The Glamour Gap: How Work Assignments Impact Equity

Just as women do more unpaid work at home than men, at work they do more tasks with “low-promotability” than men[1]—tasks that benefit the organization but are unlikely to advance their careers. “[W]omen, more than men, volunteer, are asked to volunteer, and accept requests to volunteer for such tasks,” economist Linda Babock (et. al) found. “If women hold tasks that are less promotable than those held by men, then women will progress more slowly in organizations.”

Both men and women judge women who turn down such tasks more harshly than they do men taking the same action. Both men and women also think more highly of men who accept these assignments than they do of women who accept the same assignments, psychologists Madeline E. Heilman and Julie J. Chen found. “Women, it seems, are truly disadvantaged when it comes to altruism: When they have acted altruistically, they do not benefit, and when they have failed to act altruistically, they are penalized as compared with identically behaving men,” they write.

Harris & Ewing, photographer, 1931.

These altruistic acts or “office housework” are essential, low-profile, and often routine. They can include setting up meetings, taking meeting minutes, planning office parties, ordering lunch, and cleaning up after lunch. At small architecture firms they might also include answering telephones, providing ad hoc IT support, or other administrative tasks.  In contrast, “glamour work” has a higher profile and gives opportunities for career advancement. “[W]omen and people of color do more office housework and have less access to glamour than white men do,” legal scholars Joan C. Williams and Marina Multhaup found.

This disparity hold true across professions, the scholars learned. A survey of 3,000 engineers found “women were 29% more likely than white men to report doing more office housework than their colleagues.” At the same time they are doing more office housework, women are also offered fewer opportunities for glamour work, the same study found. Among engineers, the glamour-gap as compared to white men was 35% for women of color and 20% for white women.

An equitable workplace requires equitable assignments. “To achieve real change, assignments need to be embedded in DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) strategy,” Erin Macke (et al.) writes. But even small firms without a formal DEI strategy can take actions to level the playing field. The first step is to raise awareness about how prescriptive stereotypes—like that women are naturally helpful and work for the communal good while men are ambitious—contribute to inequity. Then collect data about how office housework is distributed in your workplace and what recurring tasks are included, Williams and Multhaup suggest. Data collection can be done through surveys or dialog. Once housekeeping tasks are defined, the office can add an Office Housework category to its time-tracking system.

Once you know how office housework is distributed in your firm, take steps to balance it. Instead of asking for volunteers to perform these tasks, create a system that will ensure that everyone performs the mundane tasks. “Everyone on the team should do a task before someone does it twice,” Williams and Multhaup write.

“Next, hold everyone accountable for the tasks they’ve been assigned—even small ones,” the researchers say. Poor performance, whether to get out of doing a task or another reason, is still poor performance. If someone suggests women are better at certain tasks than men, teach them about benevolent sexism and how it hurts all genders.

The assignment of glamour work should also be done methodically. Instead of reflexively assigning the same people to the teams of high-profile or desirable projects, principals should consider a broader range of players. If the experience among other employees isn’t adequate for glamour work, then invest in these employees to help them build the skills needed, Williams and Multhaup write. For example, lower-level employees should regularly leave the drafting room for the job site, client meetings, training, and other learning opportunities.

“After the pandemic-driven exodus of women—especially women of color—from the workforce, companies cannot afford to lose more of them to additional burnout wrought by unfairly allocated assignments,” Macke (et al.) write.

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Sources:

L. Babcock, M.P. Recalde, L. Vesterlund, et al., “Gender Differences in Accepting and Receiving Requests for Tasks With Low Promotability,” American Economic Review 107, no. 3 (March 2017): 714-747.

M. E. Heilman and J. J. Chen, “Same Behavior, Different Consequences: Reactions to Men's and Women's Altruistic Citizenship Behavior,” Journal of Applied Psychology, 90(3), 2005, 431–441. 

Joan C. Williams and Marina Multhaup, “For Women and Minorities to Get Ahead, Managers Must Assign Work Fairly,” Harvard Business Review, March 6, 2018.

Erin Macke, Gabriela Gall Rosa, Shannon Gilmartain, and Caroline Simard, “Assignments are Critical Tools to Achieve Workplace Gender Equity,” MIT Sloan Management Review, January 4, 2022.

[1] The research referenced in this post studied men and women only.