Women at work: The club that says no at work | Opinion

Their inquiries illustrate with figures what more than one will have already intuited: women dedicate an average of 200 more hours a year to this type of work than men, that is, about a month of invisible work. It should be emphasized that these tasks fall to both men and women, but most of the time they are for them. They tell it in the book that they have just published with the same title as their club and that at the moment is published only in English.

The Anglo-Saxon press collects these days the debate, which has spread to the networks. “Idea for the club: a website where you can send copies of the book anonymously to a colleague who needs to read it,” suggests Jennifer Doleac, an economics professor from Texas. She worries, however, how to turn down a task. Some research indicates that when a man says no, it is thought that he is very busy, but that when a woman says it, it tends to be interpreted in a negative way. The best option, say the authors of the book, is to say that you have more important work to do, suggest that someone else do it or, in any case, ask that it be shared among several to lighten the load.

There is another possibility: “Men can help by offering themselves as volunteers”, proposes on Twitter the Lean In group, one of the initiatives to promote women at work with the most impact to date (only in this network adds 212 million followers). Behind the organization is Sheryl Sandberg, the director of operations at Facebook, author of the bestseller also titled Lean In (“Let’s go forward”), published in 2013, in which she encourages women to openly claim what they deserve at work, to demand conciliation without being billed and to make themselves heard.

Do you always have to say no? It depends. On the one hand, we must bear in mind that some of these invisible tasks are key to making everything flow in a workplace, some recall. Sometimes, it is about little lucid organizational activities. In these cases, the solution should consist not so much in accepting or rejecting them, but in asking companies to value them better. On the other hand, it is understandable to say yes when it is clearly seen that it is an obligation or a reasonable task, according to the journalist from The New York Times Jessica Bennett, gender expert. But don’t take yes for granted: there are times when you simply have to try to pass the brown on to someone else.