News

Failure To Engage

Failure To Engage
by Andrew R. McIlvaine

Although engagement levels among male and female employees appear to be similar, a deeper dive reveals some troubling findings.

Many women in the workplace feel they're getting a raw deal. And, for Georgene Huang, the reasons why aren't that hard to discern.

"Women just face more difficulty in the workplace," says Huang, a 10-year veteran of Wall Street whose resume includes stints at Dow Jones, Lehman Brothers and Bloomberg Ventures. "From unequal pay to juggling a job with caregiver responsibilities, all of these things put extra pressure on women and make it harder for them to stay at a company."

A recent report from Aon finds that, although engagement data suggests similar levels of engagement between men and women in the workplace, a deeper dive into the numbers reveals some significant differences. For example, Aon's analysis (based on engagement surveys Aon conducted last year for its clients) finds that women appear to pose a greater level of flight risk from their jobs than men across every level of tenure. Aon's research also finds big gaps in the levels of career optimism between men and women under the age of 25, with only 41 percent of the women agreeing with the statement "My future opportunities here look good" compared to 53 percent of the men. A similar gap occurs with the statement "There are sufficient opportunities within the organization for me to work on assignments to gain new skills," with only 52 percent of the women agreeing versus 62 percent of the men.

Women and men typically start out their careers in organizations with similarly high levels of engagement and empowerment, but the rate of decline for women during their first two years on the job is twice that of men, says Chris Adair, a consultant at Aon who conducted the research.

"There's three main themes that popped up when we were looking for what's driving the engagement gaps between men and women," he says. "There's a sense of a lack of fairness, lack of trust in leadership and a lack of empowerment."

Women actually tend to start off their careers with slightly stronger levels of engagement than men, but that's typically reversed by the time women arrive at senior-level positions within a company, says Adair. Much of that has to do with perceived unfairness, he says.

"I found that to be extremely enlightening," says Adair.

Read full article on Human Resource Executive.