Cognitive Bias and its impact on women’s advancement in tech #7
Imagine a software team preparing for an important product launch.
There are six people in the room. One needs to finish the backend architecture. Another is responsible for testing. Someone needs to fix the last security vulnerabilities before release.
Then there is Sarah.
Sarah is the person who notices that the developer and product manager are not communicating. She organizes the meeting. She takes notes. She checks whether the new intern understands the project. When the client becomes frustrated, Sarah is asked to speak to them. When two colleagues disagree, someone says, “Maybe Sarah can mediate.” When the team becomes disorganized, Sarah creates a shared document and follows up with everyone.
None of these tasks appear in Sarah’s job description. They are nevertheless treated as if they are somehow her responsibility.
When the next difficult technical project appears, Sarah is not chosen for it. “She is really good with people,” her manager thinks. “Maybe she would be better suited to the client-facing side.”
Sarah may even agree. After all, she has become the person who does those things.
This is where the problem becomes difficult to see. Sarah is not necessarily being explicitly told that she cannot do technical work. Nobody has to say, “Women should handle coordination.” Instead, she repeatedly receives opportunities to perform one category of work and fewer opportunities to perform another. Over time, the tasks she performs become evidence for the assumption that she prefers those tasks.
Definition and Research Foundations
Responsibility bias refers to the systematic pattern where women are disproportionately assigned, expected to perform, or rewarded for relational and organizational work, while men are directed toward tasks that build technical expertise and career capital. This pattern is documented across research in social role theory, low-promotability task allocation, and studies on task distribution in technical fields. The core issue is whether organizations assign distinct responsibilities to women and subsequently interpret the resulting behavior as evidence of individual preference.
Task Allocation and Low-Promotability Work
Workplace inequality frequently manifests in the distribution of everyday tasks. Essential organizational functions—such as scheduling meetings, documenting decisions, onboarding employees, and resolving conflicts—benefit the team, but rarely lead to promotions.
Research by Linda Babcock, Maria Recalde, Lise Vesterlund, and Laurie Weingart categorizes these functions as low-promotability tasks. Their experimental data showed that women were more likely than men to volunteer for these tasks, were requested to perform them more often, and accepted those requests at higher rates. Managers frequently ask individuals who have previously accepted these tasks, creating a structural pattern that reinforces future assignments.
Stereotypes and Technical Assignment Patterns
Social role theory demonstrates that individuals form beliefs about gender roles by observing the distribution of labor. When women are frequently observed in communal roles, those observations reinforce assumptions that women are communal and men are task-oriented. A meta-analysis covering seven decades of data by Alice Eagly and colleagues confirmed that perceptions of women as more communal have remained stable over time.
This distribution directly impacts technical fields. A study by Irene de Pater, Annelies van Vianen, and Myriam Bechtoldt found that women reported fewer challenging job experiences due to supervisors’ task-allocation decisions. Similarly, research on engineering design teams by Audrey Schauer and colleagues showed that women were more frequently assigned to documentation and communication, while men were assigned to design and fabrication.
A 2025 study by Audrey Aday, Holly Engstrom, and Toni Schmader examined this mechanism directly. Managers with essentialist gender beliefs disproportionately assigned female interns to people-oriented tasks and male interns to technical tasks. Furthermore, female participants who received people-oriented recommendations subsequently reported lower interest in technical roles, demonstrating that initial task allocation shapes subsequent career interests.
Performance Evaluation and Organizational Interventions
Responsibility bias presents evaluating challenges for employees. Role congruity theory indicates that women face negative evaluations whether they accept or decline low-promotability tasks. Accepting administrative tasks reduces the time available for primary technical achievements, while declining them can be evaluated as a lack of collaboration. Research on performance feedback shows that evaluations for women frequently focus on interpersonal behavior rather than technical performance metrics.
Because task allocation occurs through management decisions, organizations can address responsibility bias through structured policies:
Track and record the assignment of administrative, coordination, and support tasks across team members relative to promotion outcomes.
Implement strict rotation systems for meeting administration, note-taking, and onboarding duties rather than relying on volunteers.
Establish opt-out structures for technical assignments, ensuring all team members are directly offered opportunities in architecture, coding, and system design.
Rotate ownership of technical presentations, subsystem design, and technical investigations among all junior and mid-level employees.
Check task-assignment recency before assigning administrative work to ensure responsibilities are distributed equally across the team.
Separate technical outcomes from organizational support work in performance evaluations, requiring concrete metrics for both categories.
Train managers to evaluate the criteria behind task assignments to prevent previous work history from being misread as an employee’s sole interest.
Task allocation directly influences skill development and career progression. Establishing standardized processes for distributing both administrative and technical work ensures that individual career development is not determined by initial task assignment patterns.
References:
Aday, A., Engstrom, H.R. and Schmader, T. (2025) ‘Gender essentialism leads to biased learning opportunities that shape women’s career interests’, Psychological Science, 36(8), pp. 622–636. doi: 10.1177/09567976251353753.
Babcock, L., Recalde, M.P., Vesterlund, L. and Weingart, L. (2017) ‘Gender differences in accepting and receiving requests for tasks with low promotability’, American Economic Review, 107(3), pp. 714–747. doi: 10.1257/aer.20141734.
Ciancetta, L.M. and Roch, S.G. (2021) ‘Backlash in performance feedback: Deepening the understanding of the role of gender in performance appraisal’, Human Resource Management, 60(4), pp. 641–657. doi: 10.1002/hrm.22059.
De Pater, I.E., Van Vianen, A.E.M. and Bechtoldt, M.N. (2010) ‘Gender differences in job challenge: A matter of task allocation’, Gender, Work & Organization, 17(4), pp. 433–453. doi: 10.1111/j.1468-0432.2009.00477.x.
Eagly, A.H. and Karau, S.J. (2002) ‘Role congruity theory of prejudice toward female leaders’, Psychological Review, 109(3), pp. 573–598. doi: 10.1037/0033-295X.109.3.573.
Eagly, A.H., Nater, C., Miller, D.I., Kaufmann, M. and Sczesny, S. (2020) ‘Gender stereotypes have changed: A cross-temporal meta-analysis of U.S. public opinion polls from 1946 to 2018’, American Psychologist, 75(3), pp. 301–315. doi: 10.1037/amp0000494.
Koenig, A.M. and Eagly, A.H. (2014) ‘Evidence for the social role theory of stereotype content: Observations of groups’ roles shape stereotypes’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 107(3), pp. 371–392. doi: 10.1037/a0037215.