Women & Feedback

Why don’t we give women as much feedback in skydiving?

I have witnessed so many instances where women receive far less feedback than men, including while on teams, at Project 19 events and at events.

On a number of my teams, I received far less feedback than then men on my team. But, in honesty, I was flying stronger than those men. In a team setting, I didn’t think to question that I was getting less input. The team needs to improve as a whole, so I was fine with the team getting less personal feedback for the sake of the team. It never crossed my mind to think twice about it.

However, after noticing this trend related to feedback and women in skydiving, I brought it up to a friend who coaches 4way. She’s a very talented, motivated skydiver with a lot of accomplishments in the sport. I would call her an ally for women in the sport. However, after some thought, she told me she was guilty of doing the same thing: giving more feedback to the two men on the 4way team, than to the two women. But after realizing it, she also couldn’t exactly put her finger on why she did that.

Lately, I was even thinking back to when I’ve load organized. I tend to give a lot of feedback to men. But, those men also tended to fudge up my skydives egregiously, so I justified my ratio of feedback based on that. The women were doing well. “You’re doing great. Keep refining things” is short feedback. Explaining “Well you really goofed that skydive and here’s why you shouldn’t and here’s how you should avoid that” is a much longer discussion.

So should we extrapolate my experience and assume that women aren’t goofing the skydives overall? It’s possible they aren’t goofing it egregiously; after watching a lot of women fly, they tend to fly less aggressively, less all-power-no-finesse. So maybe when they goof, it’s not as loud. Or is it that we’re scared to hurt their feelings if they do a Very Large Goof? Or do we assume they already know how to avoid the goof in the future and we don’t bother to validate that assumption?

I confess that, at times, I’ve been really frustrated with feedback, especially when I cognitively know what I need to do, but my body hasn’t figured out how to do that yet, when I still don’t know what “right” feels like. I will fume, mostly directing my anger at my flappy limbs that refuse to execute the skydive correctly. Maybe that fuming looks like pouting, like I’m taking the feedback poorly, causing people to stop giving me feedback. I’ve also taken feedback really poorly when I’m already high-strung for other reasons. If I feel unqualified to be on a team, or a skydive, I feel self-conscious, as if I’m the worst person in the room and that I don’t belong there. When I end up in this state, I receive feedback and criticism, even constructive criticism, poorly. Maybe we don’t give feedback because we worry that women will gush tears and cry, and crying scares us?

I’ve even noticed that men get more feedback at co-ed Project 19 events. In fact, I’ve taken tallies during debriefs at events, to make sure it wasn’t must my bias talking, making assumptions. The feedback per debrief hovered near 50/50: 50% to women, 50% to men. That seems alright, however, there were approximately 3 dudes and 20 ladies. This phenomenon has happened at most of the events I’ve been to, and most organizers do it, both male and female organizers. I’ve noticed that organizers seem to be comfortable giving feedback to men in a joking, light-hearted manner. Maybe, somewhere deep down, we’re worried women can’t take a joke? I just don’t know.

I can’t help but wonder why we do this? Why do we give more feedback to men? What implicit bias do we have that we do so? Do we even realize? If we start forcing ourselves to notice this, how do we fix it?

I don’t really have any answers. I mostly just have more questions. For me though, I’m trying to take what I’ve noticed to heart in my coaching and load organizing in the future.