The No Club: Putting a Stop to Women’s Dead-End Work

Whether they’re being asked to chair a committee or bring coffee to a meeting, women need to learn to say no, argue economics professor Babcock, former communications professor Brenda Peyser, economics professor Lise Vesterlund, and organizational professor Laurie R. Weingart in this forceful if cursory guide. For many women, the authors write, the real time-sucks are the “non-promotable tasks” that don’t help with career advancement. This dead-end work is sometimes allocated unconsciously—women, for example, are asked disproportionately to take meeting notes—and sometimes due to misguided equity efforts, as when a university proudly announced that its committees were made up of 50% women, but its faculty skewed male so women had to serve on more than double the committees as men did. From a law firm associate who missed billable hours to help with recruitment to a bartender who lost tips while training staff, the authors provide dozens of examples of the non–career-advancing work that eats up women’s time, though to diminishing effect. They offer advice, too, such as how to figure out which tasks are promotable and which aren’t, how to avoid the negative repercussions of saying no, and how managers can redistribute work. The advice is solid stuff, but the authors’ tendency to restate their case and flood the book with predictable examples make end up making the going rather slow. This is likely to leave readers wanting. (May)