Clichés, exaggerations, exaggerations: Our analysis of 23,000 annual reviews shows that top executives receive the worst feedback

This year's data looks specifically at the feedback that a company's top performers receive. Surprisingly, we found that top performers receive more feedback than anyone else – but the quality is also the lowest. And high-performing women receive the highest quality feedback.

Top performers receive more feedback…

On average, companies recognize 5-15% of their employees as high performers. This small percentage of employees do a large portion of the work. A comprehensive study by Herman Aguinis and Ernest O'Boyle, Jr. of Indiana University found that high performers are 400% more productive than average.

Retaining this group is critical to the company's performance. Many companies develop special career programs and offer more opportunities to their top performers. Textio's annual dataset of ratings from more than 23,000 people shows that managers also give top performers the most feedback. On average, top performers receive 1.5 times more feedback than anyone else. This is true regardless of the employee's race, gender, or other demographic characteristics.

…But the quality is lower

High performers receive more feedback, but the quality is significantly lower than everyone else. High-quality feedback focuses on a person's specific behavior, rather than their personality or other intangibles. It is based on concrete examples of work results and avoids comments on fixed characteristics of people, such as their general intelligence. Finally, fair feedback is accurate, not exaggerated.

This year's data from Textio shows that high performers receive lower-quality feedback in several areas. Regardless of demographic makeup, feedback for high performers is more likely to be based on stereotypes and contains much more exaggeration and hyperbole.

Feedback from high performers also contains significantly more comments about the person's core personality traits, both positive and negative. For example, high performers are more likely to be praised for their intelligence, but also more likely to be criticized for their bluntness.

High-performing women receive the worst quality feedback

Ten years ago, data showed that high-performing women received personality feedback much more frequently than their male counterparts. Overall, women were also more likely to receive explicitly negative rather than constructive feedback.

Textio's data from recent reports confirms that these findings still hold true ten years later. Regardless of performance level, women receive 22% more personality feedback than anyone else. Women also receive less actionable feedback, and what they do receive includes fewer concrete examples. This is especially true for black and Latino women. Black women in particular receive nine times more feedback that is not actionable than white men.

Given this background, it is perhaps not surprising that the high-performing women in this year's study receive lower quality feedback across the board. Not only are their ratings lower quality than those of low- and medium-performing women, but they are also lower quality than those of high-performing men.

On average, 27% of sentences in performance reviews for top performers contain problematic feedback. However, when looking only at reviews for top performers of women, 38% of sentences contain problematic feedback.

In other words, while all high performers are scrutinized more closely than their peers, feedback from managers is particularly unhelpful for high-performing women. This poses a problem not only for fairness, but also for the company's core performance.

Last year's comprehensive study showed that employees who receive poor performance reviews are much more likely to quit within a year. We also found that the likelihood of someone quitting increases with each instance of problematic feedback in the review. This year's study shows why companies have such a hard time retaining their top women.

If you're wondering why your high-performing women quit, look at their performance reviews.

Other indispensable comments published by Assets:

The opinions expressed in Fortune.com’s commentaries reflect solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Assets.