So you’re interested in our subbrand Growth Quarters? Then join our online event, TNW2020 , where you’ll hear how the most successful founders kickstarted and grew their companies.

Imagine that your boss Ethan calls you into his office. He expresses disappointment in your recent performance and lack of commitment. How would you react? Would you accept the feedback and put in more effort? Or would you pout in your office and start looking for a new job? Now, would your reaction be different if your boss was not named Ethan but Emily?

I’m a professor of economics , and my research investigates this very question.

This has important implications for the success of women in leadership, such as Jane Fraser, who will take over Citigroup in February , becoming the first woman to lead a major Wall Street bank.

If giving feedback is more likely to backfire for women in positions of power, they may adopt less effective management strategies or become altogether less interested in holding leadership positions.

Women in the workplace

Women make up 45% of employees of S&P 500 companies. Yet, they only make up 37% of managers at the midlevel, 27% of bosses at the senior level and about 6% of CEOs.

These disparities remain despite women having overtaken men in educational attainment . They have also begun scoring higher on leadership competency tests in recent years.

Existing studies do not find clear evidence of gender discrimination against job applicants for upper management. Due to methodological constraints, such research typically focuses on hiring for entry-level positions .

Discrimination in promotion is much harder to study, as work interactions are more difficult for researchers to observe. My research, however, helps address this issue.

Drop in job satisfaction

For my study, I hired 2,700 workers online to transcribe receipts, randomly assigning a male or female name to a manager and randomly assigning which workers would receive performance feedback.

Results show that both women and men react more negatively to criticism if it comes from a woman. The subjects reported that criticism by a woman led to a larger reduction in job satisfaction than criticism by a man. Employees were also doubly disinterested in working for the company in the future if they had been criticized by a female boss.

Women in upper management are not simply being ignored. Workers hired for the transcription in our study actually spent slightly more time reading and thinking about feedback from female managers.

Nor can implicit biases explain why employees are less likely to take criticism well from women. While we found that workers in this study were, on average, more likely to subconsciously associate men with career and women with family, this tendency does not predict whether they discriminate against female bosses.

This type of discrimination is also not due to a lack of exposure to female supervisors. Workers stating that their previous female supervisor was highly effective were just as likely to bristle at the criticism from a woman boss.

Instead, what seems to drive the results are gendered expectations of management styles. Other studies have shown that workers are three times more likely to associate giving praise with female managers and twice more likely to associate giving criticism with male managers. People react negatively if something violates their expectations .

Case in point: critical female bosses.

It remains unclear the extent to which results from this study can be generalized across more traditional work settings. Yet, the “gig economy” and other remote work arrangements are a rapidly expanding part of the economy.

Some have argued that these jobs offer more flexibility and thus particularly benefit women. However, findings from this study highlight additional concerns about discrimination in the gig economy due to lack of regulatory oversight and equal opportunity protections in these jobs.

What can be done?

Recently, some companies started trying to stem discrimination against women in management positions.

Several have employed “ feedback coaches ,” teaching workers to focus on the content of feedback rather than the identity of the person providing it. There is also evidence that informing people of their biases may affect their behavior .

[ Deep knowledge, daily. Sign up for The Conversation’s newsletter .]

Other research suggests that highlighting specific credentials of women in leadership – such as positive evaluations or reference letters – may be an effective remedy.

To end on a hopeful note: Negative reactions to criticism from female bosses in my study is lower among younger workers and disappears for those in their 20s. Though younger employees may discriminate more as they age, it could be that this is a generational shift.

This article is republished from The Conversation by Martin Abel , Assistant Professor of Economics, Middlebury under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article .

7 tips on lockdown career advancement — for employees and managers

It can be hard to think about career progression when you’re working from home and worrying about job security due to, you know, a global pandemic .

And even though it’s understandable that you might want to focus on short term goals, there’s absolutely no harm in thinking further ahead and trying to figure out what your next career move could — or should — be.

The biggest challenges about working remotely are obviously reduced contact time with managers and perhaps even less visibility over an your work — but not all is lost.

“While 1:1s and check-ins should still be happening, the water-cooler chats and body language signals that might usually help you stay close to your manager will be missing. It’s essential that managers double down on regular scheduled catch-ups with their teams to find out how they’re doing,” Jonny Burch, the founder of Progression , a service that helps makers grow at work, tells Growth Quarters.

Additionally, Burch says that work that doesn’t have a clear tangible output — such as admin, for example — is much harder to see.

“If your job, or natural style, involves less visible communication of decisions or work, it may be that your work just isn’t noticed so much, whereas others who over-communicate visually may experience the opposite effect,” he notes.

Given the current circumstances, Burch has the following advice for employees thinking about their next career moves:

Don’t panic and let go of what you want out of your job or career . Making considered decisions around what you work on, where you want to go, and what you expect of your role is just as important as before, even during a pandemic.

Do take the opportunity to figure out whether working remotely is right for you. Remember that this isn’t a typical remote situation, but that doesn’t mean you can’t learn from it and use it to make your next career move one that will benefit your quality of life. Chances are when the dust settles you’ll be able to make a strong case for staying remote, if you want to.

