Here’s the scene: You’re hiking in a lush jungle in Ecuador’s rain forest when you look down and realize you’re about to step on a large snake. Before you even think, you step back quickly and get away from the snake.

Now, you could have taken the time to look in your field guide-book to see if the snake was in fact poisonous, but your brain decided for you automatically that it was safer to just assume danger and get away. Isn’t it great we can depend on our brains for quickly judging situations based on very little information, and acting accordingly?

The only problem is, we aren’t always in the jungle and in imminent danger. Yet our brains come to the same snap judgments, even when the creature we are encountering is simply another human being, and the jungle we are walking in is the parking lot at work. That’s when the usefulness of our brain’s instant judgments can be problematic.

Maybe it’s a job candidate, maybe it’s a new boss, or maybe it’s the new intern—most likely none of them impose a threat. Yet your brain can size these people up faster than you can intentionally comprehend, and leave you with all kinds of ideas about who they are and who they are not. Then suddenly you’ve got a job candidate that has to prove herself more than another because of your automatic first impression, which is based on very little, if any, fact. This is the essence of bias.

For organizations, bias is a huge barrier to recruiting and retaining the best talent. When individuals aren’t given the chance to even get in the door for an interview based on momentary assumptions about them, organizations miss out on their potential. And if they do make it through the interview, bias can creep into performance reviews, prevent them from promotions, and even affect how much they are paid.

Facebook is known to have an excellent diversity and inclusion program, and gladly shares their training* with the public. One of four types of bias that they focus on in the workplace is called performance bias. Let’s take a look at what performance bias is, talk about the impact it has on individuals and organizations, and review three simple ways to start counteracting performance bias at your organization.

What is Performance Bias?

Performance bias refers to when it is assumed that some people are much better at certain tasks than others, based on stereotypes. This leads to people in more powerful dominant groups of people being judged on their potential, while those in less dominate groups are judged on their accomplishments. When it’s already assumed that an individual is good at something, they don’t actually have to do that thing to get your vote of confidence—they already have it. And when it’s assumed that an individual might not be good at something, then they need to prove themselves by doing a good job.

Performance Bias and Gender

What does this look like in the real world? For one, male performance is often overestimated when compared to females. This is especially true in traditionally male domains, like technology, politics, and finance. Let’s look at a few examples:

1. Orchestras in the U.S. are very male dominated. American Economic Review published a study about an orchestra who started auditioning players from behind a curtain so that their gender was not apparent. This increased the odds of women making it past the first round of auditions by 50%.

2. In a study by R.E. Steinpreis, K.A. Anders, and D. Ritzke, resumes were sent out that were identical aside from one version having a woman’s name, and the other having a man’s name. The results showed the 79% of applicants with the men’s name versus only 49% of those with a woman’s name were deemed “worthy of hire”.

3.  It’s not just men who are guilty of gender-based performance bias. The Journal of Experimental Psychology published a study showing that mothers overestimate their sons’ crawling abilities, while underestimating their daughters’.