Questioning the conclusion that sexist men earn more money
Men who are taught at a young age that women should stay in the home end up earning more later in life, according to media reports about a study published in the Journal of Applied Psychology. The resulting articles carry headlines such as “Men with sexist views 'earn more',” "How Sexist Men Profit” and “Male Chauvinism = Big Paycheck?"
At least the third headline included a question mark. This particular study is certainly not definitive, but its findings are like cat nip to the press. Here's how the BBC explained the study:
Men who grow up thinking women should stay at home may be labelled "old-fashioned" - but could end up well ahead in the salary stakes.
A US study, published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, suggests that they will consistently out-earn more "modern-thinking" men.
On average, this meant an extra $8,500 (£4,722) a year.
One UK psychologist said men inclined to wield power in their relationships might also do this at work.
The study, carried out by researchers at the University of Florida, was conducted on a large scale, with 12,686 men and women interviewed in 1979, when they were aged between 14 and 22, and three times in the following two decades, the last time in 2005.
The data show that the young men who held a more, er, “traditional” view of a woman's place ended up earning more later in life. But there's no direct causation. Still, this is how a U.K. psychologist interpreted the findings for the BBC:
It could be that more traditionally-minded men are interested in power, both in terms of access to resources - money in this case - and also in terms of a woman who is submissive.
Another theory suggests that employers are more likely to promote men who are the sole earner in preference to those who do not - they recognise that they need more support for their families, because they are the breadwinner.
Thankfully, others are more skeptical about the conclusions drawn from the paper. (You can read the paper here.)
“Although this study is being cast as showing a cause-and-effect relationship between gender-role attitudes and earnings, it proves nothing of the sort: a man who believes in gender equality has the option of working just as hard at his career, and earning a lot, as does a traditionalist,” wrote Sharon Begley of Newsweek. “It does not show that egalitarians are doomed to penury. Similarly, although the researchers say that ‘traditional men, especially when compared with traditional women or egalitarian individuals, may negotiate their salaries more aggressively and effectively,' that, too, is hardly inevitable or even logical. Guys, if you believe that the little woman has just as much a right to work outside the home as you are, you don't have to slack off on salary demands.”
The study provides someinteresting data, but it doesn't warrant the sexism-is-good-for-your-career treatment.
Grieving for a lost job
Some people are taking a certain amount of pleasure in the fact that some of the big-bonus bankers who pushed mortgage-backed securities are facing unemployment and financial uncertainty. In recent weeks, we've seen images of employees of big investment banks and other financial companies carrying their belongings out of the office.
If you aside the schadenfreude, you simply have a story of people losing their jobs. Dr Thomas Stuttaford, a columnist for the London Times and a former Conservative Member of Parliament, wrote a rather poetic look at how the loss of a job is like losing a loved one. He focuses on the bankers, but many of the symptoms he outlines could easily apply to anyone who suddenly finds themselves mourning a job.
Here's what it looks like:
The standard initial response to grief is either shock or denial. A shocked person might seem dazed, disorientated and totally incapable of making decisions. They might be tearful or panicky. Conversely, those with feelings obscured by denial appear to be coping wonderfully well. Whether looking for a new job or arranging a funeral, their friends admire their stoical approach. During the initial acute stage a sorrowing relative is likely to be weepy and tearful. However, a banker would be unlikely to show emotions that are so alien to office culture, but could well be withdrawn, morose and silent.
During the acute phase of grief a sufferer might have illusions that the deceased person is still around and it is likely that he or she haunts the dreams of the bereaved. Similarly, a dismissed banker might still check share prices and pore over City pages, although neither will provide useful information.
The next stage, of course, is anger. “People angered by their loss, and the effect it has had on their lives, look for others to blame,” writes Dr. Stuttaford “ … Were colleagues irresponsible and careless? Who was gunning for me? Which bureaucratic authority should have done more? The anger might be all-consuming and the desire for revenge so strong that it leads to costly court actions, seemingly endless inquiries and ruined reputations.”
From there, people move tosymptoms associated with depression: “Irritability, feelings of hopelessness, loss of enthusiasm, guilt, inability to get started in the morning but with more energy later in the day are obvious features.”
Dr. Stuttaford writes that it can take roughly a year to work through the stages of grief. Certainly, a new job can help with recovery. And in the end, “the sorrowing widow and the disgruntled banker will again be buoyant.”
To which a commenter on the article replied:
I have just shed a crocodile tear....why doesn't he sell his Jaguar..buy a bike ..look for another job..problem solved.
