Women and Work

"Women tend to be more satisfied with their jobs than men, but they appear to spend far more time worrying about it."

"Working Life: Employee Attitudes and Engagement", a report by Kingston University's School of HR Management, quizzed some 2,000 people in the UK about their jobs and found that women are less calm and relaxed in the workplace than their male colleagues.

According to co-author Dr Emma Soane, this suggests women are more emotionally attached to their jobs.

This is the headline of 29th March 2007 in Management Issues

I guess one of the questions to ask is whether this finding is just something that is evident in the UK work force or is something that is more common across workers around the world.

It would be interesting to find out what people think about these issues here in Australia.

An even more interesting would be to see if the findings hold up in gender biased industries and/or professions.

Take for example the group labelled 'Social Workers' as one instance of a "female dominated "work force and "IT" as one instance of a 'male dominated' work force.

If people who look for work in each of these areas do in fact at least partially self select based on gender then what are the attitudes of the people who work within them and what are their experiences and to what extent would their experience coincide with those of workers in the UK?

I wonder if there is some comparative analysis being done in "male" and "female" dominated work forces?

Once again let's take for example the profession of 'Social Work' perceived to be a female dominated industry and 'IT' supposedly a male dominated industry.

Would the findings still hold up in these work environments?

It would certainly be an interesting question to pose.

If anyone pursues this line of questioning I would certainly be interested in the answers!