December is the worst month to work in the legal profession. Now that I’m running my own firm and don’t have employees at the moment, I’m thrilled that I am neither giving nor receiving performance reviews this year. I have good reason to feel this way: I have PTSD from past experiences. During my career I’ve seen every possible bad review practice. Here are some of my “favorites”:

• Hunger Games via self-evaluation. Pity those of us who are asked to write our own evaluations. While I’m sure that some employers do this well, most of the self-evaluations I was asked to complete forced me to engage in the meaningless exercise of ranking myself from 1 to 10, and then explaining why I deserved that score in order to justify a raise or a bonus that year. I particularly enjoyed being asked to explain why I was more deserving than my colleagues. It’s particularly fun to do these free-form, when you’re not given any criteria or form to use.

• Sorry I didn’t tell you in February, but . . . This is the review when you feel like you’ve been doing everything just fine, but then at the end of the calendar year you’re told you have a flaw that has significantly impacted your performance—that no one has bothered to tell you about until now. This is especially nice if the “flaw” you have is something vague (“You really need to assert yourself more”), and no one can give you a specific example of when it’s actually manifested itself.

• The Irrelevant Review. This is when you’re asked to evaluate your team based on criteria selected by HR, who have never practiced law. Thus you get to rank your employees by how effectively they use technology, or whether they participated in “team building” efforts—and you’re not allowed to put “N/A.” It’s particularly great when they limit the number of words you can use, so you can’t even explain why the question is stupid.

• Being Santa or Scrooge. Managers or supervisors are often given a pot of money and told to divvy it up among a team. So every dollar you give to Alyson you have to take from Jim. And then, when your employees ask why they didn’t get more, you can’t tell them that you were given an arbitrary number. It’s even better when you’re given caps based on criteria that have nothing to do with performance.

• Here’s your number/thanks for your service. Particularly if you’ve worked on the plaintiffs’ side of things, you may have experienced the “thanks for your service” performance review. That’s when you get a number for your bonus with no explanation whatsoever. If you don’t like the number, you don’t know why you didn’t get more. Even if you’re happy with the number, you have no idea what you did to deserve it so that you can do more of that thing next year.

It’s particularly cruel that review processes like these happen during the holiday season: while you’re supposed to be feeling goodwill towards your fellow humans, you instead get to spend the month of December stabbing your colleagues in the back, covering your ass, and dealing with (sometimes justifiably) unhappy team members. It’s no wonder we are miserable at the end of the year.

Why This Hurts Women More Than Men

Each of the types of performance reviews described above hurt women more than men. There are several reasons for this.

First, studies have shown that women are far more likely than men to receive critical feedback when subjective criteria are used. This can mean that, even if a man and woman possesses the same characteristic as a man, that characteristic will be praised in the man but critiqued in the woman.

Second, women are more likely to be modest about their own achievements. One study conducted by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) of 1,500 participants who each took a 20-question analytical test and then judged how well they thought they did on it, found that women consistently—and significantly—rated their performance lower than men. When asked to indicate their agreement on the statement “I performed well on the test,” the average man gave himself a 61 out of 100. The average woman gave herself a 46 out of 100.

Third, women are far less likely to receive constructive feedback; instead, they tend to receive feedback that is more personal, and thus more prone to bias. One study by linguist Kieran Snyder based on 248 performance reviews from 28 companies from large technology corporations to small start-ups found that 58.9% of men’s reviews contained critical feedback, while 87.9% of the reviews received by women did. The graphic representation of these results is pretty astounding:

Thus, even in a “good” year where everyone gets raises and/or bonuses, women are likely to get less than men (and we know what this means when you add up the cumulative effect of this year-over-year). Perhaps even more meaningfully, women are deprived of the opportunity to improve their skills, instead receiving feedback that is personal, often sexist, and thus demoralizing. What a way to end the year.

We Can Do Better

Even in the male-dominated workplaces in which we work, the studies cited above do suggest some ways that we can make the review process better. First, of course, legal employers can base them on objective criteria that are relevant to success in your workplace. It’s even better if attorneys are given advance notice of the criteria that will be used to evaluate them. A good way to check whether your criteria are objective is to ask whether they lend themselves to giving constructive feedback. If failing to do X doesn’t lend itself to something actionable an employee can do to improve her performance, the criterion isn’t objective.

Second, reviews should be given by at least three people. No one’s success should be determined by a single manager: that gives far too much power to one person. Even if a manager is well-meaning and fair, everyone has biases—and those can be checked by having more than one person review employees.

Third, December should not be the only time of year feedback is given. I’m not, of course, suggesting that performance reviews be given multiple times per year—but there are more informal ways to give employees feedback than giving an official performance review. In fact, informal “check-ins” often give you more opportunity to provide feedback than performance reviews do—because the feedback is in closer proximity to the work completed, and because you’re more likely to be candid in those types of interactions than when you’re writing something you know will end up in someone’s personnel file.

Finally, while this may go without saying, if you’re in a workplace that won’t implement these changes, you’re not going to be reviewed fairly. Make your new year’s resolution to find an employer who will.

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