Authors: Dr. Stryker Calvez and Dr. Jocelyn Peltier-Huntley
It's that time of year again.
Self-assessments are due. Calendar invites are going out. And somewhere, someone is about to sit across from their manager and hear five familiar words:
"You had a great year."
Sounds like good news. And it is… sort of.
The challenge, and the bias, is that “great” doesn’t tell you what was great, why it mattered, or what it means for your next step. And research suggests women hear it more often than men do. Stanford researchers Shelley Correll and Caroline Simard looked at more than 200 performance reviews across four companies and found that 57% of women received vague feedback, compared with 43% of men. It gets more complicated: when reviews did include developmental feedback, about 60% of men’s was tied to business outcomes, compared with about 40% of women’s. In other words, men were more often told specifically what to work on next and why it would matter.
That gap matters. Vague praise feels nice in the moment, and it does validate hard work. But it gives you (and the people deciding who gets promoted) very little to work with, especially when leadership roles and opportunities are on the line.
It matters most at the first step into leadership. The Women in the Workplace 2025 report found that for every 100 men promoted to manager, only 93 women were, and only 74 women of colour. At the entry-level, women were also less likely to say they’d been promoted in the last two years (30% vs. 43% of men), or that a more senior colleague had recommended them for a stretch assignment (22% vs. 32%). If that’s old news to you, you’re not alone. If it’s new, we hope it lights a fire. And here’s the part that should get everyone’s attention: when women got the same career support as men, the gap in wanting to advance disappeared. That first rung matters so much because missing it puts you in catch-up mode or pushes you to scale back your career goals altogether.
Before we go any further: this isn’t a women’s issue. It’s a systems issue. So, while the systems catch up, how do you handle it?
The part we don't say out loud
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: asking for what you want at work is awkward for almost everyone. Men feel it too. But social psychology has been pretty clear on this for a while: the cost of speaking up isn’t shared evenly. When a woman pushes for herself, she’s more likely to be seen as demanding, difficult, or “not a team player.” Researchers call this the backlash effect. Men tend to navigate a lighter version of that same tension. Less tension, but not notension.
That’s not fair. And to be clear, fixing it is the organization’s job, not the job of the women working there.
And while we wait for organizations to notice, make sense of the impact, and (hopefully) do something about it, a lot of talented people get stuck somewhere between good intentions and action.
We intend to bring up the promotion.
We intend to push back on the vague review.
We intend to ask for the stretch assignment or opportunity.
Then the moment comes, the room gets tense or awkward, and we let it pass.
Being good in tension means expecting that discomfort, even planning for it, so it doesn’t make the decision for you. Let’s get proactive with planning for the discomfort so that you can advocate for your career advancement.
Here’s where we’d start: Record. Reframe. Rehearse.
Record: bring your own receipts
If your review might be vague, don't wait for your manager to fill in the blanks. Bring the specifics yourself.
Keep a running log of what you delivered and what changed because of it:
money saved or earned
time given back to the team
risks caught before they became problems
clients kept, people developed
complex projects successfully navigated
And maybe the hardest part: name your part in these accomplishments, not just the team’s win. Sharing credit is a great habit. But at review time, your manager needs to know what you did specifically.
It doesn’t need to be fancy. Stryker keeps a running list of accomplishments on his whiteboard, both as a reminder and for exactly this. Jocelyn reflects on her wins on a weekly and monthly basis. Try five to fifteen minutes on the last Friday of every month: three wins, and why they mattered. By review season, you’re walking in with easy access information instead of a feeling.
Reframe: make it about what your leadership makes possible
This one's a little counterintuitive.
In a 2010 study, Amanatullah and Morris found that women tend to hedge when negotiating for themselves because they’re bracing for backlash, and that hedging gets them weaker results. It isn’t a skill gap. When the same women negotiated on someone else’s behalf, the hedging largely disappeared.
The outcomes followed the same pattern. Women negotiating for themselves ended up with less than men did. Women negotiating for others did just as well as men.
In other words, we often give ground before anyone has even asked us to.
Stryker has written before about how progress gets negotiated down to comfort. Turns out careers can get negotiated down the same way, and sometimes women end up being the ones doing the negotiating.
