Who’s Happiest at Work? Hint: It’s Not Women

Overall job satisfaction ticked up, but worker contentment dropped for wages, work-life balance, survey shows

By Anne Marie Chaker - May 6, 2024

Americans say they are happy at work. Are they really?

When asked how they feel overall about their jobs, most U.S. workers are positive, with 62.7% saying they are satisfied, according to new survey data from the Conference Board, a business-research group. That is the highest job-satisfaction rating since the survey began in 1987.

Dig deeper, though, and that figure might have plateaued, the researchers said, along with a widening gap in job satisfaction between men and women. Nearly 65% of men say they are happy with their jobs compared with 60% of women.?The largest gaps in satisfaction between men and women were related to financial benefits of work, such as wages, benefits and bonuses.

Despite overall satisfaction ticking higher in the past year, drops were recorded in all 26 specific categories that workers were asked about—from wages to work-life balance. Those declines indicate that overall job satisfaction is at risk despite the record overall job-satisfaction rating.

“We’ve never had a year where we’ve had that paradox,” Allan Schweyer, a principal researcher at the Conference Board, said.?

The American worker has a lot of reasons to feel upbeat. Unemployment has been below 4% for two years, wages finally started growing faster than inflation last summer and wealth has been bolstered by rising stock and home prices. In many white-collar jobs, employees enjoy latitude to work from home or flex their hours. The latest jobs report shows a still-strong labor market, though unemployment ticked up to 3.9% from March’s 3.8%.

A confluence of negative factors has accompanied the positives. While inflation is down from a year ago, household budgets still feel squeezed by the cumulative rise in prices since 2021. High mortgage rates and home prices make it difficult to move or buy one’s first home. Workers are hungry for a promotion, raise or both . Eighty-five percent of 1,000 U.S. professionals polled are considering looking for another job , according to LinkedIn.

“In general, people are saying, ‘I’m OK because I have a job,’” said Dana Peterson, chief economist at the Conference Board. “But they are worried about the future.”

Earlier this year, 23% of chief executives surveyed by the Conference Board said they expect to lay off workers in the next 12 months, up from 13% of CEOs predicting layoffs in a survey conducted in the fall.

The steepest drops in satisfaction compared with a year earlier were registered for wages, promotions, health plans and bonuses. The survey of nearly 1,700 U.S. adults also looked at specific segments of the workforce, including people who work from home, women and those considering job changes.

Culture club

Workers have found a new reason to stay at their jobs.

In the year-earlier survey, wages were a primary driver of job satisfaction. In the latest survey, more than three-fourths of all job stayers, defined as those who intended to remain in their jobs, said they were satisfied with the organizational culture of their employer. For job leavers, defined as those who intended to move on, 21.8% were satisfied with culture. The gap of more than 55 percentage points was one of the highest reported, and reflects what a big driver culture is to retaining employees, Schweyer said.?

Mike Huynh, a manager in sales planning and analytics for Walt Disney , said he felt an initial euphoria when the company awarded him a 25% raise two months ago. The feeling only lasted a day.

Since then, Huynh’s weekly hours have increased to about 70 each week, up from 40. There are more meetings and weekend work. The higher pay helps cover the mortgage and taxes, but the money is a lot less meaningful than he thought it might be.

“It’s not Jeff Bezos money,” he said.

While Huynh yearned for a big raise, he said he realizes it isn’t as big a deal as he thought it would be. Work culture means more to him now—and it is a big reason he has stayed with the company.

“Being able to rely on the people I work with is way more meaningful than just money,” he said.

The flexible-work discount

Hybrid and remote workers are among the happiest in the Conference Board’s survey.

In 2023, 65.5% of hybrid workers reported overall job satisfaction, which was slightly higher than 64.1% of fully remote workers. People who work full time on-site reported the lowest satisfaction, at 60.2%.

Amelia Castilla, an associate partner at software company Atlassian , said she has turned down higher-paying job offers from other companies that would have required her to come to the office.

“The lifestyle where I can write my own schedule doesn’t have a price,” said the 39-year old single mother of a nine-year old.

