"Abrasive" and other words men never see in their performance reviews

rubber_chicken · August 2014

My facebook friends have been passing around this article today, "The one word men never see in their performance reviews".

[https://www.fastcompany.com/3034895/strong-female-lead/the-one-word-men-never-see-in-their-performance-reviews?utm_source=facebook]

Turns out most of the women I know have been on the receiving end of this. Personally, I was once told to "smile more". Not by my manager...by my director. If I knew then what I knew now, I'd have asked her to put that sh*t in writing.

What about you ladies? What's the most personal critical feedback you've received in a review?

aglenn · August 2014

My most horrible boss ever would brush off any issues brought up by me or other female staff as "personality conflicts" regardless of what the issue was or how legitimate it was. Made me crazy.

MommyAtty · August 2014

I was told flat out by my old boss, who is an employment attorney no less, that I needed to avoid "appearing to have sharp elbows as a woman in the organization." Same guy told me to learn to appear helpless to older men in the company and I would get farther. And yes, every issue where there is a conflict is a result of "personality conflicts," especially if it is 2 women. Just yesterday, I was told that we should attempt to solve a problem "without pointing fingers at a specific person" to which I (abrasively I'm sure) replied, "Then we may as well not attempt to solve it, because the problem is the person here, not the process." Pretty sure no man has ever been told in my company not to state what the actual problem is when the problem is a person's inability to do their job.

jcwinsto · August 2014

I was once told that I needed to work on my facial expressions. I always looked stern and it always looked like I was disagreeing with him when I would be outright verbally agreeing with him. When I worked on an all female team we were never allowed to say *this person's name* did this job and made the mistake. We were only allowed to say *the team* missed catching this mistake.

ricekez · August 2014

My written performance reviews are always "meh" and pretty impersonal. It's all about what the larger team did. My manager tells me I'm doing a good job in person, but not in writing. This is somewhat typical in my organization and everyone gets about the same "merit increase." My issue is that managers will talk about men as being the "golden boy" and treat men with similar experience level as me as if they are leadership-bound, but I'm stuck at "great to work with, solid engineer, needs more experience."