Bias didn’t disappear; it went underground

Since then, HBR has gone back to that question every twenty years — 1985, 2006, and now, this month. Sixty years of data on how men and women experience leadership. And the newest wave, based on interviews with 193 senior U.S. executives, found something none of us wanted: backsliding. Men and women are diverging more, not less, on whether women are judged fairly, held to the same standards, and advanced through genuinely meritocratic systems. Read the full article here →

Here’s what I keep seeing echoed in my own coaching work, and what this research reinforces:

We thought this was solved. Most leadership teams I work with genuinely believe they’ve moved past this. Policies are in place. Language has changed. Nobody in the room today would say what got said in 1965. But bias didn’t disappear — it went underground. It now lives in the informal stuff: who gets sponsored quietly, whose performance gets judged on “gut feel,” who gets the P&L role that actually leads somewhere.

Women get evaluated on performance. Men get evaluated on potential. This is one of the most consistent patterns I’ve seen in coaching rooms and one this kind of research keeps surfacing. A woman has to have already done the thing before anyone will bet on her doing the next thing. A man gets the benefit of the doubt — the promotion, the stretch assignment, the seat at the table — on the promise of what he might do. Same title, same room, fundamentally different bar.

Which means women learn they have to be flawless. When your only path forward runs through demonstrated, proven, already-delivered results, there’s no room for the normal margin of error every leader needs to grow. I watch talented women in coaching engagements hold themselves to a standard no one could sustain — not because they’re perfectionists by nature, but because the system taught them, correctly, that one visible stumble costs them disproportionately.

And here’s the part that should bother everyone, not just the people directly affected: we all lose. Every leader held to a “prove it first” standard is a leader whose ideas, risk-taking, and full potential the organization never gets to use. That’s not just a fairness problem. It’s a performance problem. If half your talent pool is spending its energy avoiding mistakes instead of taking the swings that create real growth, you’re leaving capability on the table — the same capability every company says it’s competing for.

Sixty years of asking the same question and still finding gaps like this isn’t evidence that people aren’t trying. It’s evidence that good intentions were never going to be enough — the systems themselves need redesigning: how we define “ready,” how we sponsor talent, how subjective a “performance” conversation is allowed to be.

Worth the read. And worth an honest look at how “potential” gets defined and handed out on your own team.