So-called "white lies" — telling your husband you like his substandard cooking, or praising a friend's unflattering haircut — serve a purpose. But they can create problems in the workplace, where honest feedback, even if it's negative, is important. Women are more likely to receive inaccurate feedback about their performance, according to new research from Lily Jampol, Ph.D. ’14, and Vivian Zayas, associate professor of psychology at the College of Arts and Sciences.
In their study, Zayas and Jampol found that women who perform less well receive less truthful but friendlier feedback on performance compared to men who perform equally poorly.
White lies are told to maintain relationships, avoid harming the other person, or present oneself in a positive light, Jampol said. While they often reflect benign intentions, they can be problematic in some contexts.
“Given that feedback on development performance is a ubiquitous and important process in most workplaces and many people's lives, access to honest and accurate feedback should be available to anyone who needs improvement, regardless of his or her social group” , the authors wrote. “Here we have highlighted one factor that can hinder this access to some extent – being a woman.”
The study adds to a solid body of research showing gender differences in performance evaluations. For example, previous research has shown that in narrative performance assessments, women are described more warmly and positively than men, while they are evaluated more negatively on more objective, quantitative measures of performance. Women are praised for their work and are allocated fewer resources than men. Women also report receiving less negative feedback from managers.
The main goal of this new study, Zayas said, was "to provide empirical evidence that there is a greater tendency to positively distort information or tell lies to women during face-to-face feedback".
The researchers used two studies to test this hypothesis.
In the first, which measured participants' perceptions of another's actions, participants read a hypothetical manager's assessment of an employee's poor performance. Then they read what feedback the manager chose to give directly to the employee. Participants were randomly assigned to read different feedback statements, ranging from truthful feedback, which was the harshest, to the least truthful, which was also the most fun. Study participants were asked to guess the employee's gender based on the feedback the manager provided.
“Participants overwhelmingly suspected that an underperforming employee who was told a lie—the least truthful, but the nicest feedback—was a woman,” Jampol says. “This finding suggests that participants believe this is a habit when giving feedback.”
The second study examined whether the participants themselves were more likely to tell lies to a low-performing woman, compared to a man.
For the second study, the researchers asked participants to rate two poorly written essays, where the writers were identified solely by their initials, AB or SB; their genera were not known. Since participants did not know the gender of the writers and the evaluation was private, their grades reflect how they really evaluated the essay.
After submitting their grades, study participants were asked to provide feedback directly to each writer via chat so that the writer could improve. At this point, the names of the writers (Andrew or Sarah) were revealed, revealing that one was a man, the other a woman. Participants submitted a grade to each writer, as well as substantive comments to improve their essays.
Participants were more likely to tell lies to the writer for their own sake, leading Sarah's grades to be almost a full point higher than in their first private evaluation. They also gave her more positive comments than they gave Andrew. In contrast, the man's personal feedback was statistically indistinguishable from the participants' secret evaluations of his work.
The studies reveal a potential obstacle to equality, Jampol and Zayas said.
