'It's a double-whammy': Study shows downsides of women focused on 'low-promotability' service work

A recent survey by Robert Half reports that only 33% of women will ask for a raise this year if they aren’t offered one, compared to 80% of men who said they will. Plus, women (36%) are less likely than men (42%) to either ask for more responsibility or a raise.

That silence can be costly – literally and professionally. But there's another barrier that may be key to cracking the gender pay gap, according to researchers: "low-promotability service work” or tasks that don’t lead to promotions or bonuses, such as mentoring, organizing team events, and offering feedback.

Not only do women do more of it, research has found, they do it better than their male counterparts, and when men do take on service tasks, it’s strategic.

“Even if men are doing the same number of service tasks, they’re choosing service tasks that take a lot less time and effort than what women are doing,” says Laura Nelson, associate professor of sociology at the University of British Columbia.

“So it all compounds.”

Low-promotability work: women give more and better feedback

A study co-authored by Nelson,"Taking the Time: The Implications of Workplace Assessment for Organizational Gender Inequality," takes a close look at how women are disproportionately performing low-promotability tasks at work.

“It’s a double whammy,” Nelson says. "Women are not applying for promotions at as high rates, so they’re not getting promoted. When they do apply for promotions, they don’t look as impressive as their male counterparts, because they’re spending less time on these impressive, high-status tasks.”

The study focuses on feedback (33,456 in-the-moment numerical and textual evaluations) offered by attending physicians to residents in U.S. emergency hospital units over a two-year period.

The doctors’ evaluations revealed that women supervisors gave significantly more feedback – they also did it more thoughtfully and in greater detail.

But, as Nelson says, these high-effort, high-quality contributions are undervalued in advancement decisions.

Quality counts – but isn’t counted

Across the two-year dataset, the average woman supