Here is an excerpt from an article written by Lise Vesterlund by Justine Jablonska for the McKinsey Quarterly, published by McKinsey & Company. To read the complete article, check out others, learn more about the firm, and sign up for email alerts, please click here.
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Why do so many women say yes to these nonpromotable tasks?
That’s an excellent question, and it’s exactly why we started the research that is the foundation of the book. You could imagine that there are many, many different reasons why women are doing this work. It could be that they really enjoy doing the work. It could be that they care more about getting it done or that they’re better at it. We ran a number of experiments to try to figure out, “Are these the reasons why women are doing it?
We found that women are not doing this work because they really enjoy it or care more about doing the work—and oftentimes, not because they’re any better at it. Rather, it’s because we all have the expectation that women will do this work. That collective expectation is held by managers and people who are asking them to do this work. Managers are 50 percent more likely to ask women to do nonpromotable work, and when women are asked, they are 50 percent more likely to say yes to these requests to do nonpromotable work.
Managers are 50 percent more likely to ask women to do nonpromotable work, and when women are asked, they are 50 percent more likely to say yes to these requests.
Women are asked more, they say yes more when they’re asked, and they will even volunteer more. This collective expectation that they take on this work is why they end up with the lion’s share of the work that will not help them get promoted in their organization.
And why are women disproportionately asked to do nonpromotable work?
We all more or less expect women to say yes to this work. In fact, this expectation that women will say yes to the work means that managers are 50 percent more likely to ask women when it comes to work that nobody wants to do. And this expectation makes women say yes more frequently than men. In fact, women have internalized this expectation that they should say yes—and that everybody else expects them to say yes.
All these requests and yeses from women result in women having a much larger load of nonpromotable work and not having sufficient time to do the promotable work. So when it comes to promotion, they really can’t compete. And that helps explain why we continue to see women falling behind men when it comes to advancement.
Why is your research important to gender equality?
We think the first step in this whole process is to bring awareness to this issue of women doing more nonpromotable work and how it hurts them and their organization. Once you get that awareness, it also helps you understand why we haven’t made a lot of progress on gender equality over the past 20, 30 years, despite the fact that we’ve been working so, so hard to try to really equalize the playing field and give people equal opportunity.
There has been a eureka moment for a lot of women: suddenly they have a word to attach to all the work that has been making them miserable. Men have intriguingly also recognized the problem. So many men have come up to us after seminars to say, “I recognize my spouse in this. I recognize my daughters in this. Can I please get some material to share with them?”
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Here is a direct link to the complete article.
Lise Vesterlund is director of the Pittsburgh Experimental Economics Laboratory. Justine Jablonska is an editor in McKinsey’s New York office.
Comments and opinions expressed by interviewees are their own and do not represent or reflect the opinions, policies, or positions of McKinsey & Company or have its endorsement.