May 5, 2022

New Book Teaches Women to Say No to Office Housework

                   

Service work is a common feature of work, whether in academia, at a think tank, or in a general office setting. This work includes tasks like serving on a departmental committee, interviewing interns, or organizing an office party. Service work is essential to develop camaraderie and harmony in a workplace, but is often not considered when a worker is up for promotion. They are also called “non-promotable” tasks (NPTs), according to four authors of a recent book The No Club.

The book had its genesis in a group that has been meeting regularly and expanding since 2010, when the authors, Lise Vesterland, Brenda Peyser, Laurie Weingart, and Linda Babcock, all academics, first sat down at a restaurant to trade experiences about all the tasks that seemed to overwhelm their workdays. Unsurprisingly, as The No Club demonstrates these tasks often fall to women to complete, eating up time they might spend on work that would get them noticed by superiors who hold sway over career advancement. 

According to one study discussed in the book, women at a professional services firm, regardless of seniority, spent an additional 200 hours per year on NPTs than the median man. The authors note that women are more likely to be asked to do this kind of service work and also say yes more often. 

In addition to identifying just how much work lands on the shoulders of professional women, The No Club encourages women in the workplace to size up NPT requests and develop a perfect way to say no to work they don’t want to do and which won’t help them get ahead. They also stress that the burden should not rest with women alone, instead it is an institutional problem that needs to be addressed by entire organizations in order to divide up service tasks equitably.

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The Rhetoric of Choice Obscures Our Social Obligations to Parents

January 30, 2020
Paid Family Leave
FMLA
Pregnancy Discrimination
Leave
Who should foot the bill or take responsibility for social reproduction as more women were pressed into the workforce, government or the individual? In the US, the answer was resounding: the individual. And this has had significant consequences for working parents since. By placing the responsibility on the individual, almost always the mother, parents have been in a bind for decades and any "choices" available reside in an astonishingly thin sliver of options constrained by structural inequalities

Female Flight Attendants and Pilots File Discrimination Suit Against Frontier Airlines, Alleging Discrimination against Pregnant and Nursing Mothers

January 13, 2020
Gender Discrimination
Pregnancy Discrimination
Two lawsuits were filed against Frontier airlines alleging that the Company required pregnant employees to suspend work duties months before they were scheduled to give birth, forcing employees to use their vacation days in lieu of paid time off, take unpaid maternity leave without Frontier providing alternatives for work, and refuse to accommodate breastfeeding and pregnant workers.

New Report from Uber Highlights the Risks of Driving in the Gig Economy

January 6, 2020
Sexual Harassment
Among the most significant risks to Uber drivers were those in the form of sexual and physical assault on the job, with 42% of assault cases being reported by drivers. The most common assault reported by drivers and riders was "non-consensual touching of a sexual body part," with 1,560 cases reported in 2018 alone.

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