Today we did performance review of everyone across the board in my org. It usually is presided by HR and everyone has a frank conversation around teammates within their own teams and outside the teams. Heated debates are natural with each manager pitching their own report. In the end we thought we came to a fair conclusion and assigned ratings. Then HR turns around and says great, now you as an org have two abnormalities based on the ratings - 1, you have too many POC women with low ratings and 2/ you don’t have enough men with high ratings. We all thought we had a fair discussion on every single person in the org and yet the outcome of the exercise was flagged. So we spent another 2 hours after already spending 5 hours discussing bias, and whether we miscalibrated. We ran the whole process again only to come up 1 woman coming out of the group and 1 man moving up the chain. I hate performance reviews for this reason - there is just no good fucking way to ever evaluate people and no matter how much training you take when you put a collective number of people in a room some implicit bias will find its way. Ugh. This is the part of the job I absolutely hate.