It seems as though women have to overcome a terrible hurdle to climb the corporate ladder. Yet even when they outperform their peers, female employees still have to bear the brunt of criticism.
About 76 percent of top-performing working women received negative feedback from their bosses, compared to just two percent of successful men, according to a new report from management software company Textio, which analyzed performance reviews of more than 23,000 workers at over 250 companies.
Kieran Snyder, co-founder and data analyst at Textio, tells Assets This is largely due to managers’ unconscious bias: women are judged more critically and personally than men. “This is a pattern that is not often checked,” she says.
Instead of positive or constructive feedback, top female employees are often judged unfavorably and based on aspects of their social behavior. About 88 percent of these outstanding female employees receive feedback on their personality, while this is only true for 12 percent of their male colleagues, according to the report.
“Men mostly get feedback on their work. They’re developmental observations, they’re constructive. And then when you look at women, the positive observations are generally not about the work. They’re about the woman’s behavior, personality or attitude,” says Snyder. “We tend to judge women in the workplace based on how they make the people around them feel rather than the work they do. That is, we comment on how friendly, cooperative, difficult and personable they are. These traits don’t necessarily relate to the quality of the work she does.”
The report also finds that feedback from working women is often poorly actionable, meaning the criticism is not meaningful or does not suggest what improvements are needed. For every 1,000 words of a performance review, women receive twice as many instances of low-quality criticism as men. According to Snyder, this is a result of the strong focus on the personality of female employees. For example, performance reviews may revolve around a woman being “a joy” to work with, rather than the success of the big project she just completed.
Not only do these poor feedback mechanisms actively harm women, they can also cause big problems for bosses. The report shows that poor-quality feedback damages employee morale, especially among high performers who focus on growth and improvement. About 40 percent of top performers who receive criticism that has no consequences plan to leave their company, compared to just 22 percent of successful employees who receive a positive review.
“High performers are pretty ambitious people, so if you give them feedback that’s not specific and not actionable and don’t promote them, they’re going to leave. These people are constantly being recruited – they have a lot of options of where they can work,” says Snyder.
While it may be tempting to just slap bias training on bosses and call it a day, Snyder says that’s not a very effective approach. She agrees that there should be some coaching — since most managers aren’t formally trained in how to lead — but that employers should also invest more in their HR departments. That means filling up HR and making time for more consistent and thorough performance reviews. Because when bosses are under pressure, they don’t have time to cover all the bases.
“The average HR VP supports hundreds of managers. When it comes time for feedback, they focus on the most sensitive situations,” she says. “There are too many managers who need support, too few HR people, and employees are usually the ones who suffer from this bad system.”
Emma Burleigh
[email protected]
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