Are Men Happier At Work Than Women?

The blurring of boundaries between the personal and the professional life during the pandemic has made it more important than ever to emphasize workplace happiness and employee wellbeing.

The need to re-evaluate organizational well-being is extremely apparent attributable to high turnover rates, expanded burnout, and decreased job-satisfaction. To handle existing worries and proactively prevent new ones, it is fundamental to build support structures that reinforce the employee experience and advance working environment bliss, which contains a fair and amicable workplace, with reduced stress and an inclusive culture.

Creating happiness Balance Between Both Genders?

According to a survey “While men are happier at work than women, the majority of the reasons for their happiness are the same and are related to better general well-being, work-life balance, innovation, autonomy, belongingness, and lower interference between work and personal lives.” An interesting finding that corroborates the already existing data behind is that stress and mental health significantly impact workplace happiness for women. 

"It’s a fact that women wear several hats and are required to multi-task, which brings its own pressures. This has got further accentuated in last 2 years. However, its not really prudent to conclude it as a long-lasting trend. It also differs across industry, geography and individuals," believes Prem Sigh, CHRO, JK Organisation.

Sudeep Ralhan, CHRO, Upstox remarked, “by creating a culture of inclusion, and then specifically focusing on the needs of each demographic, we can build a culture where everyone is able to bring their whole self to work. That holds true for women also; we need to create an ecosystem of policies & norms that will enable women to be their best selves and feel a sense of belonging.”

While there is anything but a huge gap between the general prosperity of men and women, it shows a need to likewise focus on other factors, for example, pay and job positions that might be impacting the workplace happiness levels for women. As an example, of all the people in the senior administration and of the relative multitude of individuals acquiring more than 5 lacs, just 37% were ladies in the two cases. Other than this, the orientation jobs in the public eye that occasionally will generally come down on ladies to perform various tasks and take care of the necessities of both their home and work lives make sense of this well. An unevenness is probably going to negatively affect their apparent pressure and emotional wellness, which likewise makes sense of why a few ladies are driven away from their positions, thusly. This finding can likewise direct future work in focusing on 'nobody size-fits-all' drives to advance prosperity at work.

Towards A Futuristic Lens

From a societal perspective, women have been the pillars for our family setups historically. The aspect of unpaid caregiving, hence commonly affects more women than men. Women to meet the demands of work and family during the pandemic were under mounting pressure and burnout. However, the good part of societal evolution is where we find the familial responsibilities getting distributed and gender roles diminishing, very slowly but steadily. “There is a good long way to cover before the balance is still. The fabric of society is evolving and the better way to look at this, is to offer flexibility to employees, and not limit it by gender or any other parameter for that matter. Offering flexibility based on employee’s personal needs – be it a working mother of two, a single male caregiver to ailing parents or an employee battling a mental health issue, it ensures that we are sensitive to employee needs and are able to support them in balancing their personal and professional lives, which would lead to an overall happier workplace,” states Rajendra Mehta, Group CHRO, Welspun Group.

While women’s rights have advanced a great deal in a handful of organisations, there are still many such places where poor women’s stature and well-being still remains compromised for the foreseeable future. And this is actually high-time when we stop taking women’s patience for granted and provide them a healthy work environment where her productivity can be exercised to the maximum.