Beautiful Virgin Islands

Wednesday, Oct 08, 2025

‘No reward or recognition’: why women should say no to ‘office housework’

‘No reward or recognition’: why women should say no to ‘office housework’

Accepting too many necessary yet thankless tasks is holding all women back, say the authors of The No Club

Many of us have a never-ending list of tasks that are work-related, but not quite work: writing up minutes from meetings, assembling entries for awards, serving on committees, selecting interns, organising holiday parties, shopping for leaving gifts.

Many, if not most, working women accept it as just part of the job. But taking one for the team could be holding all women back.

A new book argues that “non-promotable work” – the kind that is important to organisational functioning, but unlikely to be rewarded or even recognised – is the invisible hurdle to gender equality in the workplace, with women’s time and energy being disproportionately expended on thankless tasks.

“It’s not that women are do-gooders, who want to help out the group,” says Lise Vesterlund, an economics professor at the University of Pittsburgh. “They’re doing it because we’re expecting them to.”

Vesterlund and three friends wrote The No Club: Putting a Stop to Women’s Dead-End Work after finding themselves overwhelmed in their own careers a decade ago. “Initially it was about getting our own work lives under control,” she says.

Over years of research they found that across the public and private sectors, and a wide range of roles, female employees were shouldering the burden of “office housework” and low-value assignments, causing them to miss out on promotions and pay increases.

“We think this is a central part of why women are not advancing at similar rates to men,” says Vesterlund. From teachers to engineers, investment bankers to checkout clerks, “there is not an industry, occupation or rank that we have looked at where we didn’t see this being a problem”.

Their analysis of employee hours at a large consultancy firm found that regardless of seniority, the median woman spent about 200 more hours on non-promotable work each year than the median man – equating to approximately one month’s worth of dead-end tasks.

For junior women, it seemed to come at the expense of meaningful work, with junior men spending about 250 more hours each year on high-value work such as with clients. Senior women, on the other hand, spent the same amount of time on promotable tasks as senior men – meaning they just worked more hours in total.

The firm’s executives were “shocked” to learn of the size of the imbalance, says Vesterlund. “The magnitude of this is just so much greater than what organisations expect, which is why we need to spread the word.”

The reason for this imbalance is twofold, says Vesterlund: not only are women asked to do this work more often than men; when asked, they are more likely to say yes. “Women feel guilty when they say no – because we expect them to say yes.”

One experiment found that in a mixed-gender group, women were 48% more likely to volunteer to take on a task than men were. (Men volunteered more often when in a group without women.)

This collective expectation has been internalised by managers and employees alike, derailing individual careers and entrenching inequality. Vesterlund’s research found that employees with less productive assignments were paid less and found themselves unable to increase their pay through negotiation.

“Men are also more strategic in the non-promotable work that they do, selecting the tasks that will get them access and connections,” Vesterlund says.

A 2021 report by McKinsey found women to be taking the lead on employee wellbeing and diversity, equity and inclusion – often without thanks, even as such initiatives were trumpeted through the pandemic. “It is clearly seen as being critical work but it is not being rewarded or recognised,” says Vesterlund.

In fact, company commitments to equal representation – such as on panels or committees – can pile the responsibility on to just a few individuals, says Vesterlund, with minority ethnic women in particular “taxed” for their underrepresentation.

One study of teaching staff at a US university in 2012 found academics of colour spent three more hours a week on non-promotable service tasks than their white counterparts, with one respondent noting: “If you are one of two women in your department … [you] go on a lot of dinners.”

Combined with domestic responsibilities, not least caring for children and elderly relatives, this personal-pressure pileup is coalescing into a mental health crisis among working women. “The risk … remains very real,” warned the McKinsey report.

But Vesterlund and her co-authors argue that until the problem of non-promotable work is tackled, inequalities will persist.

The switch to hybrid working, often presented as increasing flexibility, could in fact worsen the problem by making women less visible. A Deloitte survey found that nearly 60% of those working remotely felt excluded from meetings, while 45% said they did not have enough exposure to leaders.

Vesterlund says the solution is for employers and employees to reflect on how non-promotable tasks are allocated within their organisation so that it can be made fairer. Managers could assign tasks at random or by a rota, split them between multiple employees, or align them with existing responsibilities or skills.

“The solution is to change the way we distribute work: once we give men and women equal opportunities to get assignments, many things will fall into place,” says Vesterlund.

In the meantime, the challenge is resisting the status quo. “When women are expected to say yes, it can cause backlash when they say no,” says Vesterlund. Men can help to redress the balance by putting themselves forward for non-promotable tasks before a female colleague volunteers, or by taking some off her plate.

Meanwhile, women can support each other to protect their time and boundaries, just as Vesterlund and her co-authors started doing a decade ago. Even so, she says: “I continue to be shocked by how easy it is for some of my male colleagues to say no – and how hard it is for me.”

