Portage County Legal News

Columbus Trust Study shows women's trust in leadership declines with age

BRANDON KLEIN
Special to the Legal News
Published: December 12, 2017

While sexual harassment cases have swept the nation's attention, the second annual Columbus Trust Study finds that women's trust in an organization's leadership declines with age.

The recently released study does not address sexual harassment but finds that 68 percent of female Baby Boomers trust their company's leaders compared with 91 percent of men in the same generation.

Ninety-seven percent of female millennials trust their leaders followed by 87 percent of females in Generation X.

Columbus men's trust in leadership stays steady, from 91 percent of Millennials to 86 percent of Gen Xers.

Overall, Millennials have the highest trust in their organization's leaders at 93 percent, followed by Gen Xers at 86 percent and Baby Boomers at 78 percent.

"What we found was that it was important to have more personal interactions with leaders and maybe women may not have been afforded those interactions during the course of their careers as men may have had," said Bryan Haviland, chief executive officer of strategic communications firm FrazierHeiby, which created the study with research firm Illuminology. "It's still somewhat speculative but the data is not. The data is very clear that Baby Boomer generation women show a very significant decline in trust in their companies over the course of time."

Study results were based on a random poll of 450 residents in Franklin County with a margin of error of 4.7 percentage points.

Lara Kretler, vice president of FrazierHeiby, said the inaugural study's intent was to compare central Ohio's trust with national statistics.

"This year, we decided to dive deeper into demographics like gender and generation to help employers understand trust differences among these audiences," she said.

Haviland said the data shows that men had more personal access to leadership, which in most cases are men, than women. He said it was the likely driver in the drop-off.

"It could be a number of different reasons but we did not address any issues such as this recent surge of sexual harassment cases," Haviland said.

In recent weeks, celebrities, politicians and media figures have been embroiled in sexual harassment scandals including film producer Harvey Weinstein, now former CBS This Morning co-anchor Charlie Rose and Matt Lauer, who was recently fired his co-anchor job of nearly two decades from the Today show.

"I realize it's a hot topic right now," Haviland said.

The data provides a snapshot in time and is not predictive of how millennial women's trust will be in the future, Haviland said. "Practices may change," he said.

Aside from gender and generational differences, 48 percent of Franklin County residents believe that most people can be trusted compared with the Midwest region (Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin) at 35 percent and the nation at 31 percent.

"There's really probably been nothing in our society that has eroded more than trust over the last several decades," Haviland said.

He said leaders can build trust based by showing they care for their employees, can communicate and are honest, competent and transparent. Some of the study's findings can be found on www.columbustruststudy.com.

"Trust is critical to any relationship - especially in business - and research shows a gradual erosion of public trust in nearly every major institution," stated Orie Kristel, the CEO of Illuminology.

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