Men are called 'brilliant,' while women are 'overachievers.' See how your performance reviews are impacted by your race and gender.

• Women and people of color receive lower-quality feedback from managers than white men get, a new study shows.
• Asian and white men are more often called "genius" while women of color are more often called "overachievers."

When Kieran Snyder, CEO and co-founder of the augmented writing platform Textio, first started researching workplace communication over a decade ago, she was drawing on both her personal history with gender-based discrimination and an academic career analyzing natural language datasets.

From the words shared in meetings and resumes, to social media and performance feedback, Snyder said she saw patterns of bias, including findings that women receive much more overtly negative and personality-based feedback than men do.

Earlier this year, Snyder led a team to take a wider look at how gender, race, and age shape the feedback that workers receive from their managers.

The new research offers a sobering view of the US workplace after two years of supposedly stepped-up diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts following the Me Too movement and the murder of George Floyd.

At one mid-sized organization, Black women received twice as much feedback about their personality as white men did, while Asian men received slightly less than white men, according to the study.

One reason personality-based feedback is problematic, the researchers write, is that there is rarely anything the employee can do about it.

In another example, white and Asian men were far more likely than others to be called "brilliant" and "genius" in feedback, while women were more likely to be called "overachievers." (Asian women were five times as likely as white men to be called an "overachiever," which the researchers say is "typically applied to strong performers transcending low expectations.")

"Some groups are credited with more baseline talent than others," the authors write. "This plays out not just in written feedback, but in opportunities for challenging stretch assignments and promotion rates over time."

Among the reasons these biases are harmful are several critical economic impacts: better feedback is linked to more promotions, leadership opportunities, and better pay.

Indeed, a study last year from the American Association of University Women found that the people who receive the most problematic feedback at work are also those who receive the lowest average salary. Their findings showed Asian and white men receive the highest salary and the least negative bias, while Black and Latina women were at the opposite end of the scale.

Of course, no report about actionable feedback would be complete without some action-items of its own, and the authors offer several tips for both managers and employees.

Managers are advised to avoid commentary about an individual's personality, and instead focus on their specific behaviors that they can do differently going forward, backing up everything with concrete examples as much as possible.

Employees too can influence the kind of feedback they receive by asking for specific examples of past behavior, and request advice for how to tackle future challenges.