Men are more likely than women to be rewarded for supporting coworkers, research finds

“Social support is definitely an important part of what binds people to work, and to one another at work,” Nancy Baym, a senior principal research manager at Microsoft Research, tells me. “It enables information flow, knowledge exchange, and advice seeking, and all of these things actually have impacts on outcomes for the company. It’s important for your bottom line.”

However, men may be rewarded more for supporting colleagues at work than women, even as women more frequently do so, says Baym, a coauthor of newly released research in MIT Sloan Management Review.

The authors set out to investigate the career benefits for employees when providing multiple forms of social support to coworkers. They identified 13 behaviors broken into the following five categories: emotional assistance, esteem reinforcement, social companionship, information or advice, and instrumental help (providing tangible goods or services).

Both the men and women surveyed offered social support to their colleagues, but men more frequently offered social companionship and instrumental support. Meanwhile, “supporting each other emotionally, whether that’s cheering people up, or listening to them, or reaching out to see how they’re doing, those are things that women were a little more likely to do,” Baym says.

All of these actions, by men and women, “demonstrate a certain amount of empathy,” she says. “What’s so important about social support is that you’re going beyond saying, ‘I feel your pain’ to saying, ‘I’m gonna try and do something to lessen that.’”

But men’s overall rating of the level of encouragement and rewards for social support available at work was 11% higher than women’s. “The questions that we asked specifically were about being rewarded with bonuses and promotion,” Baym says.

Women reported a higher frequency of providing social support than men but a lower potential return in organizational rewards and recognition. “This gender inequity is cause for concern, especially as women continue to display higher levels of occupational stress, as well as a greater willingness to leave jobs and switch employers,” the authors write.

The findings are based on a survey of 836 respondents who self-identified as men (438) or women (398), working in 15 or more industries in companies of various sizes. Sixty-one percent were managers, and 39% were individual contributors. Forty-four percent worked full-time in the office, 39% worked full-time remotely, and 17% were hybrid.

“We see in our data that women are more likely to go out of their way to welcome a new colleague, whereas men are more likely to provide career advice. Which behavior counts more?” according to the report.

The question then becomes, says Baym: “What kind of support is valued by the company?”

However, another factor to take into consideration is, “a very long-standing finding with gender is that even when people do the exact same behavior, it can be seen really differently when it’s a male person performing and then when it’s a female performing it,” she says.

Solutions for companies? “One thing that’s really important to get clear: What behaviors are we trying to encourage here?” Baym says. Other suggestions include “make the invisible more visible.” For example, in one-on-one meetings, managers can ask the employee if anyone has been particularly supportive—and how.

“It may be that some of the ways in which women are supporting other people are not getting them the recognition that they perhaps deserve in terms of how much their efforts are building the social fabric of their workplace,” Baym says. “Some of these things women are doing may be less visible, like I may not cheer you up in front of our boss.”

“The suggestions we offer are really meant as a starting point, not as a final point,” Baym adds, “because what works in one environment may not work in another.”

Sheryl Estrada
sheryl.estrada@fortune.com

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