The Email Asked for Volunteers. You Replied by Friday Lunchtime.

Load · The Reading Room, Vol. 108 · 8 min read · what a field study, three experiments and one very quiet email found about who gets asked

Non-promotable tasks are the work that keeps an organisation running and does nothing for the career of the person doing it. Four researchers spent years measuring who ends up with it. The answer was not only that women volunteer more. It was that everyone, men and women alike, asks women first.

The short answer: non-promotable tasks are pieces of work that benefit an organisation but are unlikely to advance the career of whoever does them: committees, onboarding, event planning, informal mentoring, note-taking. Research found that women volunteer for these tasks more than men, are asked to do them more often, and are more likely to say yes when asked, driven largely by a shared expectation that women will agree.¹

The email arrives at 4:50 on a Thursday. The organisation is setting up a working group on the new onboarding process and is looking for volunteers. It will meet fortnightly. It will produce a document. Nobody will be promoted for it, and everybody knows it.

You read it and feel the familiar small tug. Somebody has to do it. You would do it well. The last working group was a mess because the wrong people ran it. By Friday lunchtime you have replied. By the following spring it is the third such group you are on, alongside mentoring two junior colleagues, organising the leaving drinks, and being the person in every meeting who writes things down. Your actual job gets done in the evenings.

Jump to: What counts as non-promotable · What the studies found · Why it gets heavier with seniority · How to say no · Questions women actually ask

What are non-promotable tasks?

They are tasks that help the organisation but carry little visibility, little connection to the core measures of performance, and little chance of being rewarded at review time. The researchers’ own examples were writing a report and serving on a committee: work everyone would prefer someone else did.¹

The category is broader than most women realise, because much of it does not look like a task at all. Planning the office party. Onboarding the new hire. Covering for a colleague on leave. Being the person who notices that a client relationship is fraying and quietly repairs it. Sitting on the diversity committee. Mentoring, formally or otherwise. All of it matters. Very little of it appears in the promotion case.

What did the research on non-promotable tasks actually find?

The work was led by Linda Babcock, an economist at Carnegie Mellon, with Lise Vesterlund of the University of Pittsburgh, Laurie Weingart of Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School, and Maria Recalde. It was published in the American Economic Review in 2017, and it came in stages.¹

First, a field study. Faculty at a large university received an email asking for volunteers for a faculty senate committee, a classic non-promotable task. Only 3.7% volunteered at all. But female faculty were 2.7 times as likely as male faculty to be among them.²

Then a series of experiments. Groups were set up so that one person had to volunteer to earn less, so that everyone else in the group earned more. If nobody volunteered, everyone earned the least. In mixed groups, women were 50% more likely than men to volunteer.²

The next finding is the one that matters most, because it removes the easy explanation. When men and women knew they were grouped only with people of their own sex, the gap disappeared: men and women volunteered at the same rates.² If women were simply more generous by nature, that would not happen. What changed was the room.

And then the asking. When participants could choose whom to ask, both men and women were 12 percentage points more likely to ask a woman than a man. Women were also more likely to say yes when asked.² The researchers concluded that beliefs that women say yes more than men appear to be an important driver of the whole pattern.¹

If you have never counted how many of these you are carrying at once, alongside everything at home, the Quiet Audit counts them for you in ten minutes, on one page. Start here.

Why does it get heavier as you get more senior?

The studies measured volunteering and asking, not seniority, so this part is an inference, and it is worth being clear about that. But the mechanism the research found works in one direction over a career. Every yes makes you the obvious person to ask next time. By your fifties, you have a reputation as the one who handles things, and the reputation does the asking for you.

Seniority also adds a new layer of requests that are hard to refuse: mentoring the women coming up behind you, representing the organisation on external panels, sitting on the committee because a senior woman is needed on it. These can matter a great deal, to you and to other people. They are also, often, non-promotable, and they tend to arrive on top of the tasks you picked up twenty years ago rather than replacing them.

The authors spelled out the consequence plainly. If women hold tasks that are less promotable than those held by men, women will progress more slowly in organisations.¹ For a woman who is already at director level and wondering why the last step up keeps going to someone else, that sentence is worth sitting with.

How do you say no to non-promotable tasks?

The researchers turned their findings into a book, The No Club, written by Babcock and three co-authors, and its central idea is simple: choose. Refusing everything was never the aim. Some non-promotable work is worth doing because it matters to you. The problem is the portion you took on only because you were asked, and because some part of you expected to be.

The practice is one decision, made at the moment the next request arrives. Before replying, take the email or the question and ask one thing: “If I were a man at my level, would I have been asked this?” If the honest answer is no, the request is working through exactly the mechanism the study measured, and you are allowed to decline it.

The sentence for declining does not need to be clever. “I can’t take this on this quarter. It might be a good visibility opportunity for someone earlier in their career.” That is all. It names a real limit and points the task somewhere, which makes it easier for the person asking to move on, and it does not require you to explain your calendar.

If the reason saying no feels impossible is less about the task and more about a lifetime of guilt around refusing anyone anything, that has its own piece: saying no without the guilt hangover. And if the specific version in your life is the notebook, the one you open in every meeting without being asked, the research on that is in nobody assigned it, you just opened the document.

Questions women actually ask about this

What are examples of non-promotable tasks?

Serving on committees, organising events, onboarding new staff, taking meeting notes, informal mentoring, covering for absent colleagues, and smoothing over team conflict. The common thread is that the work helps the organisation but is rarely counted when promotions are decided.

Why do women do more non-promotable tasks?

Research found women volunteer more, are asked more, and say yes more often. In experiments, the gap disappeared in single-sex groups, and both men and women were more likely to ask women.² The researchers pointed to shared expectations that women will agree, rather than any fixed difference in generosity.¹

Is saying no to non-promotable tasks bad for my career?

Declining everything can carry a cost, and women in the research reported more worry than men about the consequences of saying no.² Declining selectively, and redirecting the task, is usually safer than taking on everything, because an overloaded calendar also carries a career cost.¹

What is The No Club?

It is a 2022 book by Linda Babcock and three co-authors, grown out of a group the four women formed to help each other decline unrewarded work. It draws on their research on non-promotable tasks and offers practical ways to choose which of these tasks to keep.

Is mentoring a non-promotable task?

Often, yes, unless your organisation formally counts it. It can still be worth doing. Such work has value. The research simply shows it is asked of women disproportionately, which is a reason to choose it deliberately rather than absorb it by default.

Underneath the committees and the notes sits a larger picture of everything you carry that no job description includes, and it has its own measurement in our guide to the mental load and why it lands where it lands.

On the research. The field study was run at one university and the experiments used a stylised task in a laboratory. The researchers did not study women in their fifties specifically or measure seniority, so the section on seniority is an inference from the mechanism, stated as one.

References
1. Babcock L, Recalde MP, Vesterlund L, Weingart L. Gender Differences in Accepting and Receiving Requests for Tasks with Low Promotability. American Economic Review. 2017;107(3):714-747.
2. Gender Action Portal, Harvard Kennedy School. Summary of Babcock et al., gender differences in requests for non-promotable tasks.
3. Babcock L, Peyser B, Vesterlund L, Weingart LR. The No Club: Putting a Stop to Women’s Dead-End Work. New York: Simon & Schuster; 2022.

Written by Tomasz Nowak for Blue Leaf Journal.