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Page 1 Copyright Tomson Reuters Canada Ltd. - October 14, 2014 - Toronto, Ontario, (800) 387-5164 - Web Site: www.hrreporter.com
Copyright Tomson Reuters Canada Ltd.
Reprint was created with permission on
October 14, 2014 from the October 6, 2014 issue.
Performance review
or personal attack?
Are women more likely than men to receive
personality criticism in reviews?
BY LIZ BERNIER
KIERAN SNYDER was chatting
with a friend about his performance
reviews when he mentioned one of
his direct reports was talented but
abrasive. She was being considered
for a promotion but her personality
seemed to be a stumbling block for
her manager.
Tis is a really good guy, con-
cerned with fairness, said Snyder.
Te way he described one of the
women on his team made me
wonder whether hed actually write
that into a formal document.
Tat conversation was the cata-
lyst for Snyder a Seattle-based
linguist, technology professional
and CEO of her own startup,
Kidgrid to do a little research.
Ive worked in tech for many
years and held leadership roles at
major tech companies, she said. I
have generally received strong re-
views. But while the reviews often
call out my business and technical
contribution, they have frequently
included personality feedback
Ive heard words like abrasive, emo-
tional (and) aggressive a lot. For
many years, I thought it was just me.
Im sure I have things to work on,
but I got curious about how perva-
sive the pattern was.
Snyder collected 248 perfor-
mance reviews from 180 dierent
people 105 men and 75 women.
Her ndings? Women were much
more likely to receive negative
wording or comments about their
personality traits.
Women received plenty of
straight constructive criticism too.
It wasnt all personality. But where
personality feedback occurred,
it occurred almost exclusively in
womens reviews. Men only got
the constructive stu. Women got
both, she said.
Tat type of negative personal-
ity feedback occurred only twice in
the 83 critical reviews belonging
to men; it occurred in 71 of the 94
critical reviews received by women,
found Snyder.
Sadly, those ndings didnt come
as a surprise.
Ive worked in tech a long time.
Ive seen some terrible examples of
institutional bias, she said.
Te results were just one more ex-
ample of something Marina Adshade
has experienced in the education
sector for quite some time.
While there may not be a lot
out there about reviews done by
rms for their employees, theres an
enormous amount of research being
done about how students evaluate
their teachers, based on their gen-
der, said Adshade, an economist
and lecturer at the University of
British Columbia in Vancouver.We
hear this all the time that a lot of the
behaviour that is rewarded in men is
actually penalized in women.
Conversely, when students eval-
uate their professors, the biggest
rewards are given to women who
conform to gender stereotypes, said
Adshade.
Deviating from gender stereo-
types actually really hurts you in the
classroom. And I suspect this is true
at work as well.
Adshade did her own experiment
last year, using a course shes taught
several times and consistently re-
ceived good reviews for.
I thought I would try an experi-
ment in light of this thinking about
conforming to gender stereotypes.
So what I did is I taught the entire
term wearing a dress. Because, I
gured, nothing says, I conform to
gender stereotypes quite like a dress
and pantyhose, which professors
dont normally wear. And I saw my
course evaluations jump up by half a
point on a ve-point scale, she said.
It was really shocking in
fact, its the highest marks Ive ever
been given for a course. Now, its
not a controlled experiment, but I
thought it was a really interesting
outcome... Whats even more in-
teresting was the course that I was
teaching was actually Women in
the Economy and 85 per cent of my
students were women.
Evaluators gender
makes no dierence
Tat raises another interesting point
and a key one in Snyders nd-
ings. One-quarter (25 per cent) of
the performance reviews she col-
lected were written by women. And
female managers accounted for just
over 23 per cent of the negative
feedback.
I actually consider this the break-
out nding of the study, she said. I
went back and looked at reviews
that I had written after completing
the analysis. Guess what? I follow
the pattern too. I was tougher on
women in my critical language than
I was on men, even though they sta-
tistically got the same review scores.
I didnt use the specic word abra-
sive but my criticism of women on
my team reads tougher to me.
