It’s All About the Rank

For 25 years Lory Manning lived in an alternate universe. She watched as most of her classmates in 1969 headed to further education, became teachers or homemakers. Manning did something a little different: participated in international negotiations and managed $3 million budgets. "At that time there weren't as many options for women," says Manning. "I wanted to travel, I wanted an adventure, and I wanted to do something where I could get paid just like the men."

Manning saw one place where she could do all of that: the military. She joined the Navy as an officer straight out of college and continued to serve up until the mid-'90s, making tours through Iceland and Panama. "I had opportunities there that I wouldn't have had anywhere else," says Manning, who now directs the Women in the Military Project at the Women's Research and Education Institute. "I liked the sense that based on my own merits [I was] given more responsibility."

Any list of the best places to work is sure to include cool favorites like Google. The U.S. military? The sacrifices and risks required of its members seem to make it an unlikely pick. But new research suggests that it may well belong on such a list, particularly for minorities and women. The members of those two demographics in the military consistently rate their jobs as more satisfying than white males do, according to new research in this month's American Sociological Review. Much like Manning's military experience, the study of over 30,000 active duty personnel suggests that the armed forces' social hierarchy—explicitly based on rank—overrides many of the racial or gender biases in civil society, which tend to act as barriers for women and minorities in career advancement.

"Whites are far and away the least satisfied [in the military]," says Jennifer Hickes Lundquist, a sociologist at the University of Massachusetts and the study author. "Black females tend to be the most satisfied. It's a direct opposite and complete reversal of what we know about civilian job satisfaction."

In civilian society African-Americans generally express higher dissatisfaction with their jobs than their white counterparts and are less committed. But Lundquist's study of 30,000 active-duty personnel found that those norms are largely flipped in the military. She looked at five measurements of career satisfaction, including overall quality of life and opportunities for advancement, and found African-American women to be the most positive and satisfied with their jobs, followed by African-American men, Latinas, Latinos and white women. White men are the least satisfied with their military careers, rating their satisfaction and overall happiness with their jobs much lower.

"It's not that the military environment treats white males less fairly; it's simply that, compared to their peers in civilian society, white males lose many of the advantages that they had," Lundquist says. "There's a relative deprivation when you compare to satisfaction of peers outside of the military."