Women complete more work than men, report says

Dive Brief:

Not only do women complete more work on average, according to a new Hive report, but they are assigned 55% of all work, compared to 45% assigned to men. Based on a sampling of 3,000 men and women, The State of the Workplace Gender Report examined how women and men act and communicate at work.
The report also said that women send 20% more chat messages, but complete 10% more work — a stat that Hive said shows that chatting at work doesn't necessarily make someone less productive. Additionally, using passive language isn't a gender issue, it concluded: Men say "thanks" more often, and women use more emojis and exclamation points, but both say "sorry," "please," and "I think" almost equally.
The question of gender’s impact in the workplace is a complex one, Hive said, but it said it hopes the report's insights will help stakeholders understand what underpins some of today's most pressing issues.

Dive Insight:

While pay and assignment disparities are sometimes chalked up to stereotypes about the way women talk and act, Hive's findings suggest that those stereotypes may not have much truth to them. To combat this, experts suggest that employers train managers and standardize evaluation criteria. GoDaddy, for example, asked managers to really look at whether they evaluate men and women using the same criteria. For example, women are often judged based on communication and style, while men are often judged on what they’re getting done and how they’re doing it, Katee Van Horn, its former VP of global engagement and inclusion, previously told HR Dive.

The company also began a practice called "promotion flagging." At certain intervals, a manager receives a notification asking whether an employee is ready for a promotion. If not, it prompts them to offer the employee feedback. Van Horn said this combination of changes significantly improved the promotion rate for women at the company, without affecting the men’s rate.

And when it comes to gender-based pay inequities, employers may want to review their pay practices, conduct periodic pay audits and flag and correct disparities. As employers make headlines for closing their race and gender pay gaps — and others find themselves defending equal pay claims — it's only a matter of time before more face such compensation questions, Zina Deldar, an associate at Paul Hastings, and Quenton Wright, a principal at Charles Rivers Associates, told attendees at a recent conference. "We are in a new age in which there is intense pressure on companies, both internally and externally, to address pay gaps," Deldar said.

Additionally, as laws prohibiting questions about salary history gain momentum, employers are being forced to standardize pay scales and talk about salary earlier in the hiring process.