Since Atlassian went all-remote in 2020, Castilla has set her own hours, allowing her to pick up her son at school and organize playdates. She goes to the Austin, Texas, office to get together with co-workers, which can happen from once a week to once a month.

Women warriors

Despite many companies introducing more family-friendly policies, such as daycare at work and mental-health services , the women surveyed were less satisfied with their jobs than the men for the sixth year in a row.

Women, in particular, might sense a more profound loss of remote-work benefits as employers continue to push for their employees to show up more, said Frances Frei, a management professor at Harvard Business School.

“Once workers have these wonderful new benefits, those benefits have legitimacy,” Frei said.

Flexible workplaces might also be creating more gender segmentation, Frei said. For instance, in a less formal work environment, if “mentors are informally telling mentees on the squash court about new opportunities, that may only benefit certain people who are like them,” such as men.

Boston-based respiratory therapist Shamima Mather worked in hospitals until 2022, and said the hierarchy was generally straightforward: “The environment is female-dominated as far as the workforce. But positions of power is where the men are.”

She recently left to work for a health startup and appreciates the more egalitarian approach.

“It’s just work,” she said. “We all jump in and do it.”

Who’s Happiest at Work? Hint: It’s Not Women - WSJ

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Move over, Quad; the new Squad has landed

Australia, Japan, Philippines and US forming new security partnership to replace ineffectual Quad and up the pressure on China

By RICHARD JAVAD HEYDARIAN - MAY 7, 2024

MANILA – As tensions rise in the South China Sea and the threat of a war over Taiwan becomes more palpable, the US Pentagon is stepping up its regional defense diplomacy in a potent challenge to China’s rising regional threats and ambitions.

Last week, US Secretary of Defense?Lloyd Austin?hosted counterparts from Japan, Australia and the Philippines for what is being privately referred to as a budding new “Squad” defense partnership in the Indo-Pacific region.

The participants “share a vision for peace, stability and deterrence in the Indo-Pacific” and have “chartered an ambitious course to advance that vision together.” Austin said during a press conference on the sidelines of the defense summit in Hawaii, home to the US Indo-Pacific Command (INDOPACOM).

Austin claimed the new quadrilateral is rapidly consolidating into a long-term security grouping.

The “Squad” meeting came just weeks after the four nations conducted their first-ever joint patrols in the hotly contested South China Sea and the historic Japan-Philippine-US trilateral summit between Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr and US President Joe Biden at the White House.

In the coming months, the four Squad nations are set to enhance interoperability, conduct more joint patrols and drills, and enhance intelligence and maritime security cooperation – all with an eye on China’s expanding footprint across the Western Pacific.

Marcos Jr’s hard pivot to the West and his increasingly firm stance on Philippine claims vis-à-vis China in the South China Sea are driving the rapid institutionalization of the new quadrilateral grouping.

A dying Quad

In contrast to the better-known “Quad”, a security partnership comprising India , Australia, the US and Japan, the “Squad” has greater internal coherence and a clear shared strategic vision for the region. India remains close with its traditional security partner Russia and has openly defied Western-led sanctions on Moscow over its Ukraine invasion. ??

Unlike India, the Philippines is a US mutual defense treaty ally and is set to finalize a Visiting Forces Agreement-style pact with Japan similar to its existing agreements with Australia and the US. The Marcos Jr administration has expanded the number of Philippine bases to which the US has rotational military access, including facilities close to Taiwan. ?

The new “Squad” will likely further embolden the Philippines in its ongoing maritime tussles with China, which have recently intensified through Chinese “gray zone” tactic attacks on Philippine ships. That, in turn, has raised concerns of a possible armed conflict that draws in the US and perhaps by extension Japan and Australia.

China’s Communist Party-run Global Times mouthpiece has openly warned that the new “Squad” security grouping is “exacerbating regional risks”, underscoring Beijing’s growing irritation with Manila’s role as a new linchpin in America’s “integrated deterrence” strategy of counterbalancing China’s regional rise and ambitions.

The old Quad is under strain due to India’s refusal to align with the West’s punitive stance on Russia. That’s been seen in India’s refusal to condemn Russia’s actions at the United Nations or comply with Western sanctions imposed on Moscow, including on its crucial energy industry.

If anything, the Narendra Modi administration has steadfastly stood by Russia as a major strategic partner.

To the West’s consternation, India has continued to purchase advanced Russian weapons systems while massively expanding its imports of discounted Russian oil. Meanwhile, India has pushed back hard on what it sees as Western “hypocrisy” and neo-colonialism.

“Those who are economically dominant today are leveraging their production capabilities and those who have institutional influence or historical influence have actually weaponized a lot of those capabilities,” India’s External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar complained during a conference on Global South nations.

“They (Western powers) will mouth all the right things, but the reality is still today, it’s very much a world of double standards,” he added, thus positioning India as a leader among rising powers and Global South nations that China is also cultivating through expanded trade and investment relations.

Despite its heated border disputes with China, India has also refused to join any coalition or major drills aimed at constraining Beijing’s maritime ambitions. Indeed, the South Asian power seems more interested in maximizing its own bid to become a “major power” by opportunistically pursuing strategic cooperation with competing superpowers.

Emboldened in Manila

This stands in stark contrast to the Philippines , which has consistently voted along similar lines as Western democracies in key UN votes, including on Russia and Myanmar.

Manila has also proactively pushed back against China in the South China Sea through legal cases and increased naval and coast guard deployments. And it is a mutual defense treaty ally of the US with increasingly robust defense engagement with both Australia and Japan.

The creation of the four-way Squad” wouldn’t have been possible without a major reorientation in Philippine foreign policy under Marcos Jr.

Throughout the previous Rodrigo Duterte administration, Manila consciously tried to avoid any anti-China coalition or grouping in favor of stable ties with all major powers. Initially, Marcos Jr also signaled a similar hedging strategy by underscoring his commitment to the Duterte era “friends to all, enemy to none” neutrality mantra .

Following a largely fruitless state visit to Beijing last year, which failed to produce any breakthroughs on outstanding bilateral issues including over the South China Sea, the Filipino president shifted gears by rapidly enhancing security cooperation with traditional allies led by the US.

Most notably, Marcos Jr has expanded the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA) to give the Pentagon access to additional bases in the northern Philippines, pursued a trilateral Japan-Philippine-US (JAPHUS) security grouping and signed a new comprehensive strategic partnership pact with Australia.

The urgency for a new “quad” grouping has gained momentum following multiple collisions between Philippine and Chinese maritime forces in the South China Sea that have recently injured Filipino servicemen and damaged vessels.

The new “Squad”, inter alia, will reportedly regularize joint patrols in the South China Sea, expand maritime security coordination and intelligence-sharing in the Western Pacific, and help to accelerate the Philippines’ military modernization.

Even so, it’s not clear from the outset how the “Squad” can more effectively deter China’s “gray zone” strategy, including its regular use of water cannons and swarming tactics against Philippine maritime forces in disputed sea areas like the Second Thomas Shoal and Scarborough Shoal.

If anything, there is a risk that the “Squad” will embolden both the Philippines and China to take increasingly uncompromising and assertive stances, thus leading to further escalation of their disputes.

“The US is clearly trying to rally its allies – Japan and Australia – to support the Philippines, encourage the Philippines to engage in more military provocations in the South China Sea, exacerbate the complexity of the regional situation, and then find excuses to strengthen the military presence of the US, Japan and Australia in the South China Sea,” Wei Dongxu, a Beijing-based military expert, told the Global Times in response to the recent “Squad” meeting.

The Chinese expert warned that “involvement of external countries and forces in [the] South China Sea issues will only further complicate the situation in the region and flaunting their military power will not only affect normal regional cooperation but may also lead to conflicts.”

While the Philippines sees the “Squad” as a legitimate effort to protect its sovereign rights and uphold a rules-based order in the maritime region, China clearly sees the new quadrilateral grouping as part of America’s containment strategy. The upshot will likely be sustained escalation and brinkmanship in the South China Sea for the foreseeable future.

Move over, Quad; the new Squad has landed - Asia Times

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