Around two years ago, I discovered an interesting article in the Harvard Business review titled “Are You Taking on Too Many Non-Promotable Tasks?”. And I was like, wait – what is a non-promotable task?
The article is authored by Linda Babcock, Brenda Peyser, Lise Vesterlund, and Laurie Weingart. It refers to a research paper called “Gender Differences in Accepting and Receiving Requests for Tasks with Low Promotability” (where Maria P. Recalde is a co-author as well), and to its conclusion that women, more than men, tend to be asked or to volunteer for low reward tasks. (All sources linked below).
Authors define non-promotable tasks (NPTs) as those tasks that are not ranked high by an institution in terms of promotability. For example, they cite their faculty task-ranking study which views attending a faculty committee as of less value than a research focused project, in terms of allocation of promotions. Whilst these committees are essential to the running of a university and play an important role in the functioning of academia, they take time away from working on and publishing research which is seen as much more important.
More generally, a non-promotable task is a task that helps an organisation collectively, but their completion does not lead to any extra compensation, nor are they particularly recognised in performance reviews or promotions.
When I first came across this research, it made me think of tasks like taking minutes or action points, setting agendas, reviewing CVs and helping colleagues interviewing candidates. I also thought of all the times I and other coworkers volunteered to contribute to some diversity initiative or other, without much recognition. In a recent professional experience, there were literally two colleagues in charge of coordinating rotas for meetings’ attendances.
I was once told I was the point of contact for my department to test a new data vendor. Our large firm had hundreds of us involved, and we needed to communicate with salespeople, use the software (even if it wasn’t part of our jobs), and complete feedback forms. Whilst I found it interesting and important, my management mostly just wanted to check it off as completed for his department. This shows that the spectrum of NPTs can include both technical and non-technical tasks.
In the aforementioned articles, the researchers asked the management team at a professional services firm to rank work assignments by how promotable they were, and they found that “the median female employee spent 200 more hours per year on non-promotable work than her male counterparts.”
So why do people, and more specifically women, say yes to these tasks and even volunteer to do them?
The authors list many reasons that could be an explanation: the person might have internalised the expectation that they should say yes to NPTs; they are flattered to be asked; they think they need to answer immediately…
In the research paper, the authors conduct five different experiments and arrive to the conclusion that relative to men, women are significantly more likely to respond favorably to requests to undertake a task with low promotability, and that it is not explained by altruism. They also conclude that this might prevent the advancement of women in organisations.
So where do we go from there?
One can actually use this to say the conclusions also apply to society as a whole, where women continue to largely perform a lot of unpaid tasks that do not infer any particular status (like the lead grocery shopper, or the master coordinator of kids activities as one of my former colleagues called herself).
But to stay in the corporate world, a generalisation of the conclusions around NPTs can be that there tend to be more women in the less “high profile” departments, like finance or treasury. And even if those areas are core and take decisions and complete work of material importance, they are never viewed at par with say- the trading floor or the CIO office.
The main recommendations of the HBR article are – regardless of your gender – to learn to deliberately weigh each NPT and what it brings collectively and to one’s own career. The authors flag that some of these tasks might not be promotable but allow to gain knowledge in the future. In my view, what is important is that the split is fair (ie everyone is on the hook for some of these).
The irony is that actually I never thought of NPTs as NPTs, it’s only after I read the HBR article that it clicked in my head, and I started seeing them and seeing how myself/ the same colleagues had been volunteering and being volunteered for them.
It took me many years to understand that I should not be saying automatic yesses to tasks that – unbeknownst to me – were viewed as valueless. And it took some self reflection to realize that I am not the savior hero, because I magnanimously volunteered for the 3rd year in a row to review thousands of CVs, so hopefully this article can help land it with others!
Sources:
HBR article 2022: Are You Taking on Too Many Non-Promotable Tasks?
Research paper: Gender Differences in Accepting and Receiving Requests for Tasks with Low Promotability
HBR article 2018: Why Women Volunteer for Tasks That Don’t Lead to Promotions
Disclaimers can be found here.
A WOMAN IN THE CITY 