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By Maya Dusenbery • @mayadusenbery • 10 years ago

Chart of the Day: How men and women are critiqued in performance reviews

Kieran Snyder analyzed 248 performance reviews of generally high-performing men and women working in the tech industry. Here’s what she found:

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For one thing, women were more likely than men to receive critical feedback at all. When they received any, men’s critical feedback tended to be constructive suggestions on how to improve. Women, on the other hand, got that constructive feedback — in addition to complaints about their personalities. The word “abrasive”, for example, was used 17 times to describe 13 different women. That kind of negative personality criticism showed up in two of the 83 critical reviews received by men, compared to in 71 of the 94 critical reviews received by women.

But don’t worry — just be confident, embrace bossy, lean in, and everything will be fine.

Maya DusenberyMaya Dusenbery is an Executive Director of Feministing.

St. Paul, MN

Maya Dusenbery is executive director in charge of editorial at Feministing. She is the author of the forthcoming book Doing Harm: The Truth About How Bad Medicine and Lazy Science Leave Women Dismissed, Misdiagnosed, and Sick (HarperOne, March 2018). She has been a fellow at Mother Jones magazine and a columnist at Pacific Standard magazine. Her work has appeared in publications like Cosmopolitan.com, TheAtlantic.com, Bitch Magazine, as well as the anthology The Feminist Utopia Project. Before become a full-time journalist, she worked at the National Institute for Reproductive Health. A Minnesota native, she received her B.A. from Carleton College in 2008. After living in Brooklyn, Oakland, and Atlanta, she is currently based in the Twin Cities.

Maya Dusenbery is an executive director of Feministing and author of the forthcoming book Doing Harm on sexism in medicine.

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