"She's a great boss" is easy to say if she's given you a rave review. But when a female superior gives an employee a negative evaluation, the subordinate is likely to see her as less competent than a similarly critical male boss, according to research by psychologist Ziva Kunda, Ph.D., and graduate student Lisa Sinclair at Ontario's University of Waterloo.
In the studies, male undergraduates were taped as they answered a questionnaire on interpersonal skills. The researchers told them their answers would be evaluated by a managerial trainee (in reality an experimenter) as part of a training program, and added that the students could watch the trainee's evaluation afterwards on videotape. The students were then allowed to rate the "managers," who had given scripted positive or negative evaluations. When female or black male trainees gave good reviews, they were rated as highly as their white male counterparts. But when the evaluations were harsh, ratings plummeted far more for female and black managers than for white males.
