In early October, WAPPP welcomed current fellow Lise Vesterlund, the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Economics at the University of Pittsburgh and coauthor of The No Club: Putting a Stop to Women’s Dead-End Work, for a seminar on “Gendered Work: Onset and Consequences.” Vesterlund’s research has established gendered work assignments as a driver of gender gaps in promotion and compensation—the “structural problem that prevents women from reaching their potential in organizations.” WAPPP fellow Siri Chilazi spoke with Lise about her work and key insights.
Q: The concept of “non-promotable tasks” is central in your work. What exactly are these tasks and why do they matter?
A: Non-promotable tasks are assignments that benefit the organization but don’t help the individual performing them advance. Think of onboarding new employees, resolving team conflicts, organizing social events, or helping others with their work. These tasks are essential for the workplace to function, but they are often invisible, are not directly linked to the organization’s currency, and don’t showcase your specialized skills—that is, someone else could do these tasks instead of you. Across industries, we see that women, especially women of color, spend significantly more time on these kinds of tasks. In one professional services firm, women logged 200 hours more per year on non-promotable work than men. That’s time not spent on high-visibility, promotable activities.
Q: Why do women end up doing more of this kind of work?
A: It’s not simply that women are better at non-promotable work, or that they want to do more of it—it’s that they’re expected to take it on. In our early lab experiments, we found that in mixed-gender groups, women volunteered 48% more often than men. But when women and men were in single-gender groups, the difference disappeared, and they volunteered at equal rates. That tells us it’s not about preferences or skills, but about expectations. This was further confirmed in a study where we found that women were asked to take on non-promotable tasks 44% more often than men and said yes 50% more often. These gendered expectations result in a misallocation of work, where tasks fail to be assigned according to skills and comparative advantage. Gendered expectations also imply that the problem isn’t solved by women “just saying no.” When men say no, it’s largely accepted. When women say no, it can result in backlash. Improved task allocation calls for organizational intervention.
Q: How early do these gendered patterns start showing up in people’s careers? And are they limited to the U.S., where you conducted your early research, or is this a global phenomenon?
A: The differences start very early, and so far we’ve found them in every organization we’ve looked at. In a study of a large professional services firm in Norway—one of the most gender-equal countries in the world—we found that the gender gap in promotable work emerged in the first year, with newly recruited men spending 55 more billable hours than their comparable female colleagues, who instead had more non-promotable hours. We see similar patterns in a panel study of MBA graduates from Norway’s top business school. By their first year post-graduation, women are doing more non-promotable work, while men have more promotable assignments. Those early differences are very consequential. Employees who did more promotable tasks in Year 1 were more likely to be promoted in Year 2.
Q: You’ve also recently studied how task assignments shape performance evaluations. What did you find?
A: We ran lab experiments where we randomly assigned workers to have different work portfolios. While all workers had promotable and non-promotable work, some had fewer non-promotable tasks. Our study showed a substantial impact of work assignments. Even though workers on average started with identical skills, those randomly assigned more non-promotable work were paid less, received worse performance evaluations, and were less likely to get promoted. One driver was that workers with more non-promotable work often got better at doing it, but the primary driver was that managers developed an exaggerated view of workers with fewer non-promotable tasks. These workers were seen as superstars. Managers vastly overestimated their performance both on the promotable and on the non-promotable work, and in turn gave them higher pay and more opportunities going forward. It’s a compounding advantage where small initial differences in assignments lead to large disparities in subsequent outcomes.
Q: What can managers and organizations do to fix this?
A: The most important thing is to ensure that new employees are given equal shares of promotable work. Monitoring work allocation and modifying how we allocate work is critical, especially for new hires. Our experiments show that even when managers are given detailed performance information, they continue to submit a much too favorable performance assessment of the employees with better assignments. Equalizing assignments upfront helps organizations identify their employees’ true talent—and put the best people in their most critical roles.
Q: You are very clear that organizational process change is the true solution to this problem. But in the meantime, what advice do you give to individual women who have to navigate requests to do non-promotable work?
A: Saying no to non-promotable work is risky, but how you say no matters. We recommend a strategic no, where you give a short explanation for why you can’t do the work and then help the requester solve their problem. Point out that taking on this task would prevent you from focusing on the higher-priority work that will be more valuable for the organization and then suggest someone else who’s better suited and for whom the task is promotable. Sometimes you can’t decline outright—but you can negotiate the yes: agree to a time limit, share the work with someone else, offload another task, or trade for a better assignment. I’ve been there myself. Early in my career, I was asked to join a website committee because I was “good with colors.” I negotiated to serve on the hiring committee instead—a promotable assignment that better reflected my expertise. That experience underscored what my research now shows: if organizations are to reach their potential, then we need to be intentional about who does what, right from the start.