Women Are Judged More Positively at Work Than Men
...and they're probably worse off for it
It’s widely believed that men get an easier ride than women in the workplace: People automatically defer to their views, evaluate them more highly, and heap praise on even their most pedestrian contributions. Women, in contrast, are supposedly judged by a stricter standard, assumed to be less competent, and more often critiqued and corrected.
In this post, I’d like to summarize two fascinating papers showing that, contrary to the conventional wisdom, it’s actually women who receive inflated feedback in professional settings. At first glance, this might seem like a bias in women’s favor. But although overly positive feedback undoubtedly feels good in the moment, it may be harmful in the longer term, as it reduces women’s opportunities to level up their performance.
Gendered White Lies
Do people sugarcoat criticism for women more than men? That’s the question explored in a provocative 2020 paper by the psychologists Lily Jampol and Vivian Zayas. Spoiler alert: Their answer was an unequivocal yes.
Jampol and Zayas devised a clever two-part experiment to explore the issue. In the first part, student participants were asked to evaluate two low-quality essays, allegedly written by other students at their university. The authors were identified only by their initials - S.B. or A.M. - so their sex was undisclosed. Participants rated the essays on a series of scales ranging from 0 (“not good at all”) to 100 (“excellent”), and measuring attributes such as essay quality, writing quality, organization, and the like.
In the second part of the study, participants were told they’d be providing direct feedback to the authors. They were given the essays again - but this time, the sex of the author was revealed by including a name on the essay: either “Sarah” or “Andrew.” Participants rated the essays again on the same scales they’d used previously. They also provided qualitative verbal feedback.
With both phases of the experiment complete, Jampol and Zayas had all the information they needed to determine whether people give women inflated feedback. If they do, participants would give higher ratings to essays when they knew the author was a woman than when the author’s sex was unknown. On the other hand, if they don’t give inflated feedback, the scores wouldn’t differ between the two phases of the study - and if they give women harsher feedback, the second score would be lower than the first.
What did they find?