The feedback you got wasn't about you. Here's the research that proves it.
“Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.”
A few weeks ago, I was running a leadership session for a law firm’s women’s network. Around 109 people joined, which was already impressive, but what really stood out was that around 20 of them were men.
At the start of the session, I put a question up on screen and asked everyone to answer it in the chat. The question was:
"Have you ever been penalised for being assertive, direct, ambitious, independent or confident - traits often praised in men but questioned in women?"
The women in the chat were quick to answer yes. The men in the chat, on the other hand, all answered no.
Same room, same job. Two completely different experiences of the same professional world.
The research that explains what you already know
I recently came across the work of Kieran Snyder, who in 2014 analysed 248 performance reviews from 180 high-performing employees across 28 tech companies.
What she found was striking. 88% of women's performance reviews contained critical feedback, compared to 59% of men's. Men were more than three times as likely to receive purely positive feedback. But it's when you look at the critical reviews specifically that the picture becomes even more stark: of the women's critical performance reviews, 76% of them contained negative personality criticism. The figure for men was just 2%.
We’re not talking about people's work here. We’re talking about their personality.
And the feedback wasn’t coy. The word “abrasive” appeared 17 times across 13 different women’s reviews, and yet it appeared zero times in the men’s. Other words that showed up in women’s reviews but not men’s were bossy, strident, aggressive, emotional and irrational.
Snyder co-founded a company called Textio which, in 2024, published a follow-up study based on over 23,000 reviews across more than 250 organisations. A decade on, the numbers were essentially the same: 76% of high-performing women received negative feedback, compared to 2% of high-achieving men. Women who received low-quality feedback were 63% more likely to leave within 12 months.
Why this happens: the double bind
As I wrote in my chapter for Beyond Bias: Unleashing the Potential of Women in Law (Globe Law and Business, 2025), the phenomenon psychologists call “role congruity theory” explains this trap precisely.
We hold two sets of expectations simultaneously: expectations about how women should behave, and expectations about how leaders should behave. Women are expected to be warm, communal and accommodating. Leaders are expected to be assertive, decisive and dominant. Those two sets of expectations directly conflict with each other. If you conform to one, you will violate the other.
So, if a woman is assertive, she’s too aggressive. If she’s warm and collaborative, she’s likeable but not quite leadership material. There is no version of the behaviour that doesn’t attract a penalty. This isn’t a feeling or a perception: it’s a documented psychological phenomenon, replicated across cultures and decades.
I hear this played out constantly in the responses I get when I ask women about their careers. For my book chapter, I asked women in Female Lawyers’ Club and on LinkedIn: have you ever been penalised for being assertive, direct, ambitious, independent, or confident? The replies were overwhelming. Here are a few of them:
“I was told as a junior associate I was too ‘chippy’. And that was by a woman.”
“I’ve been told to ‘pipe down’ before.”
“I got called aggressive for simply responding to blunt emails with the same energy.”
“They said I had sharp elbows, but all I did was set high standards and get things done.”
These women were not underperforming. They were doing exactly what the job required, and being penalised for doing it for simply being female.
What this means for the feedback you’ve received
If you’ve ever been told that you were too much, too direct, too confident, too ambitious or, going the other way, not warm enough, not approachable enough, not smiley enough, you can now put that feedback in context. It wasn't a verdict on your capability. It was the product of societal conditioning that has long defined what women are supposed to be and how they're supposed to behave, and which doesn't disappear at the office door. The patriarchal norms that shape those expectations are still very much present in professional life. I think that knowing that is useful, because it means the problem was never you.
One of the women in the leadership session was brave enough to share her own experience. She had received excellent client feedback, and was hitting her targets. However, she was sent on a bespoke soft skills training programme because she had given direct feedback to colleagues who, in her view, weren’t doing their jobs properly. The men around her who behaved identically were not sent on any such course.
What made it worse was, when the training programme asked her to seek feedback from the managers who had sent her on the course, they refused to give it. So she was told something was wrong with her, but not what it was. The result, years later, was that she still braces herself when a manager asks to speak with her.
Back to that room
I want to tell everyone about research like this because knowing it can make a real difference to a career. Someone who hears negative personal feedback early on may decide they're simply not cut out for the law and leave, when all they needed to know was that the feedback said nothing about their ability; it merely reflected the biases baked into the system they were working in.
There is nothing wrong with her. There never was.
Enjoy the rest of the week.
Rachel