Women don’t always get the candid feedback they deserve

By Sarah Green Carmichael

The good news is that we live in a time when many managers would like to avoid coming across as sexist — particularly during performance review season. The bad news is that the evidence suggests bosses aren’t quite sure how to give women the same kind of candid feedback they give to men.

Instead, fear of appearing biased seems to be prompting managers to handle women with “velvet gloves,” according to a recent study in the Journal of Business and Psychology. The authors of that study call this “protective paternalism.” The research, led by Leah Sheppard of Washington State University, used several experiments to show that participants who wanted to avoid looking sexist gave insincere praise to female employees.

Searching for a real-world example, they found Rolling Stone reviewers gave more positive written reviews to female musicians than would be expected based on the star ratings that the critics gave to the albums. It seems we have no problem scoring a woman a 3 out of 5, but when we must explain our rating, we struggle to deliver the critique.

Everyone needs accurate, specific, consistent feedback. Without that, women will struggle to advance — even if no one is trying to hold them back, and even if bosses think they are being kind.

Sheppard’s study isn’t the only research to find a gap between women’s quantitative performance ratings and verbal reviews. A 2023 study led by Alexandra Brewer, a sociologist at the University of Southern California, found that female doctors suffered a similar problem.

Brewer and her collaborators looked at male and female emergency medicine doctors during residency — a phase in a doctor’s education that can last from three to seven years — in four different locations. Over this period, the men who scored well earned praise, as one would expect. Men who scored poorly got criticism.

But the women’s feedback was less consistent: Women were 11% more likely to get either high scores paired with criticism, or lower scores paired incongruously with praise. Over the course of residency, men's feedback trended more positive, while women's feedback remained mixed.

To be clear, this doesn’t mean that women are worse at their jobs. Multiple studies of hundreds of thousands of doctors have found the reverse: that female physicians are slightly, but measurably, better at improving patient health. Patients treated by female doctors have fewer complications from surgery, lower rates of hospital readmission and a lower risk of dying. (Why? Perhaps, the researchers suggest, because female doctors interrupt patients less often, spend more time on each patient and are more likely to suggest preventive care.)

But as any worker bee knows, being good at your job is not enough to get promoted. Your boss has to recognize the value you provide. That usually means delivering what the boss wants. It’s hard to know what that is without feedback.

Some of the most well-known studies on gender and feedback in organizations have been led by Stanford’s Shelley Correll. In a 2020 paper, Correll and her colleagues studied real performance reviews and numerical ratings at an anonymous Fortune 500 company and found that managers were reluctant to critique women too harshly — often buffering their critiques with praise. And as in Sheppard’s and Brewer’s studies, women’s scores were sometimes lower than their glowing verbal reviews.

I’m not convinced the score is always more accurate than the write-up. (Does a Rolling Stone reviewer use science or vibes to award an album three stars?) But regardless of which aspect of the performance review is more accurate, the gap between the two is a problem. And employees’ numerical ratings are often used to calculate bonuses, award promotions or decide whom to lay off.

Seen this way, inconsistent or inflated verbal praise isn’t kind at all. It’s confusing. Imagine that every review cycle, your boss tells you something like, “We all love working with you. Thanks for being such a good team player. You had a great year!” And you’re left wondering why this effusion of praise never turns into a promotion or a meaningful raise. Or worse, the discrepancy between what you are told and how you are rewarded eats away at your confidence, your motivation, your sense that your employer is trustworthy.

And if “great team player” sounds like a meaningless bromide, that’s no accident — in previous research, Correll found that the feedback women get tends to be vague and thus unhelpful. Often, comments are personal, not skills-focused, criticizing her “sharp elbows,” for example, or praising her “great smile.” Men are more likely to get specific, action-oriented feedback that’s tied to results and, most importantly, tells them exactly how to do better.

So a woman might be told she needs to “tone it down in client meetings.” A man is more likely to hear something like: “Clients don’t like being interrupted. Let them finish before you jump in.” The woman is left with little but a fuzzy awareness of having fallen short in some way; the man knows exactly what to do differently.

Fortunately, there is a way to solve this problem. In a major report for The Conference Board this summer, the Equality Action Center at University of California Law San Francisco synthesized a huge amount of empirical data on interrupting bias at work. The path to more useful, less biased feedback is relatively straightforward.

Researchers led by EAC director Joan C. Williams worked with a consumer goods company to roll out a new system of performance evaluations. The system established clear criteria — which skills did employees need? — and asked managers to provide evidence and examples. Managers were also required to attend a 90-minute workshop. The result: The share of women (and men!) receiving evidence-based feedback more than doubled.

The experiment didn’t solve every problem. Women of color were still less likely to be seen as leaders, and even after the training, some managers were still giving feedback that was more hand-wavy than hard-nosed. But the shift to specific, action-oriented feedback was a big step in the right direction.

The bottom line is simple: Bosses should give specific, consistent feedback illustrated with concrete examples, focusing on employees’ skills and behavior. They should take care to make sure number scores match verbal write-ups. And they should remember that there’s nothing kind about empty praise.