In a Growing Gender Gap of Meaning at Work, Women Have the Advantage

Adapted from “The Gender Gap in Meaningful Work,” by Vanessa C. Burbano of Columbia Business School, Olle Folke of Uppsala University, Stephan Meier of Columbia Business School, and Johanna Rickne of the Swedish Institute for Social Research at Stockholm University and Nottingham University.

Key Takeaways:

• Well-being at work is impacted by more than wages alone. Non-financial factors, like the meaning workers derive from their job, also contribute to worker satisfaction. This study found that there is a large and expanding gender gap in the experience of meaning in the workplace.
• Overall, women experience greater meaning in their jobs than men do. This gap is correlated to the over-representation of women in jobs that are seen as having a positive impact on society. 
• However, in higher paid jobs where the gender-wage gap is largest, researchers found little difference in how women and men experience meaning in their jobs.

Why the research was done: The wage gap between men and women in the workforce has been well established, but income is not the only element of a job that impacts workers’ well-being. Other factors, including flexibility, autonomy, and incidence of sexual harassment in a role can contribute to a worker’s overall experience. “In this research, we were really interested in differences in jobs beyond monetary compensation,” says co-author Stephan Meier, the James P. Gorman Professor of Business and chair of the Management Division at CBS.  

For this study, the goal was to understand what impact meaningfulness can have on job satisfaction. The researchers aimed to investigate how considering meaningfulness alongside income contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of well-being in the labor market. 

How it was done: Researchers drew on nearly 30 years of data from the Swedish Work Environment Survey, an anonymous biannual survey taken by the government and stratified by age, sex at birth, occupation, industry, and social class, ensuring a nationally representative sample. The survey asks workers more than 100 questions on work conditions, one of which invited them to rank their work experience on a scale of one to five from “very meaningless” to “very meaningful.”

Meaning is a subjective concept, but previous research has identified four contributing factors: autonomy, competence, relatedness, and beneficence. “It's not just a mission that could be meaningful or the impact,” Meier says. “It could also be what you actually do on a daily basis. How much autonomy do you have on that job? How much can you use your skills to the optimal level? What's the corporate culture?” 

What the research found: The results showed a large and growing gender gap in the meaning workers derived from their jobs. On average, women experienced their jobs as significantly more meaningful than men did. In examining possible causes for this difference, researchers found no evidence of a connection to parenting, nor did they find a link to women’s under-representation in leadership roles. 

According to the study, more women than men work in prosocial occupations that have higher levels of beneficence — jobs that have a positive impact on society. The research showed both men and women find such jobs more meaningful than others, but women find jobs with high beneficence even more meaningful than men do. “We found that most of this gender difference in the experience of meaning is driven by differences in experience of the prosocial impact of the job — the extent to which you feel like it's benefiting others or benefiting society,” says co-author Vanessa Burbano, the Sidney Taurel Associate Professor of Business in the strategy area at CBS. 

Researchers theorized several reasons for the gender gap: that women may prefer prosocial jobs; be better skilled at them; or, as the authors wrote, “they might receive more positive reactions from society when holding them.”

However, the research also found that the meaning gap between men and women wasn’t evenly distributed across all income brackets. The gap was most pronounced in jobs in the lower half of wage distribution. There was little difference between how men and women experienced meaning in jobs further up the earnings ladder, with men sometimes outpacing women in their experience of meaningful work. This observation is significant because high-paid, highly ranked positions are where the gender wage gap is largest.

Why it matters: This research contributes to a broader investigation and understanding of well-being at work, which cannot be measured by wages alone. At the lower end of the pay scale, the study shows employers that the benefit gained by meaningfulness at work may mitigate some of the negative impact of the wage gap between men and women. 

That doesn’t change the need to address the wage gap, especially in higher paid positions where it is most pronounced, the researchers say, but it offers more tools to assess workers’ well-being. “To understand well-being and inequality at work, it's important to look at a number of different factors, not just differences in wages,” Burbano says. “We're certainly not concluding that the gender wage gap isn't a problem. If anything, we're shining light on the fact that — even when incorporating a sense of meaningfulness — at the place where the gender wage gap is the greatest, the [meaning] gap is just as large.”