Women & Happiness, Part II

Last week I posted a few thoughts about women and happiness. This has been a hot topic ever since Marcus Buckingham published his top-selling Find Your Strongest Life: What the Happiest and Most Successful Women Do Differently.

A lot of women took strong exception to Buckingham telling them what they needed to do to become more happy, and others were discouraged by the data he shared that seemed to show that women had become more unhappy even as they had become more successful.

It’s important to insert a point into this conversation, because many have interpreted the research to show that striving for success in today’s overheated 24/7 work environment makes women miserable.

The environment is challenging, and many women find it doubly so because they bear multiple responsibilities. But I think the real issue is getting lost. The big problem seems to me that the traditional workplace has been incredibly slow to adjust to the entry of one half of the human race into its ranks. It’s not just about flex time, although that’s important. But what never gets talked about is that women seem to define and perceive satisfaction differently than men.

The big lesson I learned while researching my new book, The Female Vision: Women’s Real Power at Work, is that women bring different values with them to work. As long as these values remain out of sync with what organizations expect women to value, finding real satisfaction will be difficult.

In my next post, I’ll share some findings from Julie Johnson and my research on satisfaction differentials.

Filed under: Balancing Conflicts, Satisfaction Project, women and happiness, Marcus Buckingham, Sally Helgesen, Women and Happiness

Women and Happiness, Part 1

I was inspired this morning by a terrific article by Naomi Wolf in More Magazine, who writes about women and happiness. In part she was responding to Marcus Buckingham’s recent book which posited that women are becoming less happy.

Wolf put this “women are miserable” meme in exactly the right context, pointing out that every few years, we hear a lot of angst about women’s progress, especially in the workplace. We worried if it was bad for men (I heard this a lot in the 70s), we worried if it was bad for children (we all heard plenty of this in the 80s and 90s) and now we worry if it’s  bad for women themselves!

Some of this is good old backlash (though I don’t think that was Buckingham’s motivation), and some of it is just our American tendency to constantly question ourselves. And some of it is of course a consequence of the over-heated 24/7 workplace that demands so much of people right now.

But my own work leads me to believe that if women dissatisfied with work, it is  because the traditional workplace is not designed to support women’s happiness. It never was. The differences in how men and women perceive, define, and pursue satisfaction were simply not calibrated into how work was set up. In the weeks ahead, I’ll be exploring this.

What do you think?

Filed under: Women in the Workplace, Womens Leadership, Workplace and Business Trends, Marcus Buckingham, More Magazine, Naomi Wolf