Lily Jampol’s research while affiliated with London Business School and other places

While research has documented positivity biases in workplace feedback to women versus men, this phenomenon is not fully understood. We take a motivational perspective, theorizing that the gender stereotype of warmth shapes feedback givers' goals, amplifying the importance placed on kindness when giving critical feedback to a woman versus a man. We found support for this hypothesis in a survey of professionals giving real developmental feedback (Study 1, N = 4,842 raters evaluating N = 423 individuals) and five experiments with MBA students, lab participants, and managers (Studies 2-5, N = 1,589). Across studies, people prioritized the goal of kindness more when they gave, or anticipated giving, critical feedback to a woman versus a man. Studies 1, 3, and 5 suggest that this kindness bias relates to gendered positivity biases, and Studies 4a and 4b tested potential mechanisms and supported an indirect effect through warmth. We discuss implications for the study of motivation and workplace gender bias.

There has been extensive discussion about gender gaps in representation and career advancement in the sciences. However, psychological science itself has yet to be the focus of discussion or systematic review, despite our field's investment in questions of equity, status, well-being, gender bias, and gender disparities. In the present article, we consider 10 topics relevant for women's career advancement in psychological science. We focus on issues that have been the subject of empirical study, discuss relevant evidence within and outside of psychological science, and draw on established psychological theory and social-science research to begin to chart a path forward. We hope that better understanding of these issues within the field will shed light on areas of existing gender gaps in the discipline and areas where positive change has happened, and spark conversation within our field about how to create lasting change to mitigate remaining gender differences in psychological science.

Are underperforming women given less truthful, but kinder performance feedback (“white lies”) compared with equally underperforming men? We test this hypothesis by using a “benchmark” of truthful (objective) evaluation of performance and then either manipulating (Study 1) or measuring (Study 2) the extent to which the feedback given to women is upwardly distorted. In Study 1, participants were asked to guess the gender of an underperforming employee who had been given more or less truthful feedback. Participants overwhelmingly assumed that employees who had been told “white lies” were more likely to be women. In Study 2, in a naturalistic feedback paradigm, participants gave both quantitative and qualitative feedback to a male and a female writer directly. Participants upwardly distorted their original, gender-blind, quantitative evaluations of women’s work and gave more positive comments to women. The findings suggest that women may not receive the same quality of feedback as men.

Are underperforming women given less truthful, but kinder performance feedback (“white lies”) compared to equally underperforming men? We test this hypothesis by using a “benchmark” of truthful (objective) evaluation of performance and then either manipulate (Study 1) or measure (Study 2) the extent to which the feedback given to women is upwardly distorted. In Study 1, participants were asked to guess the gender of an underperforming employee who had been given more or less truthful feedback. Participants overwhelmingly assumed that employees who had been told “white lies” were women. In Study 2, in a naturalistic feedback paradigm, participants first provided a quantitative evaluation of work in the absence of any gender information. After learning the worker’s gender, participants upwardly distorted their quantitative feedback and expressed more positive comments to women, but not men. The findings suggest that women may not receive the same quality of feedback as men.

Prosocial lies, or lies intended to benefit others, are ubiquitous behaviors that have important social and economic consequences. Though emotions play a central role in many forms of prosocial behavior, no work has investigated how emotions influence behavior when one has the opportunity to tell a prosocial lie—a situation that presents a conflict between two prosocial ethics: lying to prevent harm to another, and honesty, which might also provide benefits to the target of the lie. Here, we examine whether the emotion of compassion influences prosocial lying, and find that compassion causally increases and positively predicts prosocial lying. In Studies 1 and 2, participants evaluated a poorly written essay and provided feedback to the essay writer. Experimentally induced compassion felt toward the essay writer (Study 1) and individual differences in trait compassion (Study 2) were positively associated with inflated feedback to the essay writer. In both of these studies, the relationship between compassion and prosocial lying was partially mediated by an enhanced importance placed on preventing emotional harm. In Study 3, we found moderation such that experimentally induced compassion increased lies that resulted in financial gains for a charity, but not lies that produced financial gains for the self. This research illuminates the emotional underpinnings of the common yet morally complex behavior of prosocial lying, and builds on work highlighting the potentially harmful effects of compassion—an emotion typically seen as socially beneficial.