Another day, another unfortunate news story regarding women in the workplace. Though there are many benefits to holding a position of power at work, such as a higher salary, a boosted self-esteem and contributing to greater female representation in the area, a new study shows that there can be some adverse effects for women as well.
A new study published in the December issue of the American Sociological Association's Journal of Health and Social Behavior found that women with job authority show more symptoms of depression than women without it. While that makes sense, considering that having more power at work often leads to having more stress, another finding from the study is much more alarming. The study found that men who have job authority are actually less depressed than men who do not have authority.
Yet another inequality among men and women in the workplace. Go figure.
In the study, co-authors Tetyana Pudrovska, a sociology professor at the University of Texas at Austin, and Amelia Karraker, a professor of human development and family studies at Iowa State University, analyzed data from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study. This was a long-term study of a random sample of 10,317 men and women that graduated from high schools in Wisconsin in 1957. Researchers interviewed the participants through the years when they were age 18, 36, 54 and 65 years old. Pudrovska and Karraker specifically looked at the data from 1993 and 2004, when the participants were 54 and 63 years old, respectively, because they answered questions about depressive symptoms during the interviews in those years.
Overall, women are more likely to be diagnosed with depression than men in any given year, and the study takes this into account, showing that women have slightly higher symptoms of depression than men when people of both genders do not have job authority. However, women with job authority show significantly more signs of depression.
These findings go against the commonly held sociological theory that the benefits of job authority, such as increased socioeconomic status, are good for your health, according to the study. The authors argue that the health benefits of positions of power at work need to be examined through the lens of gender relations.
What this means is when women ascend to positions of authority, they aren't always treated the same as their male counterparts. How many times have you heard someone call a woman a "bitch" because she's being assertive, whereas men usually don't receive the same kind of backlash or labelling for their strong leadership.
The study's authors write that job authority among women leads to "interpersonal stressors" that include "social isolation and negative social interactions." More specifically, women are more likely to experience insubordination, exclusion, harassment and gender discrimination. It's not having more authority in the workplace that makes women more depressed; it's all of these external factors that would make anyone unhappy.
The struggle to get more women into positions of authority is real enough even without studies like this. A Gallup poll from November 2013 found that 35 percent of Americans still prefer a male boss. In that same poll, a higher percentage of women than men said that they prefer a male boss over a female one, which is just sad.
But hopefully, the results of this study don't discourage women from seeking positions of clout at their workplaces. That's exactly how we're going to change things.
