Why "We Treat Everyone the Same" Might Be Half True

In 1965, Harvard Business Review published an article with a title that was meant to provoke: "Are Women Executives People?" It's a jarring headline six decades later, and the good news is that the outright hostility it captured has largely faded. The bad news, according to new research published this month, is more complicated — and more useful for leaders trying to actually fix things.

Researchers Dwayne Whitten, Wendy R. Boswell, and Susan Oldroyd revisited the same questions from 1965, again in 1985 and 2006, and now in 2026, surveying 193 senior U.S. executives. Their finding isn't that bias has stayed flat. It's that it has changed shape in a way that's easy for leadership teams to miss entirely, because on the surface, everything looks like progress.

The Gap That Should Stop You

Twenty years ago, when asked whether women are judged more critically in executive roles, men and women answered almost identically — around 35% of each group agreed.

Today:

• Men: still answer at 35%

• Women: now answer at 90%

  
  

That's not a small shift in sentiment. That's two groups of people, working in the same buildings, looking at the same promotion decisions, and seeing entirely different companies.

The researchers found a second, related pattern — what they call "prove-it-again" bias, where women's competence gets treated as something to be repeatedly demonstrated, while men's gets assumed and their setbacks absorbed into an overall favorable impression:

• 83% of women now believe they have to be more exceptional than men to succeed (up from 68% in 2006)

• 28% of men say the same (up slightly from 32% in 2006)

  
  

Why "We're a Meritocracy" Can Be a Warning Sign

Here's the part that should really get a CEO's attention: only 40% of women in the survey believe their company is a meritocracy, compared with 76% of men. And counterintuitively, the research suggests that companies who talk about meritocracy the loudest are sometimes where the gap is widest — because a strong belief that "the system is already fair" reduces a leader's instinct to double-check their own judgment calls.

That's not an argument against meritocracy as a goal. It's a reminder that meritocracy is a design problem, not a slogan.

Why This Hits Differently at a Growth-Stage Company

It's tempting to read this as a big-company problem — something for organizations with layers of HR bureaucracy to sort out. It's actually the opposite. At a 50–250 person company, there's usually no formal promotion committee, no multi-layer review process standing between a gut instinct and a real decision. Who gets the stretch assignment, who gets pulled into the strategic meeting, who's "ready" for the operating role — those calls are typically made informally, by the founder or CEO and a small circle of senior leaders.

That means the patterns this research describes don't get diluted by process. They run at full strength, straight from the top. The flip side is real leverage: at this size, a CEO and HR leader can change the pattern directly and quickly, without a years-long change initiative. You're also not managing a culture you inherited — you're actively building the one that will define the company as it scales. Get the informal norms right now, and they compound.

Three Questions Worth Asking Together

If you're a CEO and HR leader reading this side by side (which is exactly how this research is meant to be used), a few questions can surface where you actually stand:

• Who got the last three stretch assignments or promotions — and who was in the room when that decision got made?

• When someone stumbles, is it treated as a data point about them, or absorbed as an exception to an otherwise strong track record?

• Do your women leaders describe your culture as a meritocracy the same way your male leaders do — and if not, have you actually asked them?

  
  

None of these require a survey or a committee. They require two people willing to compare notes honestly.

Let's Talk

This isn't a call for a training module or a values poster. It's a case for the CEO and HR leader function doing what this research recommends: looking at the same decisions from both sides of the table and asking whether what feels fair from the top actually looks fair from where your people sit.

If you want a partner in thinking through how this shows up in your organization specifically, I'm happy to help. Schedule a 30-minute call.

Source: Whitten, D., Boswell, W. R., & Oldroyd, S. (2026). Research revisiting executive perceptions of gender bias, Harvard Business Review.