The good news is that we live in a time when many managers would like to avoid coming across as sexist — particularly during performance review season. The bad news is that the evidence suggests bosses aren’t quite sure how to give women the same kind of candid feedback they give to men.
Instead, fear of appearing biased seems to be prompting managers to handle women with "velvet gloves,” according to a recent study in the Journal of Business and Psychology. The authors of that study call this "protective paternalism.” The research, led by Leah Sheppard of Washington State University, used several experiments to show that participants who wanted to avoid looking sexist gave insincere praise to female employees.
Searching for a real-world example, they found Rolling Stone reviewers gave more positive written reviews to female musicians than would be expected based on the star ratings that the critics gave to the albums. It seems we have no problem scoring a woman a 3 out of 5, but when we must explain our rating, we struggle to deliver the critique.
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