Work is draining, but it is doubly so for female employees

Whether it’s unpaid caring responsibilities or on-the-job biases – female energy reserves are chipped away in unique ways. Here’s how.

‘Time is finite, energy is renewable’

Among business leadership, most people are concerned more with time management than energy management. We spoke with Allied Pinnacle chief people officer, Mofoluwaso Ilevbare, who explained there’s a better way to approach the issue.

“If you want to build capacity and you want to increase your resilience, especially in the very vocal world we live in, it’s important to manage your energy rather than trying to chase after time because the time will always go,” said Ms Ilevbare. If energy is renewable, the question is how.

“How do I renew my energy to be able to increase my capacity to deliver productive work? And that’s where the concepts of energy drainers and energy boosters come from.”

As the names suggest, energy boosters are elements – people, tasks, ways of operating, habits – that serve as a kind of fuel to deep, effective work.

Drainers, on the other hand, are those things that obscure productivity, and they can often be difficult to identify. Energy drainers can be as mundane as what we eat or whether we choose to sit or stand while working.

Other times, however, they can be as deep as the leadership style employed by higher-ups or value perceptions about our work. Ms Ilevbare noted that the line between work and personal life is more blurred than it has ever been. In the age of hybrid and remote work, identifying what it is that drains us – or that which energises us – has never been more difficult.

Female non-work drainers

It’s a fact that female energy drainers are often different to those experienced by male employees. Ms Ilevbare was careful to stress that each employee is different and that generalisations are not perfect representations of underlying reality but that certain trends can be discerned when it comes to female energy drainers. They roughly fall into two camps.

There are non-work energy drainers. Among the most obvious of these are unpaid caring responsibilities. While both men and women can be unpaid carers, women are still significantly more likely to take on these kinds of duties.

In Australia, women represent 71 per cent of all primary carers. According to research from the Workplace Gender Equality Agency, women spend, on average, 64.4 per cent of their average weekly working time on unpaid care work, compared to 36.1 per cent for men.

Rates of carer duties among women are highest at 55 years of age, whereas men are most likely to be carers at 75 years of age. Clearly, women are more likely to take on caring duties while still at working age, whereas men tend to take them on later.

“We’ve got dads who are also taking care of school runs and daddy day care and so on, but it’s still predominantly the female that does that. It comes down to a range of societal and lifestyle expectations, but it can [disproportionately] drain female employees,” said Ms Ilevbare.

On-the-job drainers

Then there are the on-the-job energy drainers that are more likely to affect female employees than male ones. These, said Ms Ilevbare, are more difficult to identify, but they have a real impact on the capacities of affected employees. It’s worth noting that Ms Ilevbare made it clear that gender-based energy drains depend on the industry, the position, and the company in question.

Firstly, there are the challenges faced by women who find themselves in male-dominated industries. One way this tends to manifest is in networking challenges. Networking is more difficult for women when they are poorly represented among leadership positions at an organisation: “Women often feel like they lack the right connections, or that they’re not part of the ‘club’ network,” said Rajesh Bhat, chief executive of Iron Lady. Research shows that men are more likely to have strong work networks than women and that self-promoting can be a more draining process for women than men.

Secondly, biases continue to affect female employees. As noted by Dr Judith Mohring, lead consultant psychiatrist at Priory’s Wellbeing Centre, women face additional workplace pressures “such as having to prove they [are] as good as men, not being valued or promoted, unequal pay, and being expected to ‘look the part’”.

Thirdly, life as a working woman is made more difficult by virtue of the fact that they are, on average, paid less than men around the world. “We all do the same commute, we eat the same food,” said Ms Ilevbare, and yet women earn less. It’s not difficult to imagine how financial pressures could drain an individual worker’s energy reserves, and research shows that money worries can detract from sleep quality, self-esteem, and overall energy levels.

Female employees suffer higher levels of work-related stress, depression, and anxiety than men, and biases contribute in a real, albeit complex, way.

Nick Wilson

Nick Wilson is a journalist with HR Leader. With a background in environmental law and communications consultancy, Nick has a passion for language and fact-driven storytelling.