Let’s Do Less Dead-End Work (Interview with Lise Vesterlund)

A conversation with Lise Vesterlund

Women are expected and asked to do thankless tasks—order lunch, handle less-valued clients—more than men, and research shows that doing those tasks slows down our career advancement and makes us unhappy at work. Why do we wind up with so much office drudgery, and how do we get some of it off our plates?

Women at Work cohosts Amy Bernstein, Sarah Green Carmichael, and Nicole Torres spoke with University of Pittsburgh economics professor Lise Vesterlund about why women get stuck with—even volunteer for—tasks that won’t show off our skills or get us promoted, and how that slows down our career advancement and makes us unhappy at work.

LISE VESTERLUND: For a long time, I’ve been concerned about the fact that women, despite overall improvements in the labor market, still struggle to break through the glass ceiling. Maybe the reason they’re not leaning in more is because they’re being held back by what we characterize as non-promotable tasks. A non-promotable task could be a client that doesn’t bring in a lot of revenue to the firm or where the requirements of the task are quite limited.

NICOLE TORRES: What are the implications of this? If women are volunteering for tasks that won’t get them promoted and if they’re doing these jobs more than men, how does this hold them back in their careers?

LISE: If you’re trying to determine which of two candidates to promote, you’re likely to select the one who completed a set of tasks that demonstrated their unique skills. If women more than men have a portfolio of tasks that are less promotable, then they’re not going to get promoted as quickly. In fact, they may never get promoted. In terms of advancement, it’s not advantageous for women to end up with these tasks. We’re finding that in a lot of places, women’s happiness at work is limited relative to men’s—especially in the field of engineering. In engineering, women report ending up with tasks that are very different from what they thought they were getting trained for. This includes engineers from top schools. Men and women are going to college, getting their degrees, entering the labor market, and then the women are more likely to report being unsatisfied with the tasks they’re given at work. If you’re constantly asked to fill in for someone else and are assigned tasks that don’t show off your potential, you’re not going to be happy at work or perform as well as you could have if you’d had a more challenging and exciting task. It has very serious consequences for women in terms of promotability, but also their overall attachment to a labor market influenced by a portfolio of tasks that are less promotable.

AMY BERNSTEIN: Is it advisable to call out the work as non-promotable?

LISE: That’s not advisable because most firms will argue that all work is promotable. It’s a question of saying, “Many of my tasks have become routine. Can I get tasks that demand more, where I can show off my skills?”

NICOLE: These tasks change over the course of your career, too. Something can be non-promotable to a higher-ranking senior executive, but it might be promotable to someone more junior.

LISE: Absolutely. If you’re a junior partner, taking on a low-profile case and demonstrating that you can do a good job by yourself is very likely a promotable task. When you become a senior partner, that’s probably not a promotable task. Serving on a hiring committee, for example, is extremely important to an organization, and it’s probably a good place to start when you’re junior in a firm, but later on, serving on a hiring committee is not going to get you noticed. It changes across your career.

AMY: The simple-minded way of dealing with this would be to say, “No, I won’t do this anymore.” But the world is not usually welcoming to that kind of response. How do you deal with the backlash of saying no?

LISE: We’re not recommending that people just start saying no. Part of what I find exciting about this work is that beliefs play such a large role. I’ve done a lot of work on gender and competition as well. We find that men are more competitive and overconfident. We don’t want to tell women, “You should be super-competitive and overconfident,” because those are not necessarily the leaders that we really want. In this case, it’s easier to figure out what to do, because if it’s a question of beliefs, we can move those around. Go back to your firm and say, “Who ends up taking on these tasks every time?” Making it clear that women are not signing up to do the holiday party because there’s nothing better to do and really clarifying to the institutions that they are losing out by having these differential task assignments. If I have a group of males and females with MBAs, the best way to run my corporation is to figure out who is the most talented. I’m not going to figure that out if all my female new hires are working on non-promotable tasks. From the firm’s perspective, having differences in allocations before even identifying their underlying talent is clearly not optimal. I’ve spoken to corporations that started coaching women: They tell the women that when they come into a meeting and already know that a project or a client that is less promotable is getting assigned, the women should “look at the body language of your male colleagues as this project comes up and nobody wants to take it.” They tell the women to mimic the body language that men have as they start checking their phones, putting things away, or pulling back from the table. Then you don’t end up in a position where you suddenly feel so stressed by the silence that you’re the one who says yes.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: What if the manager calls on you and says, “Can you take this on?” Is there a way to say no in the moment without incurring backlash?

