The role of gender in workplace productivity
How men and women work has a significant impact on overall productivity, not to mention career progression.
With the #MeToo movement and the plight of women’s issues taking center stage in the news cycle, 2018 has once again been dubbed the Year of the Woman. In that vein, Hive–which provides workplace efficiency tools–has conducted a State of the Workplace Gender survey of more than 3,000 women and men revealing much about the differences between the two genders in the workplace.
One significant difference is how each sex is affected by communication tools. “The ability to chat quickly with coworkers has exploded in recent years with the arrival of messaging apps like Slack and Microsoft Teams, but these also come with a flood of notifications,” the report notes.
For many, those distractions can reduce productivity, prompting some companies to embrace technology downtime and email breaks. But women might not need them–though they send 20 percent more messages via chat, they also complete 10 percent more work than men. Not only that, women are assigned 55 percent of all work, compared to 45 percent assigned to men. So why no promotions or more career successes for women?
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The report suggests that women are assigned and spend more time on non-promotable tasks than men. “These non-promotable tasks are any activity that is beneficial to the organization, but does not contribute to career advancement. It’s important for company leadership be mindful about how these tasks are distributed.”
Interestingly, communications is not catching up with a more gender-balanced workforce. The report shows that men assigned 20 percent more tasks to men, and women assigned 20 percent more tasks to women. Also, 57 percent of women send direct messages to women and the same 53 percent of men send direct messages to men. And, Hive notes, we are more likely to complete work assigned to us by someone of the same gender.
Warn the authors: “If both men and women continue to assign more tasks to, and complete more tasks for, colleagues of the same gender, then this tendency could perpetuate the gender gap in higher-ranking positions and the C-suite.”
Read more about the gender gap in the workplace: