“Protective Paternalism” Towards Women May Cause Inaccurate Performance Feedback

“Protective Paternalism” is a common, sometimes unconscious, theory that women need to be protected from harm. According to a new study led by Washington State University, when this theory presents itself in workplace evaluations, women employees may be shielded from helpful constructive feedback they need to improve.

The research team began their investigation by analyzing three-years-worth of publicly available music reviews from Rolling Stone magazine. They discovered that descriptions of women artists tended to feature more positive feedback than male artists with the same star rating.

In the study’s second phase, they recruited a sample of 486 participants to see if this pattern was found in hypothetical workplace performance evaluations. The participants first took a survey regarding their motivation to appear unprejudiced toward women. They next examined a performance description of a non-gendered employee and assigned them feedback from a list of positive and negative comments. One week later, the participants were asked to view the same performance descriptions, but the hypothetical employee was either labeled as a man or woman. The study participants were first asked if they felt they should protect the employee from negative feedback. Finally, they were asked to provide the hypothetical man or woman with feedback from the same list of positive and negative comments they reviewed for the non-gendered employee.

Upon analyzing their results, the researchers discovered that the participants who had stronger motivation to appear unprejudiced were more likely to assign the woman employee with more positive feedback than the non-gendered employee with the same performance.

The authors believe these findings suggest “protective paternalism” could be preventing women employees from improving and therefore limiting their ability to advance in their careers. They suggest future research should investigate the effectiveness of initiatives that bring awareness of this phenomenon to reviewers, as well as potentially reframing evaluations to focus more on coaching and mentoring opportunities.