In recent research Jocelyn led on Advancing Women Engineers in Leadership sponsorship surfaced as a key driver for career advancement. If you are fortunate to have a mentor, help them be your sponsor—someone who speaks your name in rooms you aren’t in—by sharing your wins and strategizing how your leadership skills should be leveraged within your organization.
So try connecting your ask to what it makes possible for others. Instead of “I think I’ve earned this,” try “Stepping into this role would let me help us deliver X.” That’s not shrinking your ambition. It’s naming the value your leadership actually creates.
(And yes, this is a workaround for an unfair system. It shouldn't be necessary. But until the system catches up, it helps.)
Rehearse: decide now what you'll do when it gets hard
The toughest moment usually isn't the ask. It's the pause right after.
"I'm not sure you're ready yet."
"Let's revisit this next year."
“You need to be more strategic.”
That’s where a lot of us fold. The tension of the moment takes over, especially when we haven’t prepared for it. Especially when the feedback is a vague statement, and not actionable feedback.
Psychologists Gollwitzer and Sheeran looked across 94 studies and found that simple “if-then” plans (researchers call them implementation intentions) had a medium-to-large effect on whether people reached their goals. A newer review of 642 tests found these plans work best when people are already motivated, and when they rehearse them. If you’ve read this far, we’re guessing you are.
So before your next review, write a few down:
If I hear “you had a great year,” then I’ll ask, “Which results stood out, and how do they connect to our goals and the next level?”
If I hear “you’re not ready yet,” then I’ll ask, “What would you need to see from me in the next six months?”
If I feel myself backing down, then I’ll pause, breathe, and go back to my record of those Friday wins.
Then say them out loud to someone you trust or record yourself practicing by yourself. Saying them aloud makes them feel more real, and less intimidating. And it gets the first time out of the way, so when it counts, it comes out clear and confident. It’ll feel a little silly. Do it anyway.
Like anything at the gym, it gets easier with reps.
If you're already leading people
This shouldn't all sit on your employees' shoulders. If you're looking for something to champion in 2027, start here:
Set promotion criteria before review season, and use the same structured template for everyone. If feedback isn’t tied to outcomes, it’s tied to impressions. Then share those criteria openly, with everyone.
Create evidence-based actionable feedback. Move beyond the vague “You had a great year” statements and be specific about your employee’s wins and where they need to develop. Better yet, make sure employees of all genders receive this valuable evidence-based actionable feedback.
Look at your own numbers. Who moved from individual contributor to manager over the last two years, broken down by gender and race? You can’t fix a rung you don’t know is broken. It may not be anyone’s fault. It may be a system working exactly the way it was built. But knowing lets you correct what needs correcting, and gives everyone a fair shot at doing their best work.
And when someone on your team does push for themselves, make sure it doesn’t cost them.
“If you do not intentionally, deliberately and proactively include, you will unintentionally exclude.” — Joe Gerstandt
Good in tension
Good intentions get us in the door, on both sides of the review table.
But careers, and real equity, move forward when we’re willing to stay in the conversation after it gets uncomfortable.
So, what’s one thing you’ll bring into your review this year? Add your thoughts in the comments.
Resources:
Amanatullah, E. T. & Morris, M. W. (2010). Negotiating gender roles: Gender differences in assertive negotiating are mediated by women’s fear of backlash and attenuated when negotiating on behalf of others. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 98(2), 256–267.
Correll, S. & Simard, C. (2016). Research: Vague feedback is holding women back. Harvard Business Review.
Gollwitzer, P. M. & Sheeran, P. (2006). Implementation intentions and goal achievement: A meta-analysis of effects and processes. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 38, 69–119.
LeanIn.Org & McKinsey & Company (2025). Women in the Workplace 2025.
Peltier-Huntley, J., Hughes, C. & Shukla, G. (2026). Advancing Women Engineers in Leadership. The Canadian Academy of Engineering.
Sheeran, P., Listrom, O. & Gollwitzer, P. M. (2025). The when and how of planning: Meta-analysis of the scope and components of implementation intentions in 642 tests. European Review of Social Psychology, 36(1), 162–194.