WOMEN IN TECH THE FACTS

In general, across industries and occupations, women more frequently experience what we
term personality penalties or advice that suggests they are “too abrasive” and need to “tone it
down.” In addition, preliminary findings from another study on 125 performance evaluations in a tech
company document the fact that women receive 2.5 times as much feedback related to their aggressive
communication styles as do men. In addition, the researchers found that:
• Women’s evaluations contain nearly twice as much language about their communal
or nurturing style.
• Men are three times as likely to receive feedback related to business outcomes and
twice as likely to garner comments related to technical experience and vision.
• Women’s evaluations contain 2.39 times the amount of references to team accomplishments,
as opposed to individual ones.
Interestingly, these preliminary findings also suggest that managers are almost 7 times more likely to advise
their male employees that their communication style is too soft. This finding, in particular, highlights how
men are also held to gender norms— further evidence that both women and men stand to benefit from
expanding our schemas when it comes to acceptable gendered behaviors (Simard as cited in Lebowitz, 2015;
for more info see http://gender.stanford.edu/people/caroline-simard).
80%
of science,
engineering, and
technology (SET)
women say “they
love their work” but
32%
say “they feel stalled
and are likely to quite
their jobs within
a year.”
More on Personality Penalties in Performance Reviews
In a preliminary analysis of 248 performance reviews (141 for men; 107 for women), one investigator
found the following: Women are more likely to receive critical reviews regardless of their manager’s
gender. Approximately 59 percent of reviews for men contained some kind of critical feedback, as
compared to 88 percent of the reviews for women (Snyder, 2014).
FIG. 4.6 // Reviews Including Critical Feedback
Women
13
94
Men
58
83
0 20 40 60 80 100
With Criticism
Without Criticism
Snyder, 2014
WOMEN IN TECH: THE FACTS 41