Women Must Work Harder

The joke, "Whatever women do they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good," may not be totally off the mark in the workplace.

In a recent study, no matter how they sliced the data and controlled certain variables, sociologists Elizabeth Gorman of the University of Virginia and Julie Kmec of Washington State University, came to the same conclusion: women say they have to work harder than men.

On five different surveys given in different years, to different groups of men and women in Britain and the United States, a gender gap persisted in ratings of the statement: "My job requires that I work very hard." Women were significantly more likely to say they strongly agreed or agreed.

"Even when women and men are matched on extensive measures of job characteristics, family and household responsibilities, and individual qualifications, women report that their jobs require more effort than men do," Gorman said. “Between a man and a woman who hold the same job, shoulder the same burdens at home and have the same education and skills, the woman is likely to feel she must work harder.”

What explains the association between gender and required work effort, if it’s not more difficult jobs or more demands at home?

"We argue that the association between sex and reported required work effort is best interpreted as reflecting stricter performance standards imposed on women, even when women and men hold the same jobs," said the researchers in the paper, "We (Have to) Try Harder: Gender and Required Work Effort in Britain and the United States," in the December issue of the journal Gender and Society. “A lot of experimental research has shown that people rate the same performance as better when told it was done by a man. It follows that women have to do better than a man in order to get the same evaluation. Here we see how this plays out in the effort women must put in at work,” Gorman added.

"This is what women are up against. They have to prove themselves," Gorman said.

The statement in the survey about required work effort is not one in which employees are comparing themselves to the opposite sex, noted Gorman. It's also not asking for a perception of how hard the work is or how much effort they actually exerted.

"Our focus is on required work effort," the sociologists wrote in their article, "the effort that an employee is expected to exert in order to perform her or his job at a level that is satisfactory to the employer. It is important to distinguish required effort from an employee’s actual exerted effort."

The researchers compared results from the same question asked in nationally representative surveys in 1977, 1992, two in 1997, and in 2001. The four later national surveys used the same statement as in the 1977 survey to yield comparable answers. The study concentrated its analysis on the two surveys conducted in 1997, the U.S. National Study of the Changing Workforce and the Skills Survey of the Employed British Workforce, both comprising cross-sectional, representative interviews of about 3,500 and almost 2,500 workers, respectively.