It may be Women’s History Month, but women are not feeling the appreciation — at least not in the workplace. According to mid-March findings released by MIT Sloan Management Review, women are 41% more likely than men to experience a toxic workplace culture. Analyzing millions of Glassdoor reviews, researchers Charlie and Donald Sull found that women were far more likely to describe the workplace as disrespectful, noninclusive and unfair.

HR Dive spoke to Charlie Sull about why women continue to have poor experiences in the workplace, how HR pros can help change deeply ingrained social behavior and whether a workplace can come back from maximum toxicity.

Editor’s Note: This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

HR DIVE: You’ve been studying this area for a while. Was there anything about this particular analysis that struck you as surprising or especially notable?

CHARLIE SULL: Really just the headline finding. Like many people, I suspected there was probably a toxic culture gap. I mean, this probably isn’t earth-shattering news to people, especially women. But I was really taken aback by the size of that gap. I mean, 41% in this case, is a really huge number. It’s significantly larger than even the pay gap, which is incredibly newsworthy in its own right. So the sheer size of that number was the thing that surprised me the most.

In looking at the top complaints of women compared to men, it seems like many have to do with inclusion — DEI and things like gender, disability and race. Many employers have publicized DEI commitments or invested heavily in DEI activities in recent years. What do you think accounts for the gap between the professed interest in DEI and what women seem to be experiencing?

That’s a big question. What I will say is that it’s very, very common for companies to espouse values they just don’t live up to at all. We did a research study looking at hundreds of the largest companies in the world. And we identified what they espouse, what their core values were on their websites and other publicly facing forums. And then we looked at their actual cultural behavior across all those values. And what we found was, there was zero correlation whatsoever between what companies say they aspire to and their actual cultural performance. So there are special things going on with DEI and that’s an especially interesting case, but in general, it’s very common that even though a company publicly aspires to a certain value for them not to hold up to it at all.

So it’s something that is drafted in a room between a couple of leaders and then passed down and not really integrated into the culture?

Exactly. It’s incredibly common. Yeah, there are some companies that do walk the talk, and it’s very interesting what distinguishes them from the rest, but I would say that the norm — at least in corporate America — is for official corporate value statements to be basically empty words.

Many of the elements that women are unhappy with seem to reflect basic human behavior that can be hard to change. Words like “favoritism” and “cliques” come to mind. How can workplaces change these ingrained social behaviors?

For these more social dynamics specifically, like favoritism, there are a lot of things you can do. A lot of it stems from measurements. So do you have a good sense of what employees, when they speak about favoritism, speak about in the same breath? Because this can mean different things to different cases.

In some cases I’ve experienced, favoritism manifests itself mostly in the promotion processes. So for instance, one tangible thing you can do is when a new job is posted, make sure it’s posted transparently for everyone it applies to, and not just given to a certain number of favored people.

Another way favoritism manifests itself is when a manager has certain favorites and that manager allows them to get away with anything. This leads to other employees who aren’t favorites having to pick up the favored employees’ slack. So this is more of a work-life balance story that has a different set of interventions.

But big picture? Even though toxic culture is a huge problem, we actually know a great deal about solving it.

The research seems to indicate that leadership determines a lot of employees’ experience. There are a lot of complaints about the C-suite, managers, supervisors. Do you think that there’s something about a toxic personality that allows people to advance more quickly? Or is there something about being in that position that causes people to behave in a way that appears toxic to others?

There is a fair amount of research on this. Our favorite study looked at the prevalence of sociopaths in the workforce and it did find that if you were an executive, you were slightly more likely to be a sociopath than if you were just a normal employee. So that was kind of interesting, but it also found that being a sociopath was very, very rare.

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