundation for greater workforce equity.
“Assignments” can comprise work tasks, activities, or projects. Scholars have long identified a gender gap in access to the kinds of assignments — large in scope, highly visible, and strategically important — that are seen as essential to career advancement. An estimated 70% of leadership development occurs through experiential learning, especially the kind offered by these challenging stretch assignments.
Yet women are largely overlooked for challenging work assignments. One factor is that women typically have fewer ties to influential decision makers who connect people to assignment opportunities. Biased performance evaluations also may play a role, with women seeing no gains in their performance scores for the very behaviors (such as “taking charge”) for which men are rewarded.2 One study showed how promotability depends on having had challenging past projects — setting up a vicious cycle in which women never get ahead.3 Women of color, tasked with the additional burden of “fitting in” at predominantly White organizations, may find channels to career-advancing work blocked entirely.4
Historically, companies have not tracked assignment processes. In one 2010 report, when HR leaders were asked the percentage of “business-critical/important” assignments held by women, the top two responses were “1% to 10%” and “not measured.” Both career-advancing work and meaningful work are cornerstones of positive professional experiences. But leaders may know little about who has access to significant assignments, or they may be unaware of how a lack of access drives burnout, turnover, and dwindling diversity on the leadership bench.5
These many unknowns about assignments drive an information gap that grows riskier as countless organizations head into new hybrid work arrangements. To quantify this risk, our team at the Stanford VMware Women’s Leadership Innovation Lab ran a study of assignments, using data that many companies collect and managers review at least yearly: employee engagement survey (EES) data.
References (9)
1. “Hybrid Working Is Here to Stay Post-Pandemic: Stanford’s Nicholas Bloom,” Bloomberg TV, Dec. 30, 2020, video, 6:34, www.bloomberg.com; and J.M. Barrero, N. Bloom, and S.J. Davis, “Why Working From Home Will Stick,” working paper 28731, National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, Massachusetts, April 2021.
2. S.J. Correll, K.R. Weisshaar, A.T. Wynn, et al., “Inside the Black Box of Organizational Life: The Gendered Language of Performance Assessment,” American Sociological Review 85, no. 6 (December 2020): 1022-1050.