Networked workers: email and the Internet have a firm hold on the workplace
It's not exactly a shocking revelation, but a survey from the Pew Charitable Trusts confirms that workers of all stripes are using email and the Internet in general for their daily work. Computer haters are finding it tougher to operate in today's offices.
The survey, "Networked Workers," was released last week and includes a main finding that 62 percent of employed American adults use the Internet or email at work. But it gets a little more complicated from there.
“American workers have a love-hate relationship with technology," said Mary Madden, a co-author of the report. “Along with the benefits of increased connectivity comes a host of new issues into workers' lives. How do you strike a work-life balance when you are always reachable by the boss? What counts as overtime work when you are 'on the clock' at all hours? How much personal online browsing can you do while you are sitting in your cubicle? These challenges pervade many work places today.”
The survey presents a contrasting look at how technology is impacting the average worker. On the positive side, 80 percent of employed Americans say these technologies make it easier for them to do their job. Almost 75 percent of workers believe things like email help them share ideas with colleagues, and 58 percent feel that “these tools have allowed them more flexibility in the hours they work.”
But as any worker will tell you, there is also a downside to getting connected. From the survey:
-49 percent say these technologies increase the level of stress in their job.
-49 percent say these technologies make it harder for them to disconnect from their work when they are at home and on the weekends.
-46 percent say these tools increase demands that they work more hours.
You can read a summary of the survey's findings here. Anyone looking for ways to mange their flood of email should have a look at this article. It offers some good time management tips for tackling an overflowing inbox.
Confronting a colleague about drug abuse
When she was first hired, Amber was a model employee. Then she started calling in sick, borrowing money from colleagues, losing her temper, and falling behind on her work. At first, her boss at the small public relations firm became concerned. Then she caught Amber snorting white powder in the ladies room and everything clicked: Amber was abusing drugs.
So how would you handle this situation? BusinessWeek has a case study that offers some advice. It details how Liz, Amber's boss, at first decided to leave some drug abuse pamphlets on Amber's desk as a not-so-subtle hint. Eventually, she confronted the worker.
"Amber, I normally don't get involved in my employees' personal lives, but clearly you have a cocaine problem, and it has to stop,” Liz told her.
Amber denied it. The next morning, she quit.
According to experts interviewed for the article, Liz handled the situation poorly:
Here's where Liz erred. First, she waited too long to confront Amber. "When people begin using drugs, there's often a period where they could swing either way," says Bliss, a psychoanalyst who counsels substance abusers at the Second Wind clinic in Manhattan. "If her boss had made an issue right after Amber's performance started lagging, it might have halted the drug abuse before it became serious."
But leaving pamphlets and making accusations aren't good routes to positive change. "You don't want to do anything public that could embarrass her, like placing literature on her desk," says Bliss. "And you don't want to make accusations. Instead, stick to behavior-based criticisms. Explain to her that the lateness and absenteeism and rudeness to clients are unacceptable and bad for business."
Some experts suggest implementing “a written drug-testing policy and a contract or relationship with an outside facility that can perform the tests immediately upon request.” Yes, that's a bit expensive for a small company to do. (Not to mention intrusive.) As a result, the article reports that smaller companies with less than 250 people tend to lack such a policy. (I previously wrote about drug testing in the Canadian the workplace here.)
Some employers will also pay for an employee's drug treatment and rehab. If successful, these employees "… often end up becoming very good and loyal employees," according to Angelo Valente, executive director of the Partnership for a Drug Free New Jersey.
So, at least there's some upside to a tough situation. But an employer has to handle the situation correctly, which means helping the employee get over their addiction.
The downside of a hyper-competitive workplace
Robert P. Vecchio, a University of Notre Dame management professor, has found his niche: workplace envy.
He wrote a book, Jealousy and Envy Among Health Care Professionals, and has authored several papers on the subject, including "Explorations in Employee Envy: Feeling Envious and Feeling Envied.” He's also given presentations, one of which was titled “Cinderella and Salieri in the Workplace: Explorations in Employee Envy.”
Here's how he describes envy:
Envy is the fear of losing social standing. ... It can affect people in subtle and unseen ways. People don't want to admit to it. ... If you're admitting that you're jealous, you're admitting that you have a sense of inferiority.
In the workplace, some employees will fear losing their job or status within the company if they don't keep up with their colleagues, or if others seem to garner favour. They become envious of those who succeed, which can result in them slacking off in protest, amoung other problems.
A 2001 article co-authored by Vecchio, “Managing Envy and Jealousy in the Workplace,” outlined some of his research.
