Is Your Performance Review Fair?

Is the word “abrasive” in your performance reviews? If you are a woman, you are more likely to answer yes to that question.

In a report for Fortune, linguist Kieran Snyder asked people in tech companies to give her copies of their performance reviews. She collected 248 reviews from 180 people–105 men and 75 women–from 28 companies of all sizes. After comparing the reviews, she had three main conclusions:

Women’s reviews are more likely to include critical feedback. About 59% of the reviews received by men contained critical feedback, compared to about 88% of the reviews received by women.

Men are given constructive suggestions. Women are given constructive suggestions – and told to pipe down. The criticism of women was more likely to include something personal, with phrases such as watch your tone, step back, stop being so judgmental, showing up twice in the 83 critical reviews received by men–and in 71 of the 94 critical reviews received by women.

The manager’s gender isn’t a factor.  Both males and females used similar language when reviewing women. Female managers wrote 25% of the reviews, and accounted for 23% of the criticism, meaning they were just as likely as male managers to use negative words when evaluating women.

Watch Your Words

I’d like to say the results were surprising, but sadly, I suspect most women would agree with me that they aren’t entirely. But the best part of this admittedly small study is that it calls attention to the words we use. That matters, because words are easy for us to start changing.

The words bossy, abrasive, strident, and aggressive showed up at least twice in the women’s reviews– some showed up much more often. “Abrasive alone is used 17 times to describe 13 different women,” Snyder writes. And in the reviews of women, the word aggressive was a negative, while when it came up in reviews of men it was in the context of encouraging them to be more so.

If we want to end discrimination, conscious or not, it helps to have specific things we can do to help us identify the problem and address it. Both men and women should look at the words they use when evaluating colleagues–formally or not–to notice any patterns. Most people don’t believe, or like to believe, that they have biases, but it is pretty hard to deny when we see it in writing.