Let us tell you a story about a woman we’ll call Ava. When she landed her first job in a global technology company, she soon discovered that a male colleague who had started at the same time was being paid more for the same work. When Ava asked her manager about the disparity, she was told that salaries were confidential but that he had done better on various unspecified performance measures. When she had her first child, she was excluded from business trips by her boss, who, in trying to be thoughtful about her new family demands, decided she was spread too thin to join. And later, when she put her hat in the ring for a promotion, the job went to another male colleague who had been included in those key trips.
Ava is a composite, but her experience will be familiar to many women. A lifetime of experiences like these takes a toll on women’s trust in their employers, with a cascade of consequences. Our research shows that the less an employee trusts their employer, the less engaged they’ll be in their work, the less likely they’ll be to promote or defend the company, the less value they’ll create, and the more likely they’ll be to quit.
In an internal 2021 study, we measured trust levels of 5,000 U.S. employees across job types and industries. We found that while women and men enter the workforce with essentially the same level of trust in their employers, women’s trust rapidly falls behind men’s and continues to lag throughout their careers. By the time women reach the director level, they trust their employers 30% less than men at the same level. Scores only begin to recover as women enter the senior leadership ranks. Yet even then their trust levels they never fully catch up.
In recent years, many leaders have doubled down on improving communication, transparency, and overall fairness in the workplace, including spending billions of dollars annually on diversity, equity, and inclusion programs — all of which should be having a big impact on trust. But our research finds many of these efforts aren’t having the expected effect — in fact, they sometimes actually increase the gap between men and women’s trust in their employers. Compounding the problem, many company leaders think they’re doing a better job than they are. On average, our research shows they overestimate employees’ trust levels by roughly 40%.
The Root of the Problem
Why aren’t employers’ efforts to create a more transparent and equitable workplace translating into greater trust for women? A key reason, we believe, is that the well-intentioned policies that should promote equity between men and women, such as flex time and performance-based compensation, tend not to benefit women as much or in the same ways as they do men.
Let’s take a closer look at flex-time policies, which allow employees to schedule their work around parenting or other responsibilities. We expected that such policies would boost trust because they signal that management cares about its employees and gives them agency by trusting them to manage their own time. And indeed, we saw a significant lift in scores. But although women’s trust levels closed in on the men’s, they didn’t catch up.
Why wouldn’t this trust-building policy bring women’s levels at least on par with men’s? To understand, let’s return to Ava, a new mother. Her company offers a generous family-leave policy with paid time off for new parents and ongoing flexibility to schedule work around childcare responsibilities. Though these policies don’t intentionally treat men and women differently, Ava and other new mothers in the company find they depend on the policy more than their male colleagues do and use it differently. Women are more likely than men to take longer leave and to take it all at once when a new baby arrives, using the flexibility they’re offered to schedule around their children’s needs. As a result, even though they’re as or more productive than their male peers, when they take advantage of the flexibility benefit, they can be perceived as being less dedicated and may be penalized — for example, by being overlooked for certain assignments or promotions. For many women, the flex-time benefit comes at a relative cost, and this can limit trust gains.
A similar dynamic plays out in firms that offer performance-based compensation, an incentive scheme you might expect would enhance trust across the board. In fact, rewarding high performance does increase overall employee trust by 33%. But when you break this down by gender, you see a disproportionate impact for men and a widening gap between the sexes: Men’s trust scores climb twice as much as women’s (16 vs. 8 points), resulting in a five-fold increase in the gap between their scores.
Why would women respond so differently to what should be a purely merit-based system? The answer is complex and linked to the problem of bias. Even seemingly objective performance measures, such as meeting sales targets, can be skewed by managerial bias that disadvantages women from the outset. For example, research shows that women in the same job, with the same supervisor, who received the same performance evaluation scores as their male peers, still received lower pay increases. Another study found that women in stock brokerages were often assigned accounts with lower historic commissions and/or asset values, resulting in gender differences in performance-based pay — a phenomenon familiar to many women who are on teams or in roles that make it harder for them to meet objective targets. And, as women still are paid just 83 cents on the dollar relative to men doing the same job, a woman’s performance bonus based on her salary will be less than that of a man receiving the same percent bonus.
