What Women Actually Need to Hear at Work That No One Is Saying

Here is the honest problem with the feedback most women receive at work. It is not that the feedback is unkind, though sometimes it is. It is not that the feedback is inaccurate, though often it is. The problem is that the feedback is systematically incomplete in ways that keep women from advancing, and the incompleteness has been so normalized that most women have stopped noticing they are receiving less useful information than their male colleagues are receiving. The gap is not a matter of one difficult manager or one bad review cycle. The gap is structural, and it has been documented in research for over a decade, and it continues to operate largely without correction in workplaces across every industry. 

If you are a woman working in a professional setting, you have almost certainly received feedback that included phrases like "your communication style," "your executive presence," "how you come across," or "the way you handled that situation." You have almost certainly not received feedback that included phrases like "your strategic thinking on this specific decision," "here is where your business judgment was wrong and here is what you should have decided instead," or "here is the specific technical skill you need to develop to advance to the next level." The first category of feedback is about how you appear. The second category is about what you actually did. Men in comparable roles receive significantly more of the second category. Women receive significantly more of the first. 

This asymmetry is not accidental. A 2022 study published in the Harvard Business Review analyzed more than 200 performance reviews across multiple industries and found that women's reviews were dominated by feedback about personality traits and interpersonal style, while men's reviews were dominated by feedback about task performance and technical skills. Women received an average of four times more feedback about their communication and demeanor than men received. Men received an average of three times more feedback about specific business decisions than women received. The same behaviors produced different feedback categories depending on the gender of the person being evaluated. 

What this means for your career is significant, and I want to name it plainly because the naming has been avoided in most professional development literature written for women. The feedback you have been receiving has been keeping you focused on how you appear rather than on what you decide. It has been training you to modulate your voice, your tone, your emotional expression, and your interpersonal presence, while your male colleagues have been receiving direct guidance on the substantive business skills that actually determine advancement. You have been getting a different education inside the same workplace, and the difference has been costing you. 

The Feedback You Are Not Getting 

Let me be specific about what is missing. Women in professional roles rarely receive substantive feedback in the following categories, even when the feedback would be directly relevant to their advancement. 

You rarely receive honest assessment of your strategic thinking. When you make a strategic recommendation and your manager disagrees, you are likely to be told that you should have run the idea by more people first, that your framing needs work, or that you need to build more consensus before pushing your position. You are less likely to be told what specifically was wrong with the strategic thinking itself. Was the market read incorrect? Was the timing off? Did you underestimate a competitor? Did you fail to consider a specific downside? The absence of this substantive feedback means you cannot improve the underlying thinking. You can only improve the wrapping. 

You rarely receive honest assessment of your business judgment. When your decisions produce outcomes that fall short of what your organization wanted, the debrief often focuses on process rather than judgment. You should have consulted more people. You should have written a better memo. You should have communicated the decision more effectively. The judgment itself, which is what actually determines whether the decision was correct, often goes unaddressed. Your male colleagues are more likely to receive direct feedback on their judgment, which means they get to improve their judgment over time in ways that you do not. 

You rarely receive honest assessment of your technical or domain expertise gaps. When you lack a specific skill that would be relevant to advancement, you are often not told directly. You may be steered toward professional development in general categories, or you may be given projects that inadvertently expose the gap without anyone naming it. Male colleagues are more likely to receive specific technical direction. Read this book. Take this course. Shadow this senior person on this specific type of engagement. The absence of specific direction for women means you often do not know what you need to learn to advance. 

You rarely receive honest assessment of your negotiation. When you accept a lower salary, a smaller title bump, or a less favorable role than you should have, the people watching often say nothing to you about it. They may express private concern about your undernegotiation but rarely intervene to give you the specific counsel that would help you do it differently next time. Male colleagues are more likely to receive candid advice about how to negotiate more aggressively. The advice gap accumulates over a career and appears in the compensation gap that follows. 

You rarely receive honest assessment of your presence in senior rooms. If you are being overlooked in meetings, if senior people are taking your ideas and repackaging them without credit, if you are being interrupted in ways that damage your professional standing, the honest conversation about these dynamics is often not offered to you. You may be told to speak up more, or to build your confidence, or to work on your executive presence, without anyone actually naming the specific behaviors that are undermining you or offering strategic guidance for addressing them. 

Why the Silence 

Why does this happen? The reasons are several, and they operate together to produce the pattern. 

The first reason is that giving substantive feedback to women is often perceived as risky by the person giving it. Managers who have offered direct technical or strategic feedback to women have sometimes received complaints, accusations of harshness, or accusations of gender bias in return. Some of these responses have been legitimate reactions to genuinely biased feedback. Others have been reactions to accurate substantive feedback that the woman receiving it interpreted through the lens of the many biased communications she had received in the past. Whatever the mix of factors in any individual case, the aggregate effect has been that many managers, particularly male managers, have retreated from offering women substantive feedback because the professional risk to themselves has been higher than the risk of offering the same feedback to men. The retreat is understandable at the individual level. It is devastating for women in the aggregate. 

