Think before you volunteer for that thankless work task

New academic research from the US indicates that reluctant volunteers in a work environment are more likely to be female than male.

The paper, highlighted in the Harvard Business Review, conducted both laboratory and field studies to analyse who was most likely to take on ‘non-promotable tasks’ as part of their 9-to-5.

In this instance, non-promotable tasks were categorised as those that benefit the organisation the person works for, but likely don’t contribute to their performance evaluation and career advancement (i.e. organising the office party, office housekeeping, committee participation, other low-skill endeavours).

The research team started by looking at data from a large public US university – when all 3,271 faculty staff were asked to volunteer for a senate committee, somewhat expectedly only 3.7% chose to do so. However, 7% of women volunteered, compared with 2.6% of men.

They then sought to test the findings further, by placing guinea pigs in groups of three and asking them to select a volunteer for a specific task on a computer screen over 10 rounds, with the participants knowing that the person who put their hand up in each round would actually be paid less ($1.25) than the rest of the group ($2) – if no-one volunteered the group was given a dollar each.

Results of the earlier university test were reinforced – 84% of groups succeeded in finding a volunteer (though not until the final seconds of the two-minute round, indicating reluctance by all members). However, women were 48% more likely to volunteer than men, a trend repeated in each of the 10 rounds.

The next task was to discover why this was. Women being more risk averse was quickly discounted, as in men-only and women-only groups the volunteer rate was exactly the same.

Instead, the researchers concluded that in the mixed groups there was an understanding or expectation that women would volunteer more than men – i.e. men will hold back on volunteering, while women will volunteer to ensure that the task is done. When a ‘manager’ was added to the groups, women said ‘yes’ 76% of the time when asked to volunteer, compared to 51% of the time for men.

In conclusion, the paper says a solution to the issue is not for women to stop volunteering, but for organisations to find ways of distributing tasks among workers more fairly, such as a simple task rotation schedule.