4.1 Analysis of questionnaire survey results
The results of the partial correlation coefficient for each question item showed that the strongest correlation was between years of experience and job satisfaction, and the results of the extent of influence between job satisfaction and each question item showed that female technologists with 16 or more years of experience as a technologist had high job satisfaction.
Figure 1 shows the distribution of years of experience of the female technologists surveyed in this study. This shows that female technologists with 16 or more years of experience as a technologist accounted for approximately 30% of the respondents. The aggregate results on childbirth in this questionnaire revealed that approximately half, i.e., 22 of the 51 female technologists with 16 or more years of experience as a technologist had experienced childbirth and 19 of those female technologists responded that they had taken maternity leave, 15 had taken childcare leave, and they had used the maternity leave/childcare leave system for childbirth and childcare.
Although it is difficult to identify a causal relationship between each question item based on these findings, the fact that the results show a connection between “the ability to continue working for a long time” and “job satisfaction” suggests that it is important that medical institutions establish an environment where female technologists are able to continue working for a long time, typified by a working environment that offers leave systems such as maternity leave and childcare leave so that they would be able to have and raise children and enables women to use these systems.
It was initially expected that work with fewer shifts on duty and overtime would have a positive effect on job satisfaction, but conversely, the results of this study showed that the level of satisfaction was higher with one to three shifts and overtime of 11 to 20 hours. The questionnaire survey analyzed in this study did not include questions on salary and allowance, which makes it difficult to fully deliberate this matter, but it is surmised that job satisfaction would be affected more by income, such as salary and allowances, which is the compensation for the work, rather than the direct workload itself.
On the other hand, paid holiday usage rate had the lowest partial correlation coefficient with job satisfaction, which suggests that usage of paid holidays is not prioritized, but job satisfaction was high when the respondents had used 50% or more of their paid leave. This result shows a similar trend to that of results of job satisfaction surveys in general companies and is not limited to hospitals [9]. Based on these findings, the reason that these factors had less influence on job satisfaction overall was because each individual and hospital had various ways of handling payment and different thoughts on these matters. Hence, these differences in values affected job satisfaction, and consequently, they did not produce uniform results in the analysis. However, conversely, these results suggest the necessity of improving the work environment for taking leave, as once this exceeds a certain standard, it affects the level of satisfaction.
The present study revealed that the existence of a male-female gender gap and sexual harassment lowered job satisfaction. Examples of the male-female gender gap highlighted in the responses included “married women are not promoted” and “dedicated technologist for mammography”. The example of “married women are not promoted” is believed to give the individual the impression that their work is not evaluated or treated properly. The example of “dedicated technologist for mammography” is considered to give the impression that the content of their work is limited compared to that of male technologists. Reports have shown that appropriate evaluation and treatment of a person’s work and the content of a person’s work is generally directly linked to motivation for working [10,11]. It can be easily inferred that this type of evaluation and treatment of a technologist’s work and the restrictions on their work content would lower the motivation of female technologists. Furthermore, there is no clear definition of male-female gender gap and sexual harassment, and it also differs depending on the person, which makes it difficult to implement drastic improvements. However, it is important to improve the working environment, including by actively surveying the environment within departments, and appropriately evaluating job performance.
5. Limitations of this study and future outlook
This study extracted factors that affected the job satisfaction of female technologists as basic data for creating a working environment that makes it easier for female technologists to continue working for a long period of time, as the demand for female technologists is expected to increase in the future.
The factors that strongly correlated with job satisfaction were not specific to women, as they are also common to men, including “years of experience” and “number of shifts on duty”. There are two possible reasons for these results.
The first is that a technologist’s job itself is a job where technical ability is demonstrated, so there is no significant difference in the level of satisfaction of female technologists and male technologists. However, since a similar questionnaire survey has not been conducted on male technologists, it is impossible to make a direct comparison or analysis. In the future, conducting a similar questionnaire survey for male technologists and identifying factors that make the working environment more comfortable for both female and male technologists would ascertain the differences in job satisfaction considered by female and male technologists and clarify the areas that require improvement.
The second is that an insufficient number of responses were obtained for questions specific to female technologists in the questionnaire survey that was analyzed in this study. This is believed to have had an effect on the fact that there were only a small number of factors specific to female technologists that were available for selection from Quantification Theory Type II.
The results of the questionnaire survey analyzed in this study contained a large number of missing values, where responses were not entered for the questions, which created a limitation for analysis. In particular, in response to questions on life events specific to women, such as marriage and childbirth, more than half the respondents stated that they were not married and had not experienced childbirth, which made it impossible to obtain an adequate sample size. This also made it difficult to examine women-specific variables. This point is also reflected in the fact that the correlation ratio, which shows the degree of fit with the model formula, was 0.404. Possible ways of improving this would be to conduct a questionnaire survey that includes not only currently working female technologists, but also female technologists who left their jobs due to marriage or childbirth, and to continue questionnaire surveys to collect more responses.
The questionnaire survey used in this study was the first survey focusing on women in Hokkaido. Regularly conducting these surveys in the future while revising the questions and identifying changes in response content is believed to further clarify factors that make the working environment more comfortable for women.