Office Housework
One-liner: Someone has to take the notes, plan the party, and onboard the new hire, and it is never assigned to the person whose calendar has room for “real work.”
Also known as / related terms: Non-promotable tasks, low-promotability work, office mom duties, invisible labor, unpaid support work.
What it is: Office housework refers to the pattern in which certain people, disproportionately women, are default-assigned unpaid, uncredited, non-promotable support tasks: note-taking, scheduling, event-planning, onboarding new hires, mentoring, “office mom” duties, while others are shielded from this category of work entirely and get evaluated only on visible, promotable output. The term was popularized by Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant’s 2015 New York Times op-ed, which argued that women “help more but benefit less” from that help at work. It is grounded in peer-reviewed research: Linda Babcock, Maria Recalde, Lise Vesterlund, and Laurie Weingart’s 2017 paper in the American Economic Review found that women volunteer for, are asked to take on, and accept requests for low-promotability tasks more often than men, driven partly by a shared expectation that women will say yes. This is a structural, category-wide pattern of task assignment across an entire type of unpromotable labor, distinct from a single instance of someone’s specific idea or contribution being claimed by a coworker.
What it looks like (workplace): In every team meeting, the same person is asked, or simply expected, to take notes and follow up on action items, while colleagues doing comparable or lesser work spend that same hour building the case for their next promotion.
Why they do it: These tasks genuinely need doing, and organizations default to whoever has said yes before, or whoever is stereotyped as more nurturing and communal, without examining who is quietly paying a career cost for being reliable.
How to protect yourself:
- Keep a running, dated log of non-promotable tasks you take on, so the pattern is visible in a performance review rather than invisible in memory.
- Practice a neutral, non-apologetic no, or a redirect (“I can’t take notes today, can we rotate it”), rather than absorbing the task by default.
- Push for these tasks to be explicitly assigned on a rotating basis rather than falling to whoever seems willing.
- Ask managers directly whether non-promotable work factors into promotion and review criteria, and if not, why it keeps being asked of the same people.
Cross-links: Credit Theft / Idea Appropriation, Weaponized Incompetence, The Pleaser.
Sources:
- Babcock, Recalde, Vesterlund, Weingart (2017), “Gender Differences in Accepting and Receiving Requests for Tasks with Low Promotability,” American Economic Review, 107(3), 714-747, the peer-reviewed foundational study.
- The New York Times: “Madam C.E.O., Get Me a Coffee”, Sandberg and Grant’s op-ed that popularized the term “office housework.”
- Lean In: “Madam C.E.O., Get Me a Coffee”, a hosted reproduction of the same argument with practical guidance.
Label note: Mixed, and a strong one. The term itself was popularized through journalism, but it is grounded in a genuine peer-reviewed economics study documenting the actual mechanism of unequal task assignment, giving it real academic backing beyond a catchy phrase.