Who gets feedback, who gives it: Gendered patterns in workplace assessments

Highlights

• Women are more likely to take on low-promotability tasks that are essential to organizations but often go unrecognized and unrewarded, such as providing detailed feedback.
• In this study, women supervisors gave more thorough and helpful feedback, yet women supervisees were less likely to receive meaningful evaluations, regardless of their supervisor’s gender.
• Addressing hidden inequalities in workplace assessments, both in who does the work and who benefits from it, can help create a more equitable workplace.

Assessments are a ubiquitous part of organizational life. Across industries, performance evaluations play a central role in hiring, promotion, compensation, and dismissal decisions.

Despite the prevalence and significance of assessments, we know surprisingly little about who performs the work of assessment, how they do it, and with what consequences. In response to this gap, Professor Laura Nelson and her colleagues set out to examine: Who provides feedback in organizations? Who does it well and equitably? And how might assessment practices reinforce or mitigate social inequalities?

Using real-world behavioral data that includes both numerical ratings and written comments, the authors analyzed 33,456 in-the-moment evaluations of 359 resident physicians by 285 attending physicians in emergency medicine across eight accredited U.S. hospitals over a two-year period (2013–2015). The research team combined qualitative and quantitative methods with machine learning to examine the amount, context, and content of feedback. The analysis reveals important findings about how gender shapes the delivery and quality of workplace assessments and how feedback practices may reproduce or challenge inequality at work.

Gendered patterns in high-quality, helpful assessments

The data show that women attendings were more likely to offer motivating and constructive assessments: they not only provided more feedback, but their comments were more often helpful, task-specific, and reassuring. In contrast, men attendings’ assessments tended to be more minimalist. They were more likely to include a numeric evaluation with no written feedback or offer brief comments that are not particularly constructive to either the resident or the training program.

…women attendings were more likely to offer motivating and constructive assessments: they not only provided more feedback, but their comments were more often helpful, task-specific, and reassuring.

Despite women attendings being more likely to provide helpful feedback, both women and men attendings demonstrated a positive bias toward men residents. Specifically, men residents were more likely to receive helpful feedback or reassuring comments from both men and women attendings, while women residents were more likely to receive comments only in response to an error. This dynamic creates what the researchers termed “gender double jeopardy in low-promotability tasks,” where although more women in supervisory roles take the time to provide high-quality feedback, women subordinates do not fully benefit from their supervisors’ efforts.

 Encouraging high-quality feedback for all

Professor Nelson emphasizes that solutions should not focus solely on changing women’s behavior or reducing their contributions. Instead of telling women to “just say no,” organizations should consider how to encourage men, and any others not providing high-quality feedback, to step up and fulfill this crucial role.

As she explains: “The solution is often, ‘What should women do differently?’… but the takeaway from this is not, ‘How do we fix women? How do we change women?’ Rather, it’s, ‘How do we change the section of men who aren’t giving that good feedback to fulfill this very important role in these organizations? And what organizational structures can we put in place to even it out by bringing the men up to the level of women, rather than bringing women down to the level of men?’”

“…the takeaway from this is not, ‘How do we fix women?’ … Rather, it’s, ‘How do we change the section of men who aren’t giving that good feedback to fulfill this very important role in these organizations?”

From this perspective, the study highlights several key implications:

• Shift away from “just say no” solutions
  Rather than focusing on advice that tells women to “just say no,” these findings underscore the importance of training everyone on how to give effective workplace assessments and avoid letting implicit biases influence evaluations.
• Distribute assessment labor more evenly
  The data show a stark imbalance where a small number of attendings shoulder the majority of feedback labour: many men and women did not provide great feedback, and a few men and women provided an enormous amount of consistently high-quality feedback. To avoid gaps in support for early-career employees and students, organizations should consider strategies that encourage all supervisors to offer high-quality feedback. This could include offering simple guidelines (e.g., “Attending physicians typically write an average of three sentences referencing two concrete medical tasks in each comment.”)
• Reward quality, not just quantity
  Incentives or recognition programs should value not only how much feedback someone gives but also the quality and effectiveness of that feedback.

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Research brief prepared by:

Kuan Su