How do women feel about working with other women? How do men feel about ceding their decades-long position of power in the workplace to women in the name of fair play? And, for that matter, who would men rather work with? Men or women? It turns out most have a preference for working with women, but the answers are not yet definitive, as the workplace is still changing and we’ve not yet settled into a true fair play situation regarding gender. We asked employees to respond to the question, “Do you prefer to work with men or women?”
The information comes courtesy of an ongoing study by Comparably. More than 10,000 employees responded to the survey.
Just over half of respondents from either sex said they preferred working with women.
53% of African-American employees would rather work with women than men. Caucasians were close to that average with 52%. Coming in just under the fifty percent mark, and therefore choosing men to work with at 51%, are the Hispanic/Latinos and Asian/Pacific Islanders.
When results are viewed by department of origin, we see that workers in Communications prefer having female coworkers at a much higher rate than the average for both sexes. The same can be said for the Design, HR, Legal, and – perhaps surprisingly – the Executive departments. While most department averages came in relatively close to the overall 51% average of all respondents, it’s worth noting that workers in Admin and Operations prefer to work with men to the tune of 55% and 56%, respectively.
In most cases, men report liking working with women more often than females. When departmental results are broken up by gender, we see some interesting deviations from the 50/50 norm that we’ve encountered so far. Male Communications workers chose a preference for working with women by 6% over their female counterparts. In Customer Support, men are 8% more likely to choose working with women. Women in engineering would rather work with female engineers at a rate 8% higher than men in that department. Male executives would chose female coworkers 12% more often than female executives would choose their own sex. Both male and female Operations employees would rather work with male coworkers.
Young workers showed a strong preference for working with women. That preference clearly drops with age. By the 36-40 age bracket, the choice of “women” has dropped to below 50%. Approval of female coworkers bottoms out at below 45% for the 56-60 year olds, implying perhaps that this group of workers spent decades working in an even more unfairly male-dominated workforce when attitudes towards women in the workplace were poisoned.
Employees in Houston chose male coworkers 20% more often than workers in Phoenix, who preferred working with women. San Francisco, Seattle and Boston – all tech hubs – preferred women at rates significantly higher than average.
Latest reading as of November 8.
