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It feels like women have to jump through flaming hoops to make it to the top of the corporate ladder—but even when they’re outperforming their coworkers, female employees still bear the brunt of criticism.
About 76% of top-performing working women received negative feedback from their bosses compared to just 2% of high-achieving men, according to a new report from management software company Textio, which analyzed performance reviews for more than 23,000 workers across over 250 organizations.
Kieran Snyder, cofounder and data analyst for Textio, tells Fortune this has largely to do with managers’ unconscious bias—women are judged more critically, and on a more personal level than men. “It’s a pattern that is not often checked,” she says.
Rather than being given positive or even constructive feedback, top female staffers often experience unfavorable assessments, and they’re more likely to be judged on aspects of their social presentation. About 88% of these outstanding women workers receive feedback on their personalities, while the same is true for only 12% of their male counterparts, according to the report.
“Men are mostly receiving feedback about their work. They’re developmental observations, they’re constructive. And then when you look at women, the positive observations are not generally about the work. They’re about the woman’s demeanor, personality, or disposition,” says Snyder. “We tend to relate to women in the workplace based on how they make the people around them feel, rather than the work that they’re doing. That means we comment on how friendly, collaborative, difficult, and likable they are. Those qualities don’t necessarily relate to the quality of the work that she’s doing.”
The report also finds that working women’s feedback is also often highly unactionable, meaning that criticism isn’t meaningful, or it’s unclear on what improvements need to be made. For every 1,000 words during a performance review, women experience twice as many instances of poor quality critiques compared to men. Snyder says this is a result of the laser focus around female staffers’ personalities. For example, performance reviews may revolve around a woman “being a joy to work with” instead of the success of the big project she just delivered.
Aside from actively hurting women, these lackluster feedback mechanisms can also spell big trouble for bosses. The report shows that low-quality feedback damages employee morale, especially for high-performers who thrive on growth and improvement. About 40% of top workers who get inactionable criticism plan to leave their companies, compared to just 22% of successful employees who get actionable assessments.
“High-performers are pretty ambitious people. So if you’re providing feedback that is not specific, not actionable, and you’re not promoting them, they will leave. These are people who are being recruited all the time—they have lots of choices for where to work,” Snyder says.
While it may be tempting to throw bias training at bosses and call it a day, Snyder says that isn’t a very effective course of action. She agrees that there should be some element of coaching—since most managers aren’t formally taught how to lead—but that employers should also invest more in their people department. That means filling out your HR ranks, and dedicating time for more consistent and thoughtful performance reviews. Because when bosses are stretched thin, they don’t have time to cover all their bases.
“Your average HR VP is supporting hundreds of managers. So when you get to feedback time, they focus on the most sensitive situations,” she says. “There are too many managers who need support, too few HR people, and employees tend to be on the receiving end of this bad system.”
Emma Burleigh
emma.burleigh@fortune.com
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