A new study completed at IU has shown that stress found in female employees is related to the nature and climate of their workplace.
The study, done by IU assistant professor of sociology and gender studies Cate Taylor, subjected both men and women to certain negative conditions that women experience in work settings. The conclusion was that men showed the same reactions to these conditions as women did.
The workplaces where these stress-related issues come into play are usually male-dominated, Taylor said. Social exclusion based on gender can sometimes cause difficulty in relating to the opposite gender. This exclusion causes women in the workplace to feel isolated and leads to higher amounts of stress.
“I heard people saying that women were not suited for male-dominated occupations because they just couldn’t handle the stress.” Taylor said in an email. “But that didn’t ring true to me, so I designed an experiment to test this.”
To perform the experiment, Taylor placed a man in a group of three women, and then placed a woman in a group of three men. During the experiment Taylor tested the man and woman’s stress levels by gauging the amount of cortisol, a hormone linked to stress, in the participants saliva.
The majority in each group were told to talk only about either stereotypically masculine activities or stereotypically feminine activities. This would cause the participant to feel the exclusion most commonly felt by women in the workplace. Taylor then compared the results to groups who were trained to not omit the man or woman from the conversation.
When comparing the single man’s stress levels to the single woman’s, Taylor found that the differences were insignificant. Taylor repeated the experiment several times, and each time found the stress levels of the excluded man and woman to be approximately the same. The experiment showed that men experience the same amount of stress as women in the same situation, as opposed to the belief that women are just inherently more stressed.
“Male-dominated occupations also are higher paid ... have better workplace benefits ... and are more prestigious occupations.” Taylor said in an email. “However, my work shows women in male-dominated professions encounter especially difficult workplace climates, which causes them stress.”
According to Taylor, this stress is what bars many women from achieving high-ranking positions. She went on to say she would like to see an effort from both businesses and government policy makers to create a more inclusive workplace where women are less likely to experience this stress.
Taylor plans to build on her experiment in the future by using a larger sample source for data. In these experiments, Taylor said she hopes to show these stress results can be documented outside of a lab setting by using large survey data sets. She also said she hopes any future experiments will be able to document negative health benefits of this exposure to chronic stress.
Taylor’s article, can be found both in this month’s issue of the American Journal of Sociology and online.
“The takeaway is that workplaces and public policies should try to correct the negative and stressful workplace climates that women face in these occupations—not that women should leave the occupations,” Taylor said in the email.
