Who are you going to promote — the ‘strong leader’ or the ‘real mother hen’?

While advising a CEO on gender equity, I sat in on discussion with his team about whom should receive a promotion. I noticed that they referred to the male candidate as “a strong leader.”

Then someone said of the female candidate, “Oh, her team loves her. She’s a real mother hen.”

“Whoa, back up the train!” I said. “Who are you going to promote? The strong leader or the real mother hen?”

At first, the team pushed back, “Oh, come on, Kim, it’s just a figure of speech.”

However, in the end, they had to agree, words matter. They referred to her as a real leader, not a real mother hen. She got the promotion.

But — that’s often not the case.

He’s a real a**hole. But he has to be to get the job done.

If you’ve watched or read about the docuseries Quiet On the Set, you might be surprised and horrified to learn that Christy Stratton and Jenny Kilgen, the only two women writers on Nickelodeon’s most popular show, were illegally forced to share a salary while the men on the team were paid individual salaries.

Jenny was even told she’d only be asked back if she agreed to work 11 weeks for free despite her knowing a white man with zero experience had been hired at full salary. Christy had been fired for taking two weekend evenings off the entire season.

This is happening in every industry. There are countless women whose careers stalled because of gender bias, women who have been steered into less prestigious roles while less qualified men were fast-tracked into running the high-paying profit centers.

“You have two problems here. One is that you don’t even notice your own biases — inconsistencies and double standards. That’s causing you to skew your decision-making. Two is that if you keep talking that way, not only will you promote the wrong people, you are going to start losing the right ones.”

I once advised the executive team at a tech company. Sally, the only senior woman on the product team at this company, asked me for some advice.

She learned that one of her peers had gotten a stock grant worth many multiples of what hers was worth. That was pretty hard to swallow, but she was trying to stay focused on being positive, doing great work, and getting promoted.

Over time, though, she didn’t get promoted, despite her many impressive contributions, and she was finding it increasingly difficult to stay motivated. She showed me her most recent performance review. Bob, her boss, had written that she was “abrasive” and “not technical” enough.

My bias antennae perked up. By any objective measure, she was far less abrasive than several men who’d been promoted ahead of her recently. And it wasn’t at all clear from their performance or educational background or work experience why the men who’d been promoted ahead of her were any more “technical” than she was.

Then Sally learned that Ned was going to be promoted ahead of her. Ned had accomplished less than Sally at the company. When Sally asked why she wasn’t being promoted and Ned was, Bob again harped on the “abrasive” issue, since he couldn’t point to any results to explain his decision.

To Sally, her boss’s rationale for promoting Ned over her seemed so obviously unfair that she was wondering if she’d missed something.

When I told her, “No, it’s not you; there’s real gender bias here,” she was visibly relieved. She could stop blaming herself. In my next meeting with Bob, I mentioned an executive at the company who’d been promoted recently.

I mentioned how aggressive this guy could be. “I know,” Bob said. “He is a real a**hole. But he has to be to get the job done.”

I’d set a trap, and Bob stepped right into it. “What about Sally?” I asked. “You told her she wasn’t getting promoted because she was too aggressive. Doesn’t she have to be just as aggressive as Ned to get the job done? Aren’t you putting her in a kind of catch-22?”

I continued, “You have two problems here. One is that you don’t even notice your own biases — inconsistencies and double standards. That’s causing you to skew your decision-making. Two is that if you keep talking that way, not only will you promote the wrong people, you are going to start losing the right ones.”

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Radical Respect is a weekly newsletter I am publishing on LinkedIn to highlight some of the things that get in the way of creating a collaborative, respectful working environment. A healthy organization is not merely an absence of unpleasant symptoms. Creating a just working environment is about eliminating bad behavior and reinforcing collaborative, respectful behavior. Each week I’ll offer tips on how to do that so you can create a workplace where everyone feels supported and respected.