Both women and men can have
these unconscious biases because
theyre so embedded in the way we
think, said Carolyn Lawrence, presi-
dent and CEO of Women of Inu-
ence in Toronto.
Te gender lens is really criti-
cal in both recruiting and also per-
formance evaluations processes.
Whats really interesting in the
work that we do in evaluating cor-
porate culture, you can see how if its
male-dominated, its not just in the
culture, these processes are actually
(embedded) in how you hire and
promote people, and in succession
plans, she said.
If Im a man, and Im evaluating
a man, Im naturally marking him
on the same markers of success that
I evaluate myself (with), and proba-
bly embedded into the job descrip-
tion. So if Im a man and I have a
female employee, Im marking her
on my perception of success.
Even more than that, if she is
then trained to performance evalu-
ate her employees, shes trained in
the male way.
Even really good and meticulous
HR departments are generally not
resourced to monitor for bias at
the level of review language, said
Snyder.
Te best departments look at sta-
tistical variation in numeric scores.
Lots of places do that now. But the
language that we use to describe our
colleagues is another layer, she said.
If youre constantly getting re-
warded for a particular behaviour,
youll show more of it. If youre
constantly being punished, youll
do less of it. Using negative lan-
guage to characterize a behaviour
is a form of punishment. We talk
about sticks and stones, but names
do undermine.
And whether its words like abra-
sive, bossy, strident and emo-
tional or more positive descriptors,
relying on personality feedback is
evidence an appraisal system is bro-
ken, she said.
Any kind of personality feedback,
whether youre calling someone
abrasive or emotional or brilliant
or collaborative, is inherently sub-
jective... Its true that performance
reviews are always going to be a
Page 2 Copyright Tomson Reuters Canada Ltd. - October 14, 2014 - Toronto, Ontario, (800) 387-5164 - Web Site: www.hrreporter.com
little bit subjective but delivered X
is a lot less subjective than You are
brilliant but impatient. We should
be aiming for objective analysis. Per-
sonality adjectives are never going
to be objective.
To begin identifying and address-
ing this, HR should take an active,
critical look at the language used in
reviews, said Snyder.
(One) guy I used to work with
requested that his HR department
publish guidelines on review lan-
guage. He acknowledged that not
every manager would use them ac-
tively, but the mere fact of their pub-
lication would give employees and
managers a framework for discus-
sion, she said.
And though it may be a bit un-
comfortable its important to take
a long, hard look at the performance
reviews youve written, said Adshade.
Unless people are encouraged to
think about the way they themselves
are behaving, its always the other
Te other person is behaving this
way, its not me behaving this way.
Tese other people are bad, but I
would never do that. What people
need to do is they need to be prod-
ded into thinking about this them-
selves, she said.
For example, what would be re-
ally useful... is if people went back
and sat down and read through all
their evaluations theyve provided in
the past, and see if they can observe
this for themselves. I think that
would be a good learning experi-
ence for people self-evaluation is
the only way that this is ever going to
change. Just telling people that other
people do this is never going to be
enough, because they all assume its
not them.
Combating bias
in performance appraisals
Its common for everyone not just managers to have unconscious
biases were not aware of, said Rick Lash, director at Hay Group in Toronto.
And its particularly common for managers, when conducting
performance appraisals, to have unconscious flters that infuence how
they perceive peoples past performance.
The crucial frst step toward combating this is education and training,
he said.
The frst thing is the manager has to be trained in how to do proper
performance appraisals (and) the importance of relying on what I would
call objective behavioural examples, he said. They should be collecting
specifc examples to back up their evaluations so that when they get
together with their staff, theyre not providing their own subjective opinion
as to whether theyve done well or havent done well.
The other critical piece is the importance of obtaining evidence from
multiple sources, so that as a manager you wont be relying on your
examples or your perspective. You should ensure that youre also gaining
information from other people (whom) the employee might have been
working with throughout the year, so that youre able to triangulate get
multiple different points of view so that you really do have an accurate
picture of the employees performance from multiple different perspectives
throughout the organization.