Academics do not necessarily get regular or even useful ‘performance reviews’, call them what you will. Businesses typically take this a lot more seriously, but a recent report highlights the many problems that can arise even with the best of intentions. Unsurprisingly, it turns out a lot of bias (around both gender and ethnicity) lurks within the feedback given to their teams, irrespective of whether by male and female managers.
If you’ve been appraised by your supervisor, or anyone else from your department, a few key phrases may stick in the mind. These may have been the most helpful or the least helpful/hardest to swallow. One of the most useful pieces of advice I was ever given, mid-career, was not to accept too many refereeing tasks but, for instance, simply to accept roughly the same number of papers to referee as I was myself submitting in any given year. It was a practical and actionable piece of advice, whether it was right or wrong, and it helped me put in context that to others I might have looked like I was being too much of a slave to duty if I was refereeing two or three times the number of my own submissions. By contrast, a colleague came out of an appraisal fuming. Having laid out what he felt were the problems he was facing in the fine balancing act of being a young academic, his appraiser had said ‘I can see you have problems’. Empathetic maybe; useful most certainly not, it only made my colleague feel worse and that, somehow, he shouldn’t have been having those particular problems.
In many businesses, receiving feedback is a much more regular occurrence, but it is clear that significant numbers of managers don’t make a good job of it, even if they are ostensibly ‘ticking the boxes’ required by their HR department. Two features stand out for me from this recent report from Textio: firstly, that comments are so often unhelpful and stereotypical, and secondly that men are more likely to internalise the positive and women, by a massive margin, the negative. It is hard to imagine these observations do not apply in academia too. An additional set of their conclusions relates to the highest performing workers, who appear to be given the least useful advice and who, the evidence shows, are therefore more likely to quit (and of course, good workers are more likely to be able to get another job easily).
In the past I’ve written about being accused of being emotional – not, as it happens, during an appraisal but over the phone. It turns out that this is a word (and no one will probably be surprised to hear this) directed commonly at women: the report states that whereas 78% of women in their survey had had that tossed in their direction, only 11% of men. (I wonder if people don’t regard getting angry or losing their temper as a show of emotion, but I digress.) Women were also more likely to be badged as unlikeable than men, although not by such a large margin. Ethnicity matters too. White workers were the most likely to be described as likeable (at 41%), whereas only 10% of East Asian and 11% of South Asian employees were described this way. Black and Hispanic/Latino employees were least likely to be deemed to be intelligent, and so it goes on. Bias was widespread.
What do you remember from an appraisal? It turns out women were seven times more likely to internalise negative comments than men, whereas men were up to four times as likely to remember the positives. This ties in with stereotype threat, a concept introduced by Claude Steele and described in detail in his book Whistling Vivaldi. It is the concept that, if you belong to a minority (in whatever sense) you are held back by the fear of conforming to the stereotype of that minority. That might be about women in tech or black students doing maths exams, which was the situation Steele first studied. But the criticism that you are emotional, for instance, is exactly what women fear and so it sticks in the mind more than many other comments. This is as true at conferences as in appraisals, as many a woman will attest after a bout of hostile questioning implying – or even explicitly stating – that the speaker is stupid or ignorant, regardless of the capabilities of the questioner (who may too often simply be grandstanding for their own benefit).
As for the comments about high performers, which seem to have a particular definition hard to replicate in a laboratory setting, too often they receive unhelpful feedback perhaps in the form of a cliché, the examples given in the report being as ‘she left it all on the field’ and ‘he thinks outside the box’. What are you supposed to do with such phrases? They don’t tell you what you could do better or what specific goals you should or should not be seeking. The most useful feedback is that which gives you something to work towards and a timescale on which to do it. Generalised clichés don’t offer that opportunity and can be frustrating (again something many an academic will recognize, I’m sure). The report suggests employees are twice as likely to think about seeking a new job if the feedback they receive is unhelpful.
This is a US study of businesses, so the parallels are bound not to be exact for UK academics whom I take to be the majority of my readers, but there should certainly be food for thought here for anyone involved in leading or managing other people in any setting. We should not be wasting the talent of those coming up through the ranks in pointless exercises. Good feedback can, however, be immensely helpful at critical junctures in a career.
