Just say no – it’s easier said than done. More than 10 years ago, four frustrated women got together to strategise about the never-ending requests from their mostly male colleagues to take on important but often thankless tasks that were never going to help further their careers.
They formed a club to support each other to say no and find ways to take back control of their professional and personal lives.
Carnegie Mellon University professor Laurie Weingart is one of the club’s founding members and co-author of The No Club: Putting a Stop to Women’s Dead-End Work.
Carnegie Mellon University professor Laurie Weingart. Photo: thenoclub.com
When the ‘I just can't say no’ club was formed, it made Weingart question what she was saying yes and no to.
“First, I didn't even realise that some of the work wasn't important to my career advancement, but as I started looking at what was important in terms of priorities, it started becoming more and more clear to me.
“What we came to [understand], through our club and through our research, is that this wasn't just a problem of us being unable to say no. It was that we were getting asked to do this work much more often than our male colleagues. And we were having to say no over and over again.”
Weingart tells Jesse Mulligan that women are doing more non-promotable tasks than their male counterparts.
“Think about things like filling in for other people, editing other people’s work, even mentoring colleagues, these are all really important things for other people, but they don't help yourself.
“Another set of tasks might be recruiting or on-boarding or serving on oversight committees which really help the organisation, but don't necessarily advance your career.”
A study the authors conducted with a professional services firm showed female consultants worked 200 more hours per year on such tasks than their male colleagues.
Photo: Simon and Schuster
“That's a whole month of extra work that doesn't advance their career.
“And what’s interesting about this is that it affected women at all levels of the organisation, the senior consultants and the junior consultants.”
So why is this happening? Weingart says it’s driven by expectations that women will say yes to requests.
“We did a series of studies that demonstrated that that actually is the case, that women are 50 percent more likely to get asked to volunteer to do a non-promotable task than men and it's because we expect them to say yes.
“We also find that women have internalised this, so if I know that I'm expected to say yes to do this type of work, then I'm going to feel guilty when I say no because I'm violating this expectation.
“We have story after story of women who were justifiably concerned that if they say no, that they will face negative repercussions or be seen as difficult.”
Weingart notes that in doing so, we also risk having a taxation of under-representation – where a minority is over-selected to take part in activities where diversity is wanted – or committing benevolent sexism – where women are asked to participate in tasks under the impression it’s for their benefit but it actually ends up harming their ability to perform in the short-term.
The solution is to equally distribute non-promotable tasks, but also everyone should have access to the promotable work to advance their careers, she says.
“We all have a shared stereotype of women being the ones who do this work. Women and men hold that [stereotype] and so cognitively, it's easy for us to picture a woman when we're thinking about who to ask and women do this just as much as men do.
“So, the solution is for men and women to think about who they're asking to volunteer or who they're asking for help, or to take on a non-promotable task. And to make sure that they're giving everyone equal opportunities to participate.”
In her book, she also shares some tips on ways to say no that doesn't invite negative perceptions and helps solve the problem.
“Thinking about whether a task is non-promotable, who is asking you to do the task and what the repercussions might be if you say no. So, the answer isn't to just say no to everything but to be selective in what you say yes and no to.
“One piece of advice, when saying no, is to provide a brief explanation so that you put the no in context in terms of why this is not the right time for you or your plate is already full so that people feel that it's justified that you've given it thought.
“And then follow it with an attempt to help again solve the requester’s problem, without taking on the brunt of the work, suggesting alternate people who might benefit from learning how to do the task or maybe like break the task into parts and then you take on the part that's most interesting or doable for you or offering to train someone else to do it.”
Her advice to managers is to stop asking for volunteers and use other methods to distribute non-promotable tasks, because women are 50 percent more likely to volunteer than men.
“The second thing a manager can do is to train up some people to take on this additional work.
“But at the systematic level, what organisations can do is really think about how jobs are designed, and work is distributed.
“There are many tasks that belong to nobody, and these are the ones that are non-promotable and tend to get added on to individuals’ workloads, but these tasks maybe better allocated by assigning them to the right person … where they can actually get accolades and be reviewed and be promoted based on it and get raises based on good performance.”
For Weingart, thinking strategically about what she wanted to say yes to has helped her realise the importance of her goals.
“Once I had that litmus test in my head about what to say yes and no to, it became so much easier to say no to things that I didn't want to do or weren't important to me without feeling that intense guilt that I should be saying yes because that's what I was expected to do.”