The second reason is that female-typed feedback is easier to give than substantive feedback. Telling a woman her communication style needs work does not require the manager to have deep insight into her actual technical or strategic performance. Telling a woman she needs to build more executive presence does not require the manager to have thought carefully about what specifically her presence is lacking. The generic feedback categories provide cover for managers who have not actually assessed the woman's work in depth. Substantive feedback would require deeper attention. Many managers are not paying that deeper attention to their female employees. 

The third reason is that women have been culturally trained to accept and even seek the softer categories of feedback. Many women, particularly women in earlier stages of their careers, actively invite feedback about their communication style and interpersonal presence because they have been taught that this is the kind of feedback that will help them succeed. They accept the feedback graciously. They work on the identified issues. They do not push back and ask for the substantive feedback they are not receiving, because they have not been given the framework to recognize that the substantive feedback is what would actually help them advance. 

The fourth reason is that the women who do push back on soft feedback and demand substantive feedback are often penalized for the pushback. They are described as difficult, as defensive, as unable to take feedback. The penalty for demanding better feedback discourages the demand, which reproduces the pattern. 

What to Actually Do 

If you are a woman reading this and recognizing yourself, here is what I would suggest. This is direct advice, offered without softening, because softening it would reproduce the problem the article is trying to name. 

Ask for substantive feedback explicitly. Do not wait for your manager to volunteer it. In your next one on one, ask directly for feedback on a specific strategic decision, a specific technical output, or a specific business judgment you made recently. Ask what would have made the decision or the output better. Ask what your peer at the same level would have done differently. Ask what specific skills you need to develop to be considered for the next promotion. The specificity is important. Do not ask for general feedback. Ask about the specific work you have done. 

When you receive soft feedback that focuses on how you come across, ask for the underlying substantive feedback that the soft feedback is standing in for. If you are told to work on your executive presence, ask what specifically your presence is lacking. If you are told to work on your communication, ask what specific communications went wrong and what specifically about them did not work. Push through the initial soft answer to the substantive information underneath. If the substantive information does not exist because your manager has not actually assessed your work in depth, the exchange itself will reveal that, and you will learn something important about the relationship. 

Do not immediately act on soft feedback without interrogating it. If you are told that you are too aggressive, ask specifically which behaviors were too aggressive and what a male peer engaging in the same behaviors would have been told. The exercise will often reveal that the feedback reflects gendered expectations rather than accurate assessment of your behavior. You may still choose to modulate the behavior if the workplace requires it, but you should modulate consciously rather than absorb the feedback as an accurate description of yourself. 

Build feedback relationships outside your direct chain of command. Mentors, sponsors, peers in other functions, and industry contacts outside your company are more likely to give you substantive feedback than the people who have to work with you every day. The outside feedback is often more useful precisely because the relationships do not carry the same professional risks that inhibit direct managers from being honest. Invest in these relationships. The information they provide is often the information you cannot get inside your own organization. 

Ask for the technical training and stretch assignments you would need to advance. Do not wait to be offered them. Male colleagues are more likely to be offered stretch opportunities. Women are more likely to be given the opportunities they explicitly request. If you want the challenging project, ask for it directly. If you want the executive coaching, ask for it directly. If you want the exposure to senior leadership, ask for it directly. The asking is uncomfortable. The not asking is more expensive. 

The Deeper Point 

The pattern I have been describing is not about individual managers being bad or individual women being weak. It is about a workplace culture that has developed particular expectations for how feedback is delivered to women, and those expectations have been keeping women from getting the information they need to advance. The pattern will not correct itself. Individual women pushing for better feedback are doing the necessary work of correcting the pattern one interaction at a time, and the collective effect of many women doing that work is what will eventually shift the norms. 

Do not accept incomplete feedback as if it were complete. Do not thank managers effusively for feedback that would be considered inadequate if offered to your male peers. Do not internalize soft feedback as accurate description of who you are when it may be accurate description of what the culture expects women to hear. The feedback you receive at work has shaped who you have become. Choose consciously what you will absorb and what you will push back on. 

The silence that has surrounded women's advancement in professional workplaces has been costly. The silence has kept women from developing the skills they need. The silence has kept women from advocating for the opportunities that would advance them. The silence has cost women, in aggregate, hundreds of billions of dollars in earnings over the course of their careers. The silence has cost individual women decades of professional growth that they could have had if they had been given the same information their male colleagues received. 

Your career deserves better feedback than you have been getting. Ask for it. Do not stop asking until you get it. And if the organization you work for cannot or will not provide it, that is information too, and the information is worth acting on. 

The honest conversation you have been missing is available. It just has to be demanded.