Women Must Work Harder
November 29, 2007
The joke, "Whatever women do they must do twice as well as men to be
thought half as good," may not be totally off the mark in the workplace.
In a recent study, no matter how they sliced the data and controlled certain
variables, sociologists Elizabeth Gorman of the University of Virginia and Julie
Kmec of Washington State University, came to the same conclusion: women say they
have to work harder than men.
On five different surveys given in different years, to different groups of men
and women in Britain and the United States, a gender gap persisted in ratings of
the statement: "My job requires that I work very hard." Women were
significantly more likely to say they strongly agreed or agreed.
"Even when women and men are matched on extensive measures of job
characteristics, family and household responsibilities, and individual
qualifications, women report that their jobs require more effort than men
do," Gorman said. "Between a man and a woman who hold the same job,
shoulder the same burdens at home and have the same education and skills, the
woman is likely to feel she must work harder."
What explains the association between gender and required work effort, if it's
not more difficult jobs or more demands at home?
"We argue that the association between sex and reported required work
effort is best interpreted as reflecting stricter performance standards imposed
on women, even when women and men hold the same jobs," said the researchers
in the paper, "We (Have to) Try Harder: Gender and Required Work Effort in
Britain and the United States," in the December issue of the journal Gender
and Society. "A lot of experimental research has shown that people rate the
same performance as better when told it was done by a man. It follows that women
have to do better than a man in order to get the same evaluation. Here we see
how this plays out in the effort women must put in at work," Gorman added.
"This is what women are up against. They have to prove themselves,"
Gorman said.
The statement in the survey about required work effort is not one in which
employees are comparing themselves to the opposite sex, noted Gorman. It's also
not asking for a perception of how hard the work is or how much effort they
actually exerted.
"Our focus is on required work effort," the sociologists wrote in
their article, "the effort that an employee is expected to exert in order
to perform her or his job at a level that is satisfactory to the employer. It is
important to distinguish required effort from an employee's actual exerted
effort."
The researchers compared results from the same question asked in nationally
representative surveys in 1977, 1992, two in 1997, and in 2001. The four later
national surveys used the same statement as in the 1977 survey to yield
comparable answers. The study concentrated its analysis on the two surveys
conducted in 1997, the U.S. National Study of the Changing Workforce and the
Skills Survey of the Employed British Workforce, both comprising
cross-sectional, representative interviews of about 3,500 and almost 2,500
workers, respectively.
Controlling for physical and mental demands of the job and whether family
responsibilities drained energy, Gorman and Kmec found that neither group of
factors explain the different findings about work effort. The only
interpretation that held up was that women were held to higher performance
standards.
The researchers analyzed the survey data to see if, in fact, women did have more
difficult jobs, but that was not the case. Even when the jobs were almost
identical, women still were significantly more likely to say they had to work
very hard.
In looking for another potential reason, the sociologists considered whether
domestic responsibilities outside of work, including child care and housework,
made women feel more fatigued and that they had to work harder to keep up, but
that did not emerge as the answer either.
"Marriage and parenthood had the same effect on reports of required effort
for women and men. In the U.S. sample, the researchers were able to match
workers on the number of hours they spent on childcare and housework. Between
men and women who performed the same amount of child care and housework, women
were still more likely to say their jobs required them to work very hard."
Gorman and Kmec then compared their findings to research about attitudes and
beliefs held about men and women in the workplace. "We know that people
give lower marks to an essay, a painting or a résumé when it has a woman's
name on it," Gorman said. "And when a man and a woman work together on
a project, people assume the man contributed more than the woman did. Even when
a woman's work is indisputably excellent, people don't believe she's good they
think she got lucky. In light of this previous research, it makes sense to
conclude that women have to work harder to win their bosses' approval."
Gorman stressed that it wouldn't be fair to use this research to reinforce
stereotypes. "We don't want employers to be exploiting female
workers," she said, because they know women impose higher standards on
themselves and will work harder.
Instead, Kmec noted, employers should take into account women's hard work when
considering who to promote and reward. "We do not want to insist that
female workers shirk their job responsibilities to make this gap go away.
Rather, we hope employers make job performance standards more transparent and be
held accountable for their evaluations of women at work," said Kmec.
The possible consequences of the effort gap in the workplace include some added
difficulties: the quality of women's work experience is likely to be lower than
men's; physical and emotional effects could, in turn, have negative
repercussions for families; and the difference in required effort could also
have consequences for women's careers, making it harder for them to be
recognized and promoted.
University of Virginia
PO Box 400229, 400 Ray Hunt Dr.
Charlottesville, VA 22904-4229
United States
http://www.virginia.edu
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