26 September 2023

Burnout gap: A gender gap to thank the pandemic for?

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Tanya Tarr* says there are two clear ways executives can help close the ‘burnout gap’.


We know that the pandemic has slowed down progress on closing the gender wage gap, but it is also creating a new gap that compounds that failure?

A recent poll from INSIDER made clear what many of us might have intuitively known: women are shouldering a heavier burden of burnout and pandemic exhaustion than men.

Before we dive into the chart and poll findings, let’s take a moment to define burnout.

At a high level, the World Health Organisation defines burnout as “a syndrome conceptualised as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed.”

It includes work-related exhaustion, negative feelings about work and reduced efficiency at working.

When I saw the chart above, I wasn’t surprised, but I felt a sense of dread at the discovery of another factor holding women back from professional parity.

The chart comes from a poll conducted by INSIDER in May 2021, including 1,093 respondents who are employed full-time.

Participants are also mostly middle to high income and majority white.

In that context, “it’s a good way to examine, if not exactly how burned-out people are, how willing people are to acknowledge the degree to which they’ve experienced exhaustion,” said Walter Hickey, INSIDER’s Senior Editor for Data.

“Given the self-reported nature and the focus on workers, I regard our findings — 61 per cent of American workers report burnout to some degree, 35 per cent of respondents saying their workloads increased, 17 per cent started managing virtual learning for their children and 11 per cent reported that their partner has lost a job — as one baseline estimate for the experience of burnout,” he said, in summarising key results of the poll.

But are men really feeling less burned out or are they just not as accurate in their self-reporting?

I reached out to Dr. Olivia (Mandy) O’Neill to get her take on this snapshot of gender and self-reported burnout.

Dr. O’Neill is Associate Professor of Management and Senior Scientist at the Center for the Advancement of Well-Being at George Mason University.

She’s also an expert on organisational culture, emotions, and gender.

“Men on average tend to suppress their emotions more than women. This is known.

“It would not be surprising if they are actually experiencing the symptoms of burnout, but just not recognising them, accepting them and then managing them in the way that women are,” Dr. Mandy O’Neill said.

Dr. O’Neill also pointed out that objectively, men may not be as burned out as women because they just aren’t doing as much extra work in addition to their paid jobs.

But the main driving cause of burnout may simply be overwork due to remote working, regardless of gender.

This might seem like an obvious factor to point out, but bears repeating.

While the work might not be visible to managers, people have reported working during those recaptured commuting hours.

Moreover, there still remains the struggle of navigating the blurred boundaries of where work ends and private lives begin.

“More than a third of our respondents said they were working more, and just a little less said they’d switched to remote work,” said Anna Medaris Miller, Senior Health Reporter for INSIDER.

“But even people who haven’t experienced a significant change in how or how much they work can be burnt out.

“Demanding the same amount of employees given all that’s going on – much of which employers have no idea about – is often unrealistic,” she said.

The stealth driver of burnout might be one that predates the pandemic.

Both Medaris Miller and Dr. O’Neill agree: the largest cause of burnout is not taking paid time off.

Dr. O’Neill points to the research of Dr. Lauren Kuykendall, also at George Mason University.

“It’s been more difficult to take vacations because you can’t go abroad, and you can’t travel.

“So the existing problem has just been exacerbated, and I think that’s very much contributing to burnout,” said Dr. O’Neill.

Medaris Miller also notes research that links vacation time with a host of positive health benefits.

“Americans have always been reluctant to take vacation days,” she said.

“The pandemic has deepened that cultural hesitance, in part because for much of it people couldn’t go to resorts or theme parks, dine out in restaurants, or tour museums.”

So what’s the first solution? Take your paid time off, particularly as the world starts to reopen.

Dr. O’Neill mentioned it’s not so much a policy change as a behavioural one.

She recommends that executives and managers need to be highly visible about using leave time.

This needs to be done in concert with maintaining strong boundaries about not working while on vacation.

“It’s important to make sure employees take their vacations.

“There is evidence found by my colleague Dr. Kuykendall that when supervisors model these behaviours, sometimes it’s the only way taking vacation time is going to happen,” Dr. O’Neill said.

The second solution is to edit your organisation’s work policies, in light of what you’ve learned through the pandemic.

“This is an opportunity for organisations to ditch the arcane or toxic policies that would have taken years to change before,” Dr. O’Neil said.

Specifically, what will a return to work with an hybrid approach look like?

Remote working is a technology that can help people stay productive while not having to fight traffic or manage other adjacent stressors.

But an update on policies with an eye towards truly managing stress, dissolving negativity, and boosting mindful efficiency could be the fastest path to burnout recovery.

*Tanya Tarr is a Senior Contributor at ForbesWomen and a behavioural scientist. She writes about the power of negotiation and equal pay.

This article first appeared at forbes.com.

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