The Health Impacts Of Workplace Inequity

The workplace is more than just a place to earn a living, as it shapes our daily experiences, our stress levels and, ultimately, our health. While strides have been made towards a better future, workplace inequity remains an issue, particularly for women. This isn’t just a matter of fairness or career progression; experiencing unfairness can have a tangible, detrimental effect on women’s physical and mental well-being.

Workplace inequity goes beyond simple differences in roles or responsibilities. As this Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) and Boston College article states, workplace inequity includes the systematic and persistent disparities in the opportunities and resources available to employees, regardless of their demographic and social identities.

Authors Quinetta Roberson, Eden King, and Mikki Hebl discussed workplace inequality in a paper in the Behavioral Policy journal on designing more effective practices for reducing it. Inequity includes disparities in pay, lack of access to opportunities for promotion or development, biased performance reviews, unequal distribution of resources or support, and harassment or discrimination.

They also mention that studies show that strategies such as formalizing policies, combining multiple approaches, providing oversight, and engaging employees throughout the organization are beneficial in combating inequality.

This isn’t theoretical; as research highlighted by Christopher To, Elad N. Sherf, and Maryam Kouchaki in a Harvard Business Review article points out, to address the inequity challenge, companies will need to understand how managers can fall prey to “not here” bias and motivated reasoning, and how those problems can be countered. 

Researchers Elizabeth Keller and Megan Guardiano found in a longitudinal study for the American College of Occupational and Environmental Medicine that “high levels of psychological distress have been predictive of increased absenteeism from work, affecting organizations and contributing to higher health service expenditures and utilization, impacting healthcare systems as a whole.”

The chronic nature of workplace inequity, coupled with feelings of being undervalued, is a risk factor for depression, as this paper from the University of Minnesota showed. Researchers analyzed the Youth Development Survey from early adulthood to midlife with a long follow-up from 1988 to 2019 and found evidence of the impacts of race/ethnicity and gender-related discrimination in the workplace on a depressed mood.

“The negative impact of sleep deprivation is one area that is often undervalued by workers and by human resource management,” wrote authors June Pilcher and Drew Morris from Clemson University in this article.

Poor sleep is linked to a host of other health problems, and “work-related stress and strains are related to the employee’s perceived well-being, but can be compensated for through social support,” according to the paper.

As this piece by Pamela Reynolds in Harvard Business School’s Working Knowledge highlights, confronting workplace inequity requires looking deeply at systems and biases, implying that the individual burden on those experiencing it is substantial, impacting their sense of worth within that system.

“Researchers noted that the effects of discrimination contribute to lower well-being among both genders, with the negative effects being more pronounced among women than men,” researchers wrote in an article by SHRM.

Even as they experience rising levels of burnout, women are more proactive than men in similar positions when it comes to fighting exhaustion and extending support to their colleagues and reports.

This insight comes from a McKinsey & Company podcast, which explored the results of their 2021 “Women in the Workplace” study.

For women, navigating environments where they may face bias, feel undervalued, or have to work harder than colleagues for the same recognition creates a constant state of vigilance and strain.

Addressing workplace inequity is a public health issue, and recognizing the health impacts is a critical first step towards the necessary actions, as suggested by Pamela in the Harvard Business School paper.

This involves not just individual efforts but also collective action and building bridges to create truly equitable workplaces where all individuals, including women, can thrive without sacrificing their well-being. The article concludes that to redress inequities, companies need to dig deep, build bridges, and take collective action.