Do Women Respond Differently Than Men to Performance Critiques?

Despite progress in gender equality, women in many professions still experience barriers that prevent them from attaining decision-making roles in organizations: the higher up in the organizational hierarchy, the lower the proportion of women filling roles. This phenomenon is typically attributed to differences in how men and women approach competition and take chances in the workplace.

Recent research by Maria Kogelnik, a postdoctoral affiliate at the Economic Growth Center at Yale University, offers a new explanation: the gender gap in persistence, which she defines as “the decision to continue on a career path and keep doing (or trying to do) something even when it is challenging.”

Using a controlled experiment, Kogelnik found that men are 10 percentage points more likely to continue engaging in difficult tasks when exposed to performance feedback than women who did equally well and received identical feedback. She concluded that men and women may differ in how they interpret critiques and form beliefs about their future performance, which could lead to divergence in persistence.

Dr. Kogelnik designed a randomized experiment in which male and female participants were asked to perform a challenging task: an IQ test. All participants were exposed to ego-relevant feedback on their performance that was either positive or negative, and only high performance was rewarded. After receiving feedback, subjects could choose to either continue in a similar setting or switch to an easier test with no feedback. The results showed that men were more likely to continue with the more difficult task, even when compared to women who performed equally well and received the same feedback.

Dr. Kogelnik offers two mechanisms to explain this finding: first, that men are more confident about their future performance than women, who are equally confident about their past performance; and second, that men tend to seek feedback more than women. The disparity in men and women’s likelihood to continue on a career path in response to performance feedback, despite having performed equally well, “could help explain why the share of women tends to decrease with position seniority in many stratified environments such as corporate management, academia, and politics,” Dr. Kogelnik noted.

Dr. Kogelnik holds master’s degrees in economics from Leopold-Franzens University in Innsbruck and the University of British Columbia. She went on to earn a Ph.D. in economics at the University of California, Santa Barbara.