“Competition for rewards, resources and recognition drives much of the animosity and ill feelings associated with employee envy and jealousy,” it reads. “… Factors that contribute to greater levels of employee resentment include reengineering, diversity and generational conflicts. In addition to reduced performance, dysfunctional consequences of negative emotion include stress, job dissatisfaction, withdrawal, retaliation and poor citizenship.”
Vecchio recently produced a study that found 77 percent of workers have witnessed workplace envy. More than half admitted to experiencing it. Envy appears to rear its head in highly competitive workplaces where the emphasis is on individual rather than collective success. But it can happen anywhere.
Fortunately, Vecchio's 2001 offered five ways to avoid creating an envious workplace. Here's a summary:
- Evaluate the emotional maturity of candidates at the time of hire.
- Incorporate elements of team culture.
- Implement incentives that support cooperation.
- Encourage open communication.
- Place high performers (who often give rise to envy) in mentor roles.
A mouldy way to prevent office lunch theft
There's a good chance that your office fridge has been the scene of a crime.
Someone takes the time to pack a tasty homemade lunch and store it in the fridge, only to crack open the door at lunchtime and discouver that a co-worker has helped themselves to the food. To counteract office lunch theft, people label their food and sometimes even attach a threatening note to would-be thieves. But we all know that a committed lunch thief isn't scared of a Post-It. You've got get creative, and this is where designer Sherwood Forlee comes in.
Forlee has a talent for coming up with unique designs (check out these cool Modular Wine Glasses), and he recently thought up an “Anti-Theft Lunch Bag.” Have a look at it here. Here's the preamble to the product, which is not yet available:
Stealing your co-worker's lunch is a downright contemptible act, that is, if it's perpetrated by someone other than you. But, if you've ever had your lunch stolen, you know the frustration and anger it causes. You know the revenge and ill will it inspires. And you know that no matter how well you try to hide your lunch bag at the back of the refrigerator, something's gonna be missing when you open it. Well, lament no more. The Anti-Theft Lunch Bag to the rescue . . .
Forlee's lunch bags “are regular sandwich bags that have green splotches printed on both sides. After your sandwich is placed inside, no one will want to touch it.” Would-be thieves will recoil at the sight of what appears to be mould-infested food.
A threatening note is easily ignored; but Forlee's design could be an effective deterrent because it makes the food look disgusting. Brilliant.
(Via BoingBoing)
How to make your boss hate you
Most workers have no trouble listing the things they don't like about their boss. But how often do we take a look in the mirror and think about the things we do that make our bosses crazy? Probably not that often.
To help you with a little self-diagnosis, I recommend reading “Ten things your boss hates about you.” The list could be adapted to become “Ten things not to do at work,” as all of the items could just as easily make colleagues or customers hate you. The point is to be aware of your work habits.
“Almost half of employees say they hate their boss, and jobseekers say bad management is the number one reason they quit,” notes the article. “But have you ever thought that while you're complaining about the boss in the break room, she's probably sick of you too?”
Yes, a lovely thought. Below are the ten items on the list. Read the article for the full details.
- You're unreliable
- You won't fess up to mistakes
- You gossip too much
- Nothing's ever good enough for you
- You hate change
- You smell
- You're always late
- You're over-eager
- You run your personal life from your desk
- You're a bully
Organizational conformity: because we've always done it that way!
I would also accept “that's just the way we do it” or “it's always been like that” as other examples of the mindset that can take hold inside a workplace. This bent towards conformity can paralyze an organization, according to Bob Sutton, a professor of management science and engineering in the Stanford Engineering School. He's also the author of several great books about organizational culture, innovation and, most notably, The No Asshole Rule.
Sutton wrote a blog post about why “much of what people in organizations do happens because they have always done it.” He offers a telling anecdote about what happened when student of his dared to wear a particular shade of tie during an internship at IBM:
Because the "uniform" in those days was a white shirt and red tie, he was teased like crazy by his co-workers. But he didn't realize they were serious until he showed up a second time with the deviant yellow tie, and his boss pulled him aside and give him a stern lecture about evils of wearing the wrong tie. This student concluded that IBM in those days was focused on conformity, not performance, so he went into another line of business and is now CEO of a big company. Note this was before Lou Gerstner took over -- he understood that the IBM uniform was a symbol of mindless action and being stuck in the past too, which is why he came to work the first day wearing a blue shirt.
It may seem silly to equate the colour of a shirt or tie with organizational conformity, but this scourge can take many forms. Take a critical look around your office and you can probably spot some indicators of conformity. This isn't to say it's bad to fit in, or to develop a shared company culture. The letter is essential. It's more a question of whether or not that culture is so rigid that it stifles originality and innovation.
