White cushions and average ratings
Sharing an incident related to promotion and appraisal, that happened few years ago.
This is when I was working with a consulting firm, part of the big 4. I was assigned a project and my manager for that project was a male in his late 30s. I was in my early 20s at the time.
This project required us to visit the client quite often, and the way we decided to schedule our hours were, 80% of the hours to be spent working from client’s office, remaining back at our office.
There was this one day, where I wasn’t feeling super well. I was on my second day of periods, and bleeding heavy. The client’s offices had pure white furniture, white velvet chairs, sofas, cushions, name it. I was worried of staining and moreover, I felt super weak.
I told my boss, that after the meetings got over with the client, I’d like to come back to the office to finish the work, instead of continuing at the client’s, because of the above-mentioned reason.
He silently nodded, smiled and said “sure”.
Fast forward to when it was appraisal time, I learned that I had scored the least on this project.
When I approached him, he said, “well, you aren’t quite dedicated to your work. As an example, you used your periods as a way to get out of the client’s office that day.”
I was silent, furious, but mainly sad and silent. I wasn’t going to justify whether I was using periods as an excuse. I had asked to go back to the office where I was more comfortable, I hadn’t taken an off, and yet. I wonder if he’d rank me even lower had I asked for an off for the rest of the day.
This score ended up affecting my overall average, and I wasn’t qualified for the promised promotion.
This isn’t a feminist convo. More on how we appraise people and get appraised.
How we can be more aware, responsible and ensure less bias in our ratings.