Given the multitude of ways performance-based compensation schemes can disproportionately (and even unintentionally) benefit men, it’s no wonder that women often have less trust in these policies (and the managers involved) than their male colleagues do.
The Way Forward
Building trust with female employees can be a complex challenge, but it should be an executive imperative. Three strategies can help:
1. Look beyond gender.
The need for flexibility, family leave, career opportunities, and fair compensation affect everyone — they just affect women disproportionately.
Leaders should consider how they can level the playing field for everyone. A company may offer identical family-leave packages to all employees, but if women are using more of that time than men, or if they’re penalized in some way for taking it all at once, this seemingly equitable policy may actually fail to earn women’s trust.
A solution is to redesign the evaluation process so that anyone using a given benefit receives the same treatment. For example, if a company has a flex-time policy and some employees use it more or differently than others, leaders should ensure that performance reviews focus on the value each individual creates, not when or where they work. If the company has a performance-based compensation scheme, look carefully for ways the policy may disproportionately benefit one group or individual over another and fix the inequity.
2. Take a holistic view.
Social barriers, such as uneven responsibilities at home, contribute to employees’ workplace experience and affect their ability to do their best work.
An essential part of the solution is for employers to view employees as whole humans, not just as staff who show up to work. Managerial behaviors and policies that support the whole person, not just the employee doing her job, build trust. These include extending trust to employees and giving them agency — the power to influence their circumstances.
Consider the impact of policies that assume employees can’t be trusted. For example, some retailers use an attendance system under which an employee accrues points (not the good kind) for absences, tardiness, or other infractions. The assumption is that employees won’t take responsibility for their work, or even reliably show up, without a threat dangling over them. A policy like this makes apparent that the employer doesn’t trust the employee and that their human needs — to take care of a child or parent or their own health — rank below the organization’s priorities.
When employees don’t feel trusted to balance their workplace and personal responsibilities or don’t feel supported as whole humans, they likely won’t extend trust to their employer in turn.
3. Measure, test, and scale.
It’s hard to fix a problem you don’t see or that you don’t understand. Start by surveying employees to get a baseline measure of their trust levels. Ask employees to indicate on a seven-point scale how much they agree or disagree with the following statements:
- Humanity: My employer demonstrates empathy and kindness toward me.
- Transparency: My employer uses straightforward and plain language to share information, motives, and decisions that matter to me.
- Capability: My employer creates a good work experience for me and provides the resources I need to do my job well.
- Reliability: My employer consistently and dependably delivers on the commitments it makes to me.
This evaluation will broadly reveal where leadership’s trust strengths and weaknesses lie, and further analysis can uncover differences between men’s and women’s trust levels.
Next, use in-person or online ethnographic instruments (such as focus groups) to examine the source of any trust deficits. Ethnography can help to reveal unspoken needs through observation. (People don’t always know or can’t articulate what is needed.) Is the biggest problem a perceived lack of leadership transparency, humanity, capability, or reliability? Or a combination? Armed with this insight, leadership can begin to design incentives and policy interventions to address the sources of trust problems.
Pay particular attention to gaps between men’s and women’s scores. For example, if female employees give leadership lower scores on transparency than men do, focus groups may reveal this is because they don’t trust that they are being fairly evaluated and compensated. Part of the solution, then, is to make these processes transparent, publish the evaluation criteria, aggressively share data on how performance and compensation are linked, and otherwise go above and beyond to communicate and demonstrate the equity of the organization’s practices.
After rolling out interventions designed to help address the trust deficit, measure trust levels again and scale up the practices that have the greatest impact. Then continue to monitor trust and test ways to continually improve it. This requires commitment and intentionality. It should be considered an ongoing investment.
. . .
Most companies are trying to create equity in the workplace and, by and large, the policies that give rise to gender-based differences in trust are well intentioned. But biases that can benefit men more than women often creep in undetected, taking a toll on trust. Through an iterative process of measurement, experimentation, and refinement, organizations can better identify the ways in which their policies treat people differently and make changes that will continue to narrow the gaps between men and women. Ultimately, it’s not only women who will benefit from enhancing trust, but every employee and every organization.