Newsletter

Related Articles

Beautiful Virgin Islands
0:00
0:00
Close
France: Less Than a Month After His Appointment, the New French Prime Minister Resigns
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán stated that Hungary will not adopt the euro because the European Union is falling apart.
Sarah Mullally Becomes First Woman Appointed Archbishop of Canterbury
Mayor in western Germany in intensive care after stabbing
Australian government pays Deloitte nearly half a million dollars for a report built on fabricated quotes, fake citations, and AI-generated nonsense.
US Prosecutors Gained Legal Approval to Hack Telegram Servers
Macron Faces Intensifying Pressure to Resign or Trigger New Elections Amid France’s Political Turmoil
Standard Chartered Names Roberto Hoornweg as Sole Head of Corporate & Investment Banking
UK Asylum Housing Firm Faces Backlash Over £187 Million Profits and Poor Living Conditions
UK Police Crack Major Gang in Smuggling of up to 40,000 Stolen Phones to China
BYD’s UK Sales Soar Nearly Nine-Fold, Making Britain Its Biggest Market Outside China
Trump Proposes Farm Bailout from Tariff Revenues Amid Backlash from Other Industries
FIFA Accuses Malaysia of Forging Citizenship Documents, Suspends Seven Footballers
Latvia to Bar Tourist and Occasional Buses to Russia and Belarus Until 2026
A Dollar Coin Featuring Trump’s Portrait Expected to Be Issued Next Year
Australia Orders X to Block Murder Videos, Citing Online Safety and Public Exposure
Three Scientists Awarded Nobel Prize in Medicine for Discovery of Immune Self-Tolerance Mechanism
OpenAI and AMD Forge Landmark AI-Chip Alliance with Equity Option
Munich Airport Reopens After Second Drone Shutdown
France Names New Government Amid Political Crisis
Trump Stands Firm in Shutdown Showdown and Declares War on Drug Cartels — Turning Crisis into Opportunity
Surge of U.S. Billionaires Transforms London’s Peninsula Apartments into Ultra-Luxury Stronghold
Pro Europe and Anti-War Babiš Poised to Return to Power After Czech Parliamentary Vote
Jeff Bezos Calls AI Surge a ‘Good’ Bubble, Urges Focus on Lasting Innovation
Japan’s Ruling Party Chooses Sanae Takaichi, Clearing Path to First Female Prime Minister
Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs Sentenced to Fifty Months in Prison Following Prostitution Conviction
Taylor Swift’s ‘Showgirl’ Launch Extends Billion-Dollar Empire
Trump Administration Launches “TrumpRx” Plan to Enable Direct Drug Sales at Deep Discounts
Trump Announces Intention to Impose 100 Percent Tariff on Foreign-Made Films
Altman Says GPT-5 Already Outpaces Him, Warns AI Could Automate 40% of Work
Singapore and Hong Kong Vie to Dominate Asia’s Rising Gold Trade
Trump Organization Teams with Saudi Developer on $1 Billion Trump Plaza in Jeddah
Manhattan Sees Surge in Office-to-Housing Conversions, Highest Since 2008
Switzerland and U.S. Issue Joint Assurance Against Currency Manipulation
Electronic Arts to Be Taken Private in Historic $55 Billion Buyout
Thomas Jacob Sanford Named as Suspect in Deadly Michigan Church Shooting and Arson
Russian Research Vessel 'Yantar' Tracked Mapping Europe’s Subsea Cables, Raising Security Alarms
New York Man Arrested After On-Air Confession to 2017 Parents’ Murders
U.S. Defense Chief Orders Sudden Summit of Hundreds of Generals and Admirals
Global Cruise Industry Posts Dramatic Comeback with 34.6 Million Passengers in 2024
Trump Claims FBI Planted 274 Agents at Capitol Riot, Citing Unverified Reports
India: Internet Suspended in Bareilly Amid Communal Clashes Between Muslims and Hindus
Supreme Court Extends Freeze on Nearly $5 Billion in U.S. Foreign Aid at Trump’s Request
Archaeologists Recover Statues and Temples from 2,000-Year-Old Sunken City off Alexandria
China Deploys 2,000 Workers to Spain to Build Major EV Battery Factory, Raising European Dependence
Speed Takes Over: How Drive-Through Coffee Chains Are Rewriting U.S. Coffee Culture
U.S. Demands Brussels Scrutinize Digital Rules to Prevent Bias Against American Tech
Ringo Starr Champions Enduring Beatles Legacy While Debuting Las Vegas Art Show
Private Equity’s Fundraising Surge Triggers Concern of European Market Shake-Out
Colombian President Petro Vows to Mobilize Volunteers for Gaza and Joins List of Fighters
×