At work, women volunteer more often

Women tend to volunteer, or get volunteered, more often for the kind of thankless tasks that don’t lead to promotions, pay raises or being recruited by the competition.

“The gap is persistent,” said Lise Vesterlund, one of a group of researchers who went into the lab several years ago to better understand who agrees to do the “nonpromotable tasks” that need to be done in every workplace but that no one is really eager to take on.

Ms. Vesterlund is an economics professor at the University of Pittsburgh and a research associate with the National Bureau of Economic Research.

She and her colleagues didn’t necessarily set out to prove that women are more likely to volunteer for the low-ranking committee, the low-profile cases or the time-consuming task of organizing the holiday party.

But they were aware of the ease in which excessive demands on their time could divert them from other challenging work.

In response, in 2009 they’d created The No Club — a loose collection of like-minded friends who could talk about what assignments to seek out and what to avoid. “We meet over wine,” said Ms. Vesterlund, with a laugh. Emergency meetings can be called and there’s a crown that’s sometimes awarded.

The original five-member group included Linda Babcock, department head and professor of economics at Carnegie Mellon University, and Laurie Weingart, CMU interim provost and a professor of organizational behavior and therapy.

Those three were involved in the research first published in American Economic Review in March 2017 under the title, “Gender differences in accepting and receiving requests for tasks with low promotability.” This summer, some of the researchers wrote about it in Harvard Business Review.

Also involved in the research was Maria P. Recalde, an assistant professor of economics at the University of Melbourne, and a former student of Ms. Vesterlund’s.

In the lab, the researchers re-created that stressful moment when, say, the dean has gathered people to focus on some issue and wants someone, anyone, to volunteer to be the chair. There’s no extra money involved and it’s not likely