LISE: You don’t want to be a naysayer. But there are ways that you can negotiate it a little bit. If you’re in a public meeting, saying no in front of others isn’t advisable. But going up to the manager afterward and saying, “The projects I’ve been assigned recently are all of the same character. If I’m taking this on, can I not take on the next one? Or can we assign the other non-promotable work to someone else?” When I first got my job, I was assigned to be on the website committee. I responded by saying, “The website committee is a very nice committee, but I would really like to be on the hiring committee instead, where I would actually have some impact.”

SARAH: I’ve been in that position, and I usually say something like, “I’d love to be a good team player and help out with this,” or “I’d really like to be in a position where I could help.” Then I give the reason why I can’t. I try to nod to what’s expected of me as a female. “Oh, I would love to be helpful, but unfortunately I can’t.” Short of asking people in gender-isolated settings to volunteer for tasks at work, is there a way that we can get men to volunteer more, or to say yes more when we ask them to do things?

LISE: A lot of men don’t recognize that not stepping up to a task means that a woman is likely to do it. When people volunteer, it’s not because they really want to do the task. Or, if you said no to volunteering, it really means that you’re putting this additional burden on women.

AMY: You’ve formed a group to cope with this problem?

LISE: The whole project came out of a “no” club. We were five women, all finding ourselves in the same situation, where the work that we really enjoyed was accounting for a smaller and smaller share. So once a month, we met and talked about the requests that we had gotten, and the things that we had said yes and no to. I would get requests that I felt underqualified for. I would feel like the only time I’d ever be asked is right now, so if I don’t say yes now (even if it’s going to kill me), they will never ask me again. A very common trigger for women is, “I can get it turned around really quickly and just get it done.” I would often be in the position where I would get a request and feel very selfish for saying no. I never considered that the “yes” meant that I was saying no to something else. What the club helped me become aware of was that, by saying, “Yes, I will help you out with that report,” I was also saying no to spending time with my deserving kids, who had been waiting all week to see me. Once I became aware of that trade-off, it became easier to say no.

NICOLE: What’s an example of something that you brought to the group and the advice they gave you?

LISE: I agreed to be on an editorial board for a very good journal in economics, and I was drowning in editorial work. Initially, they told me, “Don’t take the position.” But senior mentors advised me that this was very prestigious and that I should say yes. Then I couldn’t do it, because it was so much work. I met with the no group on a Friday night over a glass of wine, and they told me that by Monday morning, I needed to resign from the editorial board. The minute I sent the email, I felt like I was hanging out with a bunch of friends who told me to jump off a roof, and I stupidly did it. At the time, I was horrified of the consequences. But it was the only right thing to do. Sometimes saying no is scary. But there’s a limit to how many hours you’re supposed to be working.

SARAH: Time is the only finite resource that any of us really has. Everything else is fungible, but we all have the same amount of time in a day.

LISE: It’s also important to think about the things I really want to say yes to. It’s not just saying no, no, no. It’s saying no so that you can do the things that you really care about. What is distressing in talking about this is that it’s a conversation that you can have with a lot of women. The men appear not to listen so much. It has to be made clear to corporations and business leaders that if they saddle women with more of this non-promotable work, they’re not going to find the best talent. It’s a corporate responsibility to change the way that we allocate these tasks.