A reader writes:
I’m hoping for some guidance on dealing with an employee who is convinced she’s not advancing because she’s a woman, but it’s really due to her barely trying enough and believing that advancement comes from checking boxes and “delivering service on time.”
We are in a creative niche industry that is fairly evenly split between men and women, although the larger industry we are a part of is still very male-dominated. Our company is a small privately owned company (less than 50 people), almost evenly divided, with women at all levels, including leadership.
I am a woman at the top level of our company and am involved in deciding who is ready to be promoted to the next level. We have a list of hard skills that people need to master at each level to advance, but there are also less easily measurable soft skill components, which become more important as people advance (we have a list and try to give guidance on how to develop these, but it’s impossible to say that someone has “mastered” creativity or customer interaction, for example). Other more senior women and I regularly try to train younger employees on strategies for dealing with gender discrimination, which unfortunately we still deal with outside the company, but in 20 years, there are very few examples I’ve ever seen or heard of inside it – and the few that have come up have been addressed promptly.
One employee, Mia, is saying that she earned the promotion because she “checks all the boxes” on the hard skills list and that she doesn’t like doing soft skills, so they’re not important – and because of those things, the only possible reason she’s being held back is because she’s a woman. An accurate analysis is that she performs most of the hard skills adequately for her current level, but does not excel in any of them, has not proven any ability in the next level of hard skills, and is very poor at all of the soft skills (she received this feedback). The “proof” that she was pushed back due to gender discrimination is that a male employee who was hired a few months after her (and has been amazing at almost all skills) got a promotion. (We don’t necessarily have a set number of positions at each level; we generally promote when we feel people are ready and put in more work to develop.) It’s also worth noting that Mia worked in a different role for the first year and was almost fired, so technically she’s been in the same role as this guy for less time, but she doesn’t think it matters. The two other women who have been hired since Mia are doing really well and have a real chance of stepping down before she does, assuming they continue their current trajectory. Overall, I am shocked because his stance on this shows a remarkable lack of self-awareness on his part.
Mia is still an asset in her current role, although she is becoming toxic about the situation to other employees, so I’m not sure how long we’ll feel like that again.
Do you have any suggestions on how to tell if this is a performance issue that has nothing to do with her being a woman? I’m a little worried that if she leaves she’ll try to file a discrimination suit (this seems baseless, but I don’t know much about the law).
You can read my response to this letter in New York magazine today. go there to read it.
