Burnout & bias: women’s well-being at work

Published on December 31, 2023   14 min

A selection of talks on Management, Leadership & Organisation

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0:00
I'm Colleen Ammerman, Director of the Gender Initiative at Harvard Business School and I'm going to share some research about women's well-being at work. Also about the role of bias and undermining womens' experiences in the workplace and also some reflections on how organizations can address problems like burnout and retain and advance their female employees.
0:20
In the late 2010, a research team that I work with collected data from Harvard Business School alumni. This data collection was part of an ongoing longitudinal study of the schools' MBA graduates. The response rate for this particular wave was 17%. The data I'm going to share with you today is from those alumni who are working full-time, so leaving aside those who are not working or are working part-time. These respondents who are full-time workers, are employed in a variety of industries, and they're located around the world, although the majority are in the US. The span generations, Millennials, Generation X, Baby Boomers, they range in age from their 20s to about 70, but again, we left out people who are retired or otherwise not working full-time from the data I'm about to share with you. What I want to know is that the survey was conducted prior to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. We're really talking about a level of burnout and stress that already existed prior to the effects of the pandemic on employee well-being, which we've heard a lot about. It gives us a sense of who was already struggling before the impacts of an extreme event like the pandemic.
1:25
We asked a set of questions to understand how work might be affecting people's well-being and these were, how often have you felt burned out from work? How often has work had a negative effect on your mental health? And how often has work had a negative effect on your physical health? Then, we focus on the people who said they had these negative experiences, either often or very often. We're talking about people for whom work is having quite a significant negative impact on some aspect of their well-being. Not just people who have a tough week here and there, or maybe we're having a tough week the time they happen to take the survey. What did we find?
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Burnout & bias: women’s well-being at work

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