Sutton's post also offers another telling anecdote. He recounts “a conversation I had with management guru Warren Bennis when I was on the academic job market for the first time (this was about 1983).”
Sutton writes Bennis “warned me that some of the most prestigious Ivy League schools (where I was interviewing) could be very stifling places, and … that the ‘The best you can be is a perfect imitation of those who came before you.' ”
It's a wonderful line. Sutton says it's also “a lovely diagnostic test for an organizational culture.” Does your workplace pass or fail? What examples of conformity do you see around you?
Be sure to read Sutton's post, if only to enjoy the spot-on cartoon he uses to illustrate his point.
Back in the saddle, and laying waste to workplace myths
Yes, I'm back.
Like many people, I took time off in August and early September and am overjoyed to be back in the office to write The Office. After all, there's only so much time one can spend relaxing in perfect sunshine. Okay, so even workplace writers suffer from the September blahs.
Speaking of workplace writers, my friend and fellow office life scribe Stephanie Whittaker wrote a recent article that deserves mention. Stephanie highlighted nine “workplace myths” and found experts and statistics to debunk them. You can read the piece here.
Myth number eight is “You have to put work before everything else in order to succeed.” Stephanie called upon Nora Spinks, president of Work-Life Harmony, to attack this idea. Spinks said that successful people “put family and work at the same level of importance. Research shows that people who put work first have weak personal relationships. They tend to exercise little and don't eat well. They do rise through the ranks but they flame out.”
Here are a couple other items from the article:
Myth 6: People leave jobs and go to other employers for more money.
"They may tell their superiors that the reason they're leaving is that they've found a job that pays more, but whenever I've done exit interviews, they tell me that there are other reasons for their departures," Constant said.
Chief among them, she said, is the fact that "the job wasn't what they expected or what they were hired to do."
Myth 9: We're more accessible and available than in the past and we work longer hours than ever before.
In fact, a recent study by Statistics Canada says Canadians worked on average 40.8 hours per week in 2006, compared with 41.5 in 1997.
"There's a workload wind-chill factor, which makes our workload feel heavier than it is," Spinks said. "Because we can work faster, we think we are but it takes the same amount of time to make a decision as it used to. We have the misimpression that we're working harder and longer because we feel more stressed than we used to. And we feel more stressed because there are things beyond our control, including the speed at which things come at us now.
Wow, "workload wind-chill" is the best new piece of workplace jargon I've heard in a while. I encourage you to read the rest. And a happy September to all.
“Please let others talk during a meeting” and other messages for boorish colleagues
How would you go about telling a colleague their jokes are inappropriate or that they have bad breath?
I imagine most of us would suffer in silence, afraid to get into a confrontation. But for those looking for an anonymous way to register a complaint, NiceCritic.com (“The Anonymous Way to Send a Helpful Message”) has created a service to help get your message across.
The site has a selection of pre-written messages that you can email to a colleague. They receive the note but won't know whom it came from. Here are some sample messages for office workers:
Please be courteous with the copier.
Please limit your conversations over the cube walls.
Showcasing your collectibles may make you look a little immature.
The clipping of your fingernails can be somewhat distracting.
We can see when you are surfing the internet to non-work related sites.
Your snack crunching is quite distracting.
As you can see, the complaints range from the somewhat important to the nit-picky. But that's probably true of most complaints about co-workers.
Erik Riesenberg, the site's founder, was inspired to launch the project after a friend sugested that his nose hair could use a little trimming. "I had this idea that there's got to be a better way to facilitate that kind of communication," he told the Washington Post. You can read the paper's story about NiceCritic.com here.
There are other websites that enable you to send an anonymous email to a co-worker, but Riesenberg's site is different because you can only select from pre-written messages. His goal is to offer people a polite way to raise an impolite subject.
"There have been other sites like this but that let you write in messages," he said. "It usually turns into something negative; people use vulgarity or profanity."
True. Some people don the cloak of anonymity and suddenly feel free to lash out. Add in the fact that email is a poor medium for a sensitive exchange, and you have a potentially harmful situation.
Still, an email about someone's loud chewing is likely to annoy the recipient, regardless of how polite the language is.
Craig Silverman is a Montreal freelance journalist who writes The Office, a weekly workplace culture column for Globe Life. He blogs here about office life and encourages your comments and contributions. Craig's writing has appeared in publications including The New York Times and Montreal Gazette, and he is the editor of RegretTheError.com, the award-winning media errors and corrections blog. He braved the world of open-concept offices and cubicles at a software company during the dot-com boom, and fondly recalls those heady days of free massages and stock options for all.
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