After being hurt, they decided to leave the city—workplace microaggressions and the disappearance of a sense of urban belonging.

On Friday evening, the cafés on Financial Street were full of people who had just gotten off work. A friend said softly through the steam of her latte: "I'm planning to move to Suzhou at the end of the year. It's not that the opportunities here are bad, but it's that feeling, you know? Getting cut off mid-sentence in meetings, having my proposals treated as a mere formality, never receiving replies to emails—none of these are big deals, but day after day, I find myself starting to hate the city itself."

Her words happened to be corroborated by a newly published study. A survey published in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, covering 327 female employees in 54 cities, attempted to answer one question: Could workplace "microaggressions" (workplace incivility) make women want to leave the city?

The answer leans toward the affirmative. The study found that workplace incivility is significantly positively correlated with women's "intention to leave the city." Those who have experienced condescension, indifference, or being unreasonably interrupted in the office are more likely to develop a sense of aversion to the city—not toward work itself, but toward the entire composite of steel and concrete.

Low Intensity, High Harm

Workplace incivility is defined as "a low-intensity deviant behavior that violates the norms of mutual respect in interpersonal interactions." It is not as overt as workplace bullying; it is more like a creaking sound under the floorboards—you always hear it, yet often ignore it. However, researchers caution that this seemingly minor disrespect has a natural tendency to escalate. It may evolve from an offhand sarcastic remark into being excluded from core meetings, and then into having one's contributions systematically erased.

The gender dimension is even more critical. In real workplace environments, women are more likely than men to be the primary recipients of this subtle hostility. When they try to express their views in professional settings and are frequently interrupted; when their suggestions require more evidence to be adopted; when their clothing, tone of voice, or even family roles are inappropriately brought up—these daily micro-harms form a chronic psychological stress.

Long-term longitudinal studies show that up to 98% of employees have experienced some form of workplace incivility during their careers. It is not an occasional lapse, but a latent norm lurking within organizational structures. Previous research has thoroughly demonstrated how it erodes trust, creativity, and organizational citizenship behavior within organizations, but this paper extends the lens even further: it makes people leave a city.

The City: A 'Perpetrator' Guilty by Association

"Intention to leave the city" is a relatively novel analytical framework. It refers to an individual's tendency to want to leave due to pervasive dissatisfaction with the city, manifested as reluctance to participate in the city's public affairs, actively considering moving to other cities, or even going to great lengths to avoid returning in the future. Behind this concept lies a crisis of "belonging."The researchers found that when women encounter workplace incivility, if they attribute the experience to the city's social atmosphere—such as an excessively cold competitive culture, overly transactional interpersonal interactions, or a lack of safety in public spaces—they are more likely to turn "just put up with it" into "time to leave." The city here becomes a huge emotional container. The hurt suffered in the office is projected onto streets, subways, shopping malls, and parks. You no longer see the city's scenery; instead, you see the backdrop to your wounds.

This "guilt-by-association" effect is even more pronounced in societies with higher mobility. The paper introduces the variable of "relationship mobility," which refers to the room an individual's environment provides for establishing new social relationships. High relationship mobility means people can easily make new friends and integrate into new communities; low relationship mobility means social circles resemble closed-door meetings. The study finds that relationship mobility negatively predicts women's intention to leave the city and plays a moderating role between workplace incivility and exit intention. In other words, when a city offers abundant social outlets—coffee shops, book clubs, nighttime gyms, weekend markets—spaces that allow people to re-establish emotional connections, injured employees may yet fall in love with the city again.

Another moderating variable is urban livability. When a city's infrastructure, cultural services, and environmental quality are good enough, they seem to provide a buffer against the harm caused by workplace incivility. The fact is: what a city offers is not only salary and positions, but also the texture of life in the six hours after work—whether it can soothe those fragile emotions.

The Office Has the Final Say on Whether a City Is Gentle

Linking workplace incivility to population mobility has been rare in previous urban studies. When people talk about a city's attractiveness, they usually focus on industrial structure, GDP, housing prices, and educational and medical resources. This article, however, points out that those minor offenses remaining at the organizational level also constitute hidden variables in urban competitiveness.

In human resources research, there is a saying: employees leave not because of the company, but because of their immediate supervisor. By this measure, whether a city is livable may depend not only on its green coverage rate and commuting time, but also on the tone of speech used in the office. This is especially true for women—the "low-intensity hostility" they face in the workplace is often packaged as "just joking" or "you're overthinking it." But it is precisely this unacknowledged emotional labor that, once past a certain tipping point, makes people entirely give up on a city.

This is also why, whenever a city's creative industries begin to rise, we often see many women seeking a moment of respite in independent coffee shops, cultural spaces, and shared study rooms. It's not that they don't love the city's past; rather, they are trying to find a more generous social order outside the cold, indifferent cubicles. The warmth of those spaces may retain people far better than any investment-attraction policy.The proliferation of remote work has further amplified this contractual relationship between individuals and cities. When the workplace is no longer tied to a physical office, people have gained unprecedented choice. As a result, cities have begun to compete for "the heart's belonging," not just "opportunity." If a city cannot offer basic respect between nine and six every day, what right does it have to ask people to entrust it with the rest of their lives?

Farewell, or a New Beginning

The conclusion of the study suggests that these findings not only enrich human resource management theory, but also provide a basis for fundamental urban population management policies. But for those of us living in cities, it reads more like a reminder: a city is not an abstract entity, but a fabric woven from countless concrete encounters. A nod across a conference table, a glance in an elevator, the space a stranger yields by stepping aside during the evening rush hour—all of these jointly write the character of a city.

Perhaps that friend never did leave. She later met a new colleague who, at a meeting, flipped her forgotten PowerPoint back to the first page. She said that in that moment, she suddenly felt the city wasn't so bad after all. And the research tells us this is precisely no coincidence—the power of relational mobility and urban livability lies in their ability to give wounded hearts a buffer zone, letting them think twice before leaving.

A city, in the end, should not be a place people want to flee. It should be a place where, even after being hurt, one is willing to stay and heal.

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This article is written based on publicly available academic research. The original study was published by Jianpeng Fan. Reference link: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-025-06366-7