Women are significantly more likely than men to experience a workplace environment they would deem ... [+]
Women are significantly more likely than men to experience a workplace environment they would deem to be “toxic”—a gap that has widened considerably as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, new research shows.
By analyzing the language used in contributions made by over three million U.S.-based employees to Glassdoor—a company review site—researchers found that, from 2016 to 2021, women were 35% more likely to negatively mention toxic culture, defined as disrespectful, non-inclusive, cut-throat, abusive, or unethical, than men.
In 2020 and 2021, as the Covid-19 pandemic raged, disproportionately affecting women in the workplace, this culture gap seemed to have widen too. The data shows that women were 41% more likely to suffer toxicity in the workplace in the first year after the onset of Covid-19.
“Toxic culture is not only an outlier in terms of the sentiment gap between women and men, it exacts an enormous toll on organizations and individuals,” commented lead author Donald Sull, a lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management who is also the co-founder of CultureX, a company that uses artificial intelligence to monitor and address corporate culture problems.
Plenty of evidence supports what Sull’s saying. One example: the latest Women in the Workplace report, compiled by consulting firm McKinsey & Company, in collaboration with women’s workplace-equality non-profit Lean In, showed that a record number of women are leaving their employers. And workplace culture is commonly cited as a reason for quitting.
The Glassdoor data collected shows that the toxic culture gap does not tend to diminish with seniority. Instead, across self-reported C-level roles, women were 53% more likely to say that they experience toxicity than men, which was higher than the average across all seniority levels.
When examining the trend across different industries and sectors, the researchers found that fourteen of the sixteen occupations with the smallest toxic culture gender gap are also occupations which tend to have a disproportionately high percentage of female employees: childcare workers, psychologists, social workers, and communication associates, for example. Nonetheless, even across many of these fields, a toxic culture gender gap exists.
The largest gaps were observed across retail, transportation, investment services—which included investment banking, asset management, venture capital and private equity—and restaurants.
The comments authored by women that were analyzed as part of the research used more than 14,000 different words and phrases to describe elements of a toxic culture, the researchers noted. They found that two most widely used were “favoritism” and “clique”.
