The No Club by Linda Babcock, Brenda Peyser, Lise Vesterlund and Laurie Weingart
“All around us, all the time, women perform unrewarded work and we fail to notice”
3 Main Messages:
Non Promotable Tasks (NPTs) fall mainly to women and this either causes stress at work or at home and means women fall behind.
We need to learn when and how to say no!
All organisations benefit when NPTs are equitably and thoroughly allocated
You are falling behind when you are napping at work. And I’m not talking about sleep. I’m referring to when you NAP, a term coined by Jenny Wood, former Google Leader and author of Wild Courage: when your time is taken up with Not Actually Promotable tasks.
Babcock, Peyser, Vesterlund and Weingart (to be referred to as BPVW) write about this very matter here in The No Club. They, alongside their late friend, MJ, realised that they were becoming stressed, overworked and overlooked at work because they were spending too much of their time on what they refer to as Non Promotable Tasks - NPTs.
Whatever we call them, the issue remains: there is “substantive and overwhelming evidence” that NPTs weigh particularly heavily on women in the workplace. While they might be light tasks, “a tonne of feathers is still a tonne.”
But what ARE these tasks and why are they a problem? Promotional tasks are those at work which are visible, specialised, prepare you for future work or give you access to future work. NPTs, by contrast tend to be the administrative jobs - the “office housework” such as:
filling in when others are absent
organising and coordinating (but not managing) others
editing and proofreading for others
logistical planning and special events
governance work
resolving conflicts
onboarding
training and mentoring
helping coworkers with personal problems
getting coffee etc
While all of these roles are vital in keeping the cogs of the machine oiled, the impact of spending too much time on such tasks means career stagnation, emotional exhaustion, social isolation, job dissatisfaction, stress and high turnover. In other words unfair distribution of NPTS is a problem both for the person in question but also for the organisation.
Fired up by their own experiences, BPVW set about researching to see if and why these tasks fell more proportionally to other women too. They discovered irrefutable evidence that this was true and concluded that “Women’s excessive load of non-promotable work is the anchor that has been holding them back.”
Looking to understand why this is so common in the workplace, they realised that women are more likely to volunteer, women are more likely to be asked, and women are less likely to say no. There is an underlying expectation that women will perform these NPTs. Furthermore, they found that “while NPTs are a problem for women in general, they are an even bigger problem for women of colour.”
Once all the evidence has been presented in this book and the impact explained, the authors set about explaining how women can learn to recognise which NPTs will serve them and which will not. There are some wonderful suggestions for when how to say no, and how to begin to address the imbalance for the benefit of everyone in the organisation.
They recommend starting with creating awareness, then identifying allies and working together for change. I recommend that you start by reading this book. Not only will it raise your awareness of inequalities within your own life and organisation, but it will teach you effective negotiation skills, ways in which to optimise your work portfolio, and how to seed organisational change which will benefit everyone.
Whether we refer to these types of tasks as NPTs or NAPs, we need to wake up and start learning how to say yes to saying no!