Don’t put career progression conversations on pause because ‘it’s all just crazy right now.” Your manager’s job hasn’t changed — they should be supporting your growth, so remind them of it.

If you’re typically someone who interfaces heavily with others, do look for new ways in which to have the same impact remotely . What cultural or team-focused ideas can you implement? How can you replace a meeting with an asynchronous process? “Never waste a good crisis,” Winston Churchill once said.

Burch also shared his top tips for managers and team leads:

Double down on giving your teams clear expectations which they can absorb and work on without you present. Your ‘manager sixth sense’ on skills development is now far less powerful from miles away, so documenting your expectations and what people need to be doing is essential, now more than ever.

Don’t you dare put career conversations on ice , even if you’ve had to lay others off. It’s your damn job.

The reality hasn’t changed: remote or not remote . If managers aren’t demonstrating to their teams that personal development is supported, those people will start to look for opportunities further afield.

Times may be tough right now but it’s important not to lose sight of what opportunities lie ahead. So, start thinking about what you want and what you have to do to get it.

The dos and don’ts of creating your product roadmap

You wouldn’t start a cross-country drive without a roadmap (or GPS), and neither should you attempt product development without one.

A product roadmap is what connects the near-term product changes to the mid-term strategic milestones and the long-term vision. It communicates the sequencing of priorities and helps you plan all your product-based initiatives.

But many leaders are confused about what goes into a product roadmap. Ultimately, there is no right answer: different types of roadmaps suit different companies.

They can show lots of detail or very little; they can be intentionally scrappy or highly organized with color-coding, iconography, team associations, and more. We’ve seen them printed on ten-foot-wide poster paper and contained on a simple Google Sheet.

While there is no “best way of making a roadmap,” there are a few dos and don’ts that can guide you in crafting your roadmap document.

The dos of building a roadmap

Let’s start with the dos.

Do clearly categorize specific roadmap initiatives. Based on our experience, we’ve realized that all product development activities can be placed into one of three categories:

Innovation (making progress towards the vision)

Iteration (getting better results from what you’ve already built)

Operation (maintaining your product and running your business)

If possible, on top of categorizing each initiative, communicate the allocation target for each category to remind the audience the level of investment that was agreed upon.

Do paint a picture far enough in the future that it helps other teams to plan accordingly. For example, marketing may need to start working on communication plans for a large product release well in advance.

Do clarify the rationale behind the work you’re planning on doing. The problems you are solving, the value you are attempting to create, and the key outcomes you are trying to deliver are often more important than the features you currently intend to build.

Do leave room for plans to shift. Development timelines are notoriously difficult to predict in advance. As you experiment and validate assumptions through customer discovery, you will want to be able to react to what you learn, and the roadmap should allow for that.

The don’ts of building a roadmap

And now the don’ts, which are just as important as the dos.

Don’t try to predict development plans so far ahead that you’ll almost certainly change them before you get there. Offering this false precision is a common way to erode trust between product and the rest of the company.

Don’t worry about providing the same level of fidelity for every team. It’s okay for the roadmap to have a “ragged edge” in which some items are better understood than others, or some teams’ plans extend farther into the future than others.

Don’t make commitments that are unnecessary or that are unlikely to actually be met. Generally speaking, it’s better to avoid feature-date pairs unless there’s a specific business reason the date is as important as what actually ships.

Don’t get in the habit of playing roadmap Tetris to force as much in as possible. It’s far better to under-commit and over-deliver than vice versa, and you’ll need some buffer to accommodate the ripple effects when development doesn’t go according to plan or critical feedback comes in.

The dos and don’ts of communicating the roadmap

Building the roadmap is only the first step. After that, you need to share it with all the stakeholders. Here are some dos and don’ts for how to most effectively communicate your roadmap.

Do share it with your executives first, because if you get buy-in from leaders in the organization, they can help build agreement and excitement about its contents with the rest of the employees.

Don’t present it to the whole company at once. Each major group within the company will have different needs and concerns.

By presenting to each group separately, you can best address these needs and concerns and help everyone get what they need out of the presentation. We recommend having separate meetings for each of the following groups:

Engineering, QA, Architecture

Sales and marketing

Account management, customer success, and customer support

Everyone else not in those groups (HR, finance, etc.)

Don’t be boring. Your presentation quality matters tremendously, and it’s your job to make your presentation engaging. Use charts and other visuals.

Do create a system for answering questions and getting feedback. Some of this can be done in the presentation meetings. However, some people don’t feel comfortable asking questions or offering feedback in front of others, so also consider conducting anonymous surveys after the presentations.

One more do and don’t

We’ll leave you with one final do and one don’t.

Do dedicate the time and resources to creating a roadmap. It’s one of the most important documents guiding your company’s actions and initiatives.

But don’t stress about making a “perfect” roadmap. The best roadmaps evolve and develop with the company and serve to spark the right conversations about priorities.

Whether you opt to build a highly detailed, organized roadmap with color-coding and more, or a broader, intentionally rough one, following these dos and don’ts will help ensure that you craft and share your roadmap in an effective way.