Trust at work is important. It helps you feel more secure in your career and allows you to feel like you can speak out, share ideas or take risks without being penalised or laughed at (a phenomenon known as psychological safety). And if you do trust your employers, research suggests you’ll be more engaged and motivated, more likely to stick around and more likely to speak highly of the company.

According to recent research discussed in The Harvard Business Review, though, women tend to trust their employers less than men as they progress through their careers, and it might be down to the fact that employers’ efforts to improve gender equality, diversity and inclusion just aren’t translating into real change.

Authors Ashley Reichheld, Emily Werner and Wenny Katzenstein, who work for Deloitte, measured the trust levels of 5,000 US employees across different job types and industries in 2021. 

They discovered that while men and women tend to enter the world of work with similar levels of trust for their employers (with men reporting an average trust score of 40 as junior employees, compared to an average score of 39 for women), women’s trust “rapidly falls behind men’s and continues to lag throughout their careers”.

By the time they became managers, women had a trust score of 46, compared to a trust score of 52 in men. At director level, women trust their employers “30% less than men at the same level”, the authors explained.

“Scores only begin to recover as women enter the senior leadership ranks,” they added. “Yet even then their trust levels never fully catch up.”

Their investigation also found that many efforts to make women more engaged in the workplace, including well-intentioned inclusion policies, flexible working and performance-based rewards, are not having the intended effect. Instead, sometimes they might even increase the trust gap.

To make things worse, many companies think they’re doing a much better job on this front than they really are. “On average, our research shows they overestimate employees’ trust levels by roughly 40%,” the study authors wrote.

So, why aren’t these policies working? Is it a case of diversity dishonesty, or perkwashing? “A key reason, we believe, is that the well-intentioned policies that should promote equity between men and women, such as flex time and performance-based compensation, tend not to benefit women as much or in the same ways as they do men,” the researchers posited. In other words, then, the very policies that are brought in to even the playing field are, in fact, playing to men’s strengths instead.

Take flexible working. “A company may offer identical family-leave packages to all employees, but if women are using more of that time than men or if they’re penalised in some way for taking it all at once, this seemingly equitable policy may actually fail to earn women’s trust,” they explained. 

Similarly, they suggest, performance-based rewards might be impacted by managers’ implicit biases.

The question of how to solve this glaring workplace trust issue is a knotty one, but first of all, it seems like a good initial step would be for employers to actually listen to the people who work for them rather than patting themselves on the back for their inclusion policies, without waiting to see whether they work or not. 

Images: Getty