Is it possible to create a performance review system that somebody won't complain is sexist?
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.
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.
Problems like this are endemic to zero-sum schemes like stack ranking.
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?
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-revie...
Edit: By non-sexists, I mean, like, non-garbage people.
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.
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?
Why would you ever want to evaluate employees by any metric not directly tied to their contribution to company success?
Usually from the point of view of the problematic person, everyone else is the asshole. At some point the evaluation has to boil down to a judgement call, rather than an objective measurement. This process is always fraught, for instance when the bosses are the assholes themselves or support them (ahem, Travis), but I don't love the idea of just not considering interpersonal factors when evaluating performance. Bad behavior shouldn't have to rise to the level of an HR complaints before consequences are faced, and good behavior should be rewarded.
What metric would you recommend?
This isn't, by the way, an original concept; the dangers of the inappropriate use of micro-level metrics that aren't tied to business outcomes in decision-making (and the individual employee level is about as micro as you can get) was one of the key problems W. Edwards Deming identified.
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.
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.
One where no one ever will complain? No, but so what?