This article is written by Linda Babcock, James M. Walton Professor of Economics at Carnegie Mellon University, Brenda Peyser, Former Associate Dean of the School of Public Policy and Management at Carnegie Mellon University, Lise Vesterlund, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Economics at the University of Pittsburgh and Laurie Weingart, Richard M. and Margaret S. Cyert Professor of Organizational Behavior and Theory at Carnegie Mellon University

It’s 8:30 am, you’re going through your email, and realize you need a summary of your employees’ time-off requests for the past month. It’s a mundane task that doesn’t take a lot of expertise or skill, it just takes a lot of time. You go through the members of your team in your mind. Who are you most likely to delegate the project to?

Our research shows that you are more likely to ask a woman than a man. There is a good reason: Women are more likely to say “yes”, which makes your job a lot easier. But there is a problem with taking the easy route. Women perform these “non-promotable tasks” — tasks that are important to the organization, but usually come without reward or recognition for the person who does them — more often than men.

The people who do a disproportionate share of this work have less time to do the work that is rewarded — and this can slow their career advancement.

Taking one for the team

What are non-promotable tasks (NPTs)?

Generally, they include work that is of less value to the mission or bottom line of the organization (like the example above, summarizing time-off requests), or work that supports others and is hidden from view (building a presentation deck rather than presenting it). And, of course, there is office housework – cleaning the supply closet or taking notes at a meeting — tasks that are in no one’s job description, but still need to be done.

Studies in the pharmaceutical industry, universities, grocery stores, and the U.S. Transportation Safety Agency (among others), show that women perform more non-promotable tasks than do men. This disproportionate workload can lead to stress, dissatisfaction, and turnover if it goes unchecked. At the same time, organizations lose out when they aren’t effectively utilizing their labour pool. When women are assigned work that doesn’t use their skills to full advantage, it impedes the organization from achieving its goals.

Why do women end up with more of this work? That’s what interested us. We posited that managers would allocate more NPTs to women because women are expected to say yes. To test this, we ran a series of experiments to see whether women were more likely to perform an NPT by volunteering, whether managers expected them to volunteer and whether managers would ask them to do the NPT.

It is only in groups of mixed gender where the women do more because everyone, men and women, expects them to

In the study, everyone was better off (i.e., got a payment) if one person volunteered before a deadline, but the volunteer’s payment was smaller than other members of their group.

Volunteering amounted to “taking one for the team” — performing a non-promotable task that helps everyone in the group, but the volunteer is helped the least. In the first experiment, where people worked in groups composed of men and women, women were 48% more likely to volunteer than were their male counterparts.

This wasn’t because the women were more altruistic or risk-averse, but because of expectations. We demonstrated this in our second experiment using groups of all-men or all-women and found that the differences in the rate of volunteering between men and women disappeared. Men, knowing that only men were in their group, now had different expectations of who should volunteer. Without the women to rely on, they stepped up more.

Interestingly, the women engaged in a similar assessment — they stepped back when grouped with all women. The women could count on someone else to volunteer. It is only in groups of mixed gender where the women do more because everyone, men and women, expects them to.

Men should volunteer more so women don’t feel like they have to

Finally, we looked at whether managers (male and female) were more likely to ask women to volunteer (and get the lower payment). To each mixed-gender group, we added a manager whose role was to ask someone to volunteer. What did we find? Women received 44% more requests to volunteer than men.

Intriguingly, the gender of the manager did not make a difference. Both male and female managers were more likely to ask the women in the group to volunteer. This was, apparently, a wise decision: Women were more likely to say yes, they accepted a request to volunteer 76% of the time while the men only accepted 51% of the time. These results show that collectively held expectations cause women to volunteer more, be asked more, and accept more requests to “take one for the team.”

Now that we understand this pervasive problem, what can we do to address it?

Our research speaks volumes. We know that it is our expectations rather than inherent qualities of women that cause women in the workforce to do so much non-promotable work, whether through volunteering or through being assigned the tasks. As a first step, we need to stop taking the easy route and asking the women. Instead, here are some steps managers can take to create equity in the workplace:

  • Get a realistic view of how people are spending their time. Conduct an assessment of tasks and their promotability to get a sense of the work people do and how NPTs are allocated across your workforce. Check to make sure that tasks are falling into the right buckets and are appropriately rewarded.
  • Adopt alternative methods of task allocation: rotate assignments so that employees with similar jobs get the same load of NPTs. To do this, managers should stop asking for volunteers and can instead draw names from a hat or set up a schedule for the tasks.
  • Develop norms and expectations for how much time employees should spend on NPTs and track their progress towards that upper limit. Use this data in making decisions that distribute future work to even out the load. Tracking these assignments ensures that we do not overly burden one person (or group).
  • Allow NPTs to become bankable such that they can be exchanged for future requests.
  • Re-bundle tasks within jobs, moving tasks that are non-promotable for one job to other jobs for which the task would be profitable.

Just saying “no” does not solve the problem. The task still needs to be done and it is likely that if one woman says no, another will be asked in her place

We focus on suggestions for managers because that is the best way to effect lasting change within an organization. However, that doesn’t mean that the rest of us have no influence.

  • Men and women can pay more attention to who is doing the lion’s share of non-promotable tasks and make sure management is aware of any imbalanced distributions that might exist.
  • Since the uneven distribution of non-promotable tasks is often unintentional, the message can be delivered in a non-accusatory way, avoiding defensive reactions.
  • Men should volunteer more so women don’t feel like they have to.
  • When asked to take on a new NPT, discuss with your manager which other NPT you can take off your plate to free up time.

And one final note – just saying “no” does not solve the problem. The task still needs to be done and it is likely that if one woman says no, another will be asked in her place.

These simple, inexpensive solutions will provide gender equity in the workplace, prevent the stagnation of women’s careers, and better optimize the workforce.

It is important to consider how the Covid-19 pandemic might alter the conclusions and recommendations from our research. With historic levels of unemployment and suffering, is it the right time to focus on inequities at work? Perhaps. Historically pandemics have exacerbated a wide range of inequities and there is no reason to suspect that this one will be any different.

The closing of schools and daycares and the increased demands of caring for ill family members are already creating increased caretaking demands on families. As these roles have traditionally fallen disproportionately to women, they will face increased pressures and stress that arise from balancing work and family commitments. As new paradigms of workplace routines are being put in place due to the pandemic it is a good time to make sure that organizations are equitably distributing different types of work across their male and female employees. Now may be a good time to make adjustments such as those we suggest above to remove barriers to women’s success. — Linda Babcock, Brenda Peyser, Lise Vesterlund, & Laurie Weingart

📚 This article is part of the free email boot camp 7 days of inspiration for International Women’s Day. Sign up here.

(Picture credit: Unsplash )