Men, Help Us Stop Women’s Dead-End Work

Here's how to promote gender equity at work

Perhaps you get uneasy when conversation turns to the topic of gender equity in the workplace, not because you disagree with it—but because you don’t know how you can help. You know that women’s pay is lower and their promotions slower, but what can you do about it? We think we can offer a few concrete steps you can take to remove some of the obstacles women face in the workplace.  

There are a number of barriers to women’s advancement, but a big one is that they, more than men, are given non-promotable tasks (NPTs).  NPTs help the organization run smoothly and matter to its success, but they’re called non-promotable for a reason. While they help the organization, they bring no reward or recognition to the person who does them. Tasks like formatting a spreadsheet, handling a low revenue and time-consuming client, helping new employees become acclimated and, yes, even taking notes at meetings all need to be completed, and women are the ones doing most of this work. Women don’t do this work because they inherently are better at it, or enjoy it more, but because we all expect them to do it. It’s an unfortunate, but real, part of our shared experience. We suspect that you are nodding in recognition, reflecting on how you may have been successful in avoiding much of this work.  

When we’ve given talks about our book, The No Club – Putting a Stop to Women’s Dead-End Work, men see the women they love – partners, daughters, mothers – reflected in our research and they urgently ask us how they can help them. They see women’s frustration at working hard but getting nowhere, because they lack the time to focus on the work that matters most to their advancement. Other men worry about their female co-workers.  

One man told us the story of his friend and colleague, Maria, who gradually became overloaded with non-promotable work. Her days grew full of routine tasks, far removed from the challenging work she once did, and ultimately, she resigned and started over to recapture the work she had been trained to do. Her career’s downward turn complicated their friendship and made things awkward. This man told us how much he wished he could have helped Maria and asked us to provide guidance to men like him, so here are some ideas to put into practice. 

Start with the low-hanging fruit: Make people aware of the problem and speak out to stop the process of overloading women. If a woman is ‘voluntold’ to hire and oversee the department’s summer interns again, suggest the assignment be put on rotation and create a schedule. Our research shows that women are 50% more likely to volunteer than men are, so instead of asking for volunteers—draw names from a hat. If you are in a supervisory position, pay attention to whom you ask to do the non-promotable work and make sure you seek out both men and women. Once you balance the distribution of these tasks, everyone has the chance to do the work that moves the organization—and their own careers—forward.  

More systematically, if you are in a position to do so, you can help change how work is assigned in your organization. Start by making clear what is critical for career advancement—discuss what promotable work looks like so everyone knows. Identify non-promotable assignments and keep track of who is doing them. Are women at every rank doing more non-promotable work? It shouldn’t be that way—work should be allocated according to skill not gender. Using this data, you can help change how work is distributed. By raising awareness and intervening, you can take important steps to move the needle towards gender equity in your workplace.  

We’d like to point out, too, that there are things you can do outside of work to help the women in your life. If you are a father, a son, a brother, or a partner, the women you care about are likely to be overworked and underutilized in their jobs. Your partner’s salary increases may be smaller than those of her male colleagues’, which means your household income is less than it could be. Or, your partner may be overworked and coming home long after the normal workday ends—tired, dejected, not in the mood for small talk. Although you can’t intervene at her workplace as you can in yours, you can support her in taking steps (like those above) to improve her workload. There’s a lot you can do to help women—those you work with and those you live with--move forward in their careers, so please join us in our efforts to free women from their excessive load of dead-end work. The results will be worth it. Your workplace will be more productive and profitable, and employees will be happier and more engaged--and you can feel good about making a real contribution to all those positive outcomes.