Office housework: the invisible workload holding your best women back
Someone organises the team offsite. Someone onboards the new hire, takes the notes in the leadership meeting, mentors the juniors and remembers everyone's birthday. The team would notice straight away if it stopped. But it almost never shows up in a performance review.
Researchers call this low-promotability work. We call it office housework. In most teams we work with, it falls on the same few people, and they are usually women.
What the research says
In a 2017 study in the American Economic Review, economists Linda Babcock, Maria Recalde, Lise Vesterlund and Laurie Weingart tested who volunteers for a task that helps the group but not the person doing it. In their experiment, women volunteered about 34% of the time and men about 23%. Women were also more likely to be asked, and more likely to say yes when they were (American Economic Association summary).
The point isn't that women are better at this kind of work. In the experiment, the task was clicking a button. The point is that expectations, on both sides, steer it towards women.
Why it matters for performance
Office housework isn't free. Every hour spent on it is an hour not spent on the work that gets rewarded: the client project, the strategy paper, the visible win. Over a year, that becomes a real difference in who looks promotable.
It also drains motivation. Doing more than your share with no recognition is exactly the kind of gap that turns a high performer into a quiet one. From the outside it looks like she's lost her drive. Underneath, she's tired of carrying work nobody counts.
How to spot it in your team
- Who organised the last three team events, onboarded the last three hires and took notes in the last three meetings?
- Does any of that work show up in their goals or reviews?
- When you need a volunteer, who do you look at first?
If the answers keep landing on the same people, you have an invisible workload problem.
What closes it
For leaders: share the work out deliberately, by rotating it instead of asking for volunteers; count it in reviews when it genuinely matters to the team; and notice who you ask first.
For the women doing it: learn to say no, or to trade up ("I can take this if X moves to someone else"), without damaging relationships; and make the work that matters visible.
Invisible workload is one of the ten causes we measure in the free Engagement Gap Check, because it's one of the most common and one of the easiest to fix once you can see it.