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I know it’s a lot better now than it was before, but don’t you sometimes wonder why women, despite all our educational and overall work achievements, still struggle to break through the glass ceiling? As seen with women all over the world now becoming CEOs, MDs, Governors, Vice-Presidents, etc, it’s safe to say we’re eventually breaking through although it takes a lot more work and effort than our male peers have to put in. There are a lot of reasons why this is happening but one major reason that isn’t discussed often is that women aren’t leaning in more because we are being held back by “non-promotable” tasks.
Occasionally, everyone; irrespective of gender, gets asked to do things they weren’t particularly hired to do. You know, that part of your JD that says “other duties as assigned by the functional lead”. The real set-up lol!
The problem is that women often get more of these “other duties” and they tend to be thankless dead-end tasks. Then they’ll be wrapped up in seeming “compliments” like “women are more organized”, or ” women tend to pay more attention to details” or the one I hate most, “women just have a way with these things”. What does that even mean?
On one episode of the “Women at Work” podcast hosted by Harvard Business Review, I heard the story of one lady who was always assigned the responsibility of taking notes during team meetings when someone else could take them. There was also another lady who was expected to take on additional tasks like watering the plants in the team’s shared office. Ladies, you may be all too familiar with situations like these. Oftentimes, we are the ones tasked with ordering a birthday cake for a team member or ordering lunch at a team off-site. The interesting thing about it all is that, even if we aren’t assigned, we typically are the first to volunteer for these non-promotable tasks. That’s right, you could say we are our own problem…or are we?
Lisa Vesterlund, a behavioral & experimental economist and an economics professor at the University of Pittsburgh, says non-promotable tasks aren’t only routine work like writing a report or planning an event. They could also present like being assigned a client who doesn’t bring in a lot of revenue for the business. In an experiment conducted by Lisa and her colleagues, they found that when women and men are put in a group and someone needs to volunteer for a task that no one wants to do, women will typically step forward. When women are not in the group, one of the men (or more) would volunteer and get it done. The experiment had a third part where a manager was brought in to select someone for the task and they found that managers (irrespective of gender) were 40% likely to select a woman!
This means that women don’t volunteer from a place of being altruistic or feeling like the task is beneficial, it’s more because we believe that we are expected to step up for such tasks or otherwise risk being perceived as not being a team player. Meanwhile, the fact that you’re a team player by doing these dead-end tasks almost never guarantees that you’d get a promotion, which basically hinders career advancement. Make it make sense o.
Think about it, if 2 candidates were put forward for a promotion, it’s the candidate who has completed a set of tasks that were challenging, requiring a unique combination of business skills and that could be directly linked to the growth of the business, who would be selected for the promotion.
Please dears, let’s not lose focus and women abeg don’t lose guard. Let’s all be more conscious of this bias towards women in the workplace and commit to breaking it because women also deserve a seat at the table. No one deserves to be held back in their career journey solely because of their gender.
Happy Women’s History Month!
