This behavior of bosses, much more marked towards women than men, harms the career development of the best employees.
In the world of work, certain gender inequalities persist. In 2022, according to theInseethe average wage income of women remained 14.9% lower than that of men in the private sector and for the same working hours. For the same position, the wage gap is smaller: 4%.
This is explained in particular by a gendered distribution of professions, with a smaller number of women than men accessing the most well-paid positions. study The SKEMA observatory points out that women only occupy 6.25% of the 80 CEO positions in CAC 40 companies. Other factors could explain this difference.
A report of management software company Textio studied the performance reviews of more than 23,000 workers in over 250 organizations and came up with a rather alarming finding, which could partly explain why women are less likely to advance to senior positions than men. Focusing on women who are considered top performers, 76% of them received negative feedback from their bosses compared to only 2% of top male performers. They are more likely to receive unfavorable evaluations, rather than receiving encouraging or constructive feedback.
Moreover, these comments do not always concern work. 88% of these hard workers receive remarks about their personality, such as “their friendliness, their spirit of collaboration, their aptitude for difficulty and their sympathy”, compared to only 12% of their male counterparts. The female gender would then be judged in a more critical and more personal way than the male gender.
This attitude hurts women’s career progression and morale. According to the study, nearly 40% of top performers who find themselves receiving inadequate feedback consider quitting. “Top performers are pretty ambitious people. If you give them feedback that’s not accurate, that’s not actionable, and you don’t promote them, they’re going to leave,” Kieran Snyder, co-founder and data analyst at Textio, told Fortune.
To overcome this problem, she believes that it would be necessary to have more training for managers, but also to devote more time to performance evaluations to make them more consistent with the work carried out.