Working women demand satisfaction

By Asuna Kojima, Mainichi Shimbun, Sunday 29 August 1999

Working women are demanding satisfaction.

Getting gratification from their work is a key element in female employees deciding whether to stay in their current jobs or hit the wanted ads, a university survey has found.

Masumi Mori, assistant professor at Showa Women's University, and two other professors polled 2,160 female company employees on why they quit their first jobs or have moved to other pastures. All of those polled graduated from university or junior college seven, 12 or 17 years ago.

Of the 719 women who responded, some 70 percent are no longer with the companies that they first joined upon graduating.

The figure is evidence of the decline in recent years of what used to be the traditional corporate path—staying at one company from graduation to retirement. The stay-at-home philosophy was especially prevalent among university graduates.

When asked why they quit their first companies, the most common answer from the women respondents was that they found no satisfaction in their work.

Ranking second was that they did not believe in their company's future prospects.

Among those who did not take the leap, some 30 percent cited their satisfaction with their job duties as motivating them to stay with their companies.

With working years becoming longer, the nature of women's work has changed. A sense of satisfaction deeply influenced the women's motive for staying at the same companies, Mori said.

If companies are good at providing proper employment and personnel policies, the proportion of women working for the same companies will increase, she said.

Answers to the question of why they chose their current jobs after once quitting also revealed that a sense of satisfaction was important. More than 60 percent of the respondents to the question said that they chose their new jobs because they believed they could best utilize their knowledge and skills by choosing those positions.

While gratifying women's demands seems the way to keep them in their jobs, the lack of satisfying alternatives also plays a key role. Of those who stayed in their first jobs, 51 percent of the women said that they thought changing companies would not improve their financial and working conditions.