Gender-based exclusionary practices in performance appraisal

Abstract

We examine how performance appraisal is, following Acker, an organizational process producing inequality. By process we mean that appraisal is an on-going and relational year-round practice, enacted through interaction between men and women, rather than a bounded and individualized event. We use Bourdieu’s concept of habitus to analyze how masculine domination guides what is presented as a gender-neutral organizational practice. We conducted in-depth interviews at a financial sector organization in Malta with employees, their direct appraisers and higher-level appraisers. Appraisers measured employees’ tangible (task related) as well as “behavioral” performance. We find that the practice of attributing scores to behavior, and the interaction between men and women, appraisers and appraisees, both reflect and produce women’s inferior status. While women concentrated on tangible targets such as sales, male employees and the appraisers focused on soft targets, specifically on socializing with colleagues, which in practice emerged as the key criterion for the behavioral score. We find that male sociality is an organizing process that literally devalues women through quantified performance scores. Managerial discretion translates employees’ behavior into a lasting organizational record, contributing a formalized component to the gendered hierarchy.