Women still feel like they’re getting the short end of the stick when it comes to pay, benefits, and career growth opportunities. That’s leaving many of them unsatisfied with their jobs.
The Conference Board’s latest U.S. Job Satisfaction report released Monday found that the gap between men and women when it comes to satisfaction with their employers has continued to widen. Women reported less overall job satisfaction than men for the sixth consecutive year.
In 2023, men were 4.5 percentage points more satisfied than women overall with their work. Women reported lower satisfaction across 24 of 26 of the subcategories used by the Conference Board. The largest gaps between men and women in satisfaction among those categories were related to the financial benefits of work, with bonuses having the largest disparity. That was followed by potential for career growth, health benefits (including mental health policies), and wages.
Cultural factors also deepened the satisfaction gap, with women substantially less satisfied than their male counterparts by the recognition they receive, performance reviews, and the quality of leadership.
Women were only slightly (0.1 percentage points) more satisfied with their commute and interest in their work.
Women made up almost half of the U.S. workforce as of March 2023, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office. Yet many are still making less than their male counterparts for the same work. On average, women working full-time, year-round are paid 83.7% of what men are paid — and the pay gap becomes even wider for Black and Hispanic women, according to the Department of Labor.
A growing dissatisfaction with work
Overall job satisfaction grew slightly in 2023, ticking up to 62.7% from 62.3% from a year earlier. There was, however, a year-over-year decrease in all of the subcomponents of job satisfaction compared for both men and women.
The largest declines in 2023 were also in financial benefits — like bonuses, hard base benefits, wages, and promotions — which the Conference Board suggests could mean workers are feeling the pinch of inflation.
The average annual percentage change in wages for all workers rose to 8.3% in 2022, but dropped off to 7% in 2023, according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. That means that while wages continued to grow last year, they did so at a slower pace than a year earlier.
The grass isn’t always greener
The Conference Board also found that people who left their jobs during the pandemic in search of new employers are now less satisfied overall than those who stayed in their jobs.
These “job switchers” reported an overall job satisfaction 5.6 percentage points lower than the “job stayers,” according to the report. And in 15 of the 26 subcategories, those who switched jobs were less satisfied. Chief among these was a far lower satisfaction with the leadership and culture in their new jobs.
More than one-third of Americans changed jobs between 2020 and 2022, in search of better pay, according to a 2022 PBS NewsHour/NPR/Marist poll. The tight labor market drove workers in search of better wages and benefits to the job board, where they were able to exercise new-found power in the market to secure higher-paying positions.
At the time, it was found that many were reaping the benefits — at least financially. A majority of workers who moved to new jobs between April 2021 and March 2022 saw a year-over-year increase in their real earnings, a Pew Research Center poll published in July 2022 found.