IDLab Seminar: How Gender Context and the Work Environment Relate to Employee Job Burnout

On May 29, 2026, the International Laboratory of Intangible-driven Economy hosted a research seminar where IDLab Research Fellow Sofya Paklina presented a paper on how job burnout develops taking into account gender factors at the individual, leadership, and team levels. The study - co-authored with Marina Zavertiaeva, Senior Research Fellow at IDLab, Evgeniya Shenkman, Junior Research Fellow at IDLab, and Ekaterina Akhmetgalina, member of the Research Study Group for the Analysis of Reputational Effects of Bank Top Management - was conducted under Russian Science Foundation (RSF) grant No. 25-18-01037, "Job Burnout Syndrome: AI-Based Diagnostics and Assessment of Economic Effects."

The relevance of the topic is underscored by the high percentage of workers experiencing burnout - nearly half of the global workforce faces this issue - as well as by substantial economic losses; in particular, the annual costs of job burnout in Russia reach 1.94 trillion rubles. Applying the job demands-resources model and self-categorization theory, the researchers examined how employee well-being is associated with their own gender as well as the gender context of both leadership and the team.

The empirical analysis demonstrated that women generally face a higher probability of burnout than men; however, this gap depends substantially on the work environment. One of the key findings was that in settings where the supervisor is a woman and the majority of coworkers are women, the likelihood of burnout among female employees increases even further compared to men in the same context. Moreover, the institutional environment at the country level acts as a moderator: in countries with lower levels of gender equality, women suffer from burnout more frequently under male supervisors.

Another important finding of the study highlighted the role of social support: assistance from coworkers and managers statistically significantly reduces the risk of burnout, especially for women. Interestingly, for men, support within predominantly female teams may not exhibit as pronounced an effect. Concluding the presentation, seminar participants discussed the possibility of extending the study across multiple waves of longitudinal data, as well as accounting for cross-cultural differences.