"we promoted Bob because he makes good decisions and motivates others to follow him. We didn't promote Ann because she's trying to enforce her suboptimal decisions by using her authority"
Maybe, but DanBC is likewise only highlighting one option.
In my experience, that is by far the less likely. Leaders are called leaders because they lead people who choose to follow. If you're forcing others to follow, you're not a leader, you're an authoritarian. I haven't met many of the latter, but plenty of the former, none of which I would describe as "assertive".
When breaking the reviews down by gender of the person evaluated, 58.9% of the reviews received by men contained critical feedback. 87.9% of the reviews received by women did.
Men are given constructive suggestions. Women are given constructive suggestions – and told to pipe down.
There’s a common perception that women in technology endure personality feedback that their male peers just don’t receive. Words like bossy, abrasive, strident, and aggressive are used to describe women’s behaviors when they lead; words like emotional and irrational describe their behaviors when they object. All of these words show up at least twice in the women’s review text I reviewed, some much more often. Abrasive alone is used 17 times to describe 13 different women. Among these words, only aggressive shows up in men’s reviews at all. It shows up three times, twice with an exhortation to be more of it.
>Maybe white males learn this early on the playground. But anybody can learn this.
You're missing the point. The point is the -exact- same behaviors are seen through a cultural lens.
In 2003, Frank Flynn taught a Harvard Business School case study on Silicon Valley entrepreneur Heidi Roizin to a class at Columbia. Her story is epic: After graduating from Stanford's Graduate School of Business in 1983, she founded an early Silicon Valley software company before becoming president of Software Publishers' Association and later serving as Vice President of World Wide Developer Relations for Apple. Then she became a venture capitalist and Stanford lecturer.
But when those Columbia students read her story, only half of them knew her as Heidi Roizin. The other half read the same story with a changed name: Heidi became Howard.
The students reacted very differently to the same protagonist, depending on the perceived gender.
"Although [students] think [Heidi is] just as competent and effective as Howard, they don't like her, they wouldn't hire her, and they wouldn't want to work with her," Flynn later said. "As gender researchers would predict, this seems to be driven by how much they disliked Heidi's aggressive personality. The more assertive they thought Heidi was, the more harshly they judged her (but the same was not true for those who rated Howard)."
In short, men are liked for being assertive, while women are disliked.