Opinion
Empowering Women in the Workplace.
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By Bhushan Sethi, Peter Brown, Chaitali Mukherjee, and Aoife Flood
The gender gap at companies may be narrowing, but there’s still a lot of daylight. Now, we have data to back up what most women (and many men) know at an anecdotal level: according to PwC’s Global Workforce Hopes and Fears Survey 2022, men in the workplace are more empowered than women.
The survey was conducted in March and April 2022 and drew responses from more than 52,000 workers in 44 countries, making it one of the largest workforce surveys ever conducted. Of the total base of respondents, approximately 42% were women.
As part of that survey, we wanted to know whether people felt empowered—or disempowered—at work. We looked at four well-understood dimensions of empowerment drawn from academic research: autonomy; performance/job impact; meaning and belonging; and confidence/competence. By surveying workers on these dimensions (through a total of 12 questions) and then calculating the degree to which the dimensions were both important to people and present in their work lives, we constructed a simple empowerment index, which we then used to evaluate different segments of the workforce.
Read the full strategy+business article.
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Bhushan Sethi is an Adjunct Professor at NYU Stern.
The survey was conducted in March and April 2022 and drew responses from more than 52,000 workers in 44 countries, making it one of the largest workforce surveys ever conducted. Of the total base of respondents, approximately 42% were women.
As part of that survey, we wanted to know whether people felt empowered—or disempowered—at work. We looked at four well-understood dimensions of empowerment drawn from academic research: autonomy; performance/job impact; meaning and belonging; and confidence/competence. By surveying workers on these dimensions (through a total of 12 questions) and then calculating the degree to which the dimensions were both important to people and present in their work lives, we constructed a simple empowerment index, which we then used to evaluate different segments of the workforce.
Read the full strategy+business article.
____
Bhushan Sethi is an Adjunct Professor at NYU Stern.