That George Clooney, he's just so feisty. Though you know, some people think he's a bit hysterical, the way he goes on about his political views. Or they would, if people ever described men as hysterical. The Guardian recently put together a great list of words that are only ever used when talking about women, including (shudder) "feisty", "flounce", "nag" and "bossy". And what's scary is that some of these words are used by employers when evaluating their female employees.
A recent study by Fortune magazine showed that managers not only judge men and women by different standards, they describe pretty much the same behavior in different ways depending on whether the employee is male or female. Linguist Kieran Snyder, who did the study,wrote that she (yes, this Kieran is a she - I was surprised too) was inspired by a conversation with an engineering manager about some employees who were being considered for a promotion.
“Jessica is really talented,” he said. “But I wish she’d be less abrasive. She comes on too strong.” Her male counterpart? “Steve is an easy case,” he went on. “Smart and great to work with. He needs to learn to be a little more patient, but who doesn’t?”
Snyder decided to find out if this sort of language found its way into the actual performance reviews and company records - and worryingly, she discovered that it did. She also discovered that women received much more criticism than men - while 58.9% of the reviews received by men contained critical feedback. 87.9% of the reviews received by women did.
And when men got criticism, they were given constructive advice. One man was told to "“Take time to slow down and listen. You would achieve even more.” Women with similar faults, however, were given harsher critiques: “You can come across as abrasive sometimes. I know you don’t mean to, but you need to pay attention to your tone.” or “Your peers sometimes feel that you don’t leave them enough room. Sometimes you need to step back to let others shine.”
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Snyder found that not only were women's personalities constantly criticized, but the critical words used were different to the words used to describe men.
Words like bossy, abrasive, strident, and aggressive are used to describe women’s behaviors when they lead; words like emotional and irrational describe their behaviors when they object. All of these words show up at least twice in the women’s review text I reviewed, some much more often. Abrasive alone is used 17 times to describe 13 different women. Among these words, only aggressive shows up in men’s reviews at all. It shows up three times, twice with an exhortation to be more of it.
The fact that men were encouraged to be aggressive while women were criticised for the same quality is pretty depressing. I suppose we should just be glad they didn't call them "feisty" too.
But what can be done? As employees, I'm not sure we can do very much. But employers might want to start looking at how they judge the women who work for them - and see if they view them differently from their male colleagues.
So have you experienced this in your workplace? Are women workers criticised in specific ways? And what other words are only used to describe us ladies?
