In that temple of debate that is Twitter, the dominant trends of the weekend were basically football and Eurovision. But if you scratch a little more you will find issues that move fewer tweeters and that, however, are just as or more interesting. One of them is the so-called Club del No, which teaches women to reject the less grateful and invisible tasks at work and that fall mostly on them, according to the group’s founders.
It all started in 2010, when four academics met at a restaurant in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to complain about the high volume of tasks that took up their time, but they had almost no visibility in their jobs, that is, they did not count towards earning points in their lives. professional. Examples? Organizing department meetings, buying a farewell gift for a colleague, supervising the intern… One of them recalls the case of a colleague who systematically went to meetings without a notebook and asked her to pass on her notes afterwards. So these four women, Brenda Peyser, Laurie Weingart, Linda Babcock and Lise Verterlund, decided to start a club, the No Club (@thenoclub on Twitter; they also have a website), to help other women know how to say no without harm their careers and, incidentally, investigate this matter.
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.
Motherhood triggers false assumptions that women are less committed to their careers—and even less competent. Research shows that #maternalbias is the strongest type of gender bias.
— Lean In (@LeanInOrg) April 26, 2022
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.