Elisa Baldazzi (University of Bologna)
Marina Della Giusta, Sylvia Jaworska, Giovanni Razzu and Almudena Sevilla
Who gets recognised as high-performing is not only a matter of what employees do it is a matter of how performance is defined. When evaluation criteria are implicitly calibrated to majority-group behaviours, talent is systematically misrecognised, and that misrecognition compounds over careers into large earnings and promotion gaps. Yet the field has lacked causal evidence that changing the language of evaluation criteria can improve minority outcomes inside real workplace evaluation systems. Attitude-change interventions such as unconscious bias training have repeatedly failed to move the needle; structural redesign of evaluation criteria offers a more promising path but one that has remained largely untested. This paper closes that gap. Exploiting within-firm variation across six teams in a large international service-sector firm three of which received revised, more inclusive evaluation guidance and three of which did not we provide the first field-experimental evidence that a criteria-level language intervention causally and substantially improves the performance ratings of female and non-white employees, with no detectable effect for white male employees. The intervention works without requiring any change in the beliefs or preferences of individual evaluators, identifying criteria-level language redesign as a scalable institutional lever for reducing the misallocation of talent. Our second contribution is to open the black box of the evaluation process itself. Through direct observation and systematic coding of calibration meetings access that firms almost universally deny to external researchers we show that inclusive criteria restructure the evaluative conversation, reducing comparative and sales-focused assessments that embed male-normed performance standards and shifting discourse toward holistic consideration of individual competencies. This mechanism evidence reveals not just that the words used to define excellence matter but the precise organisational process through which they shape who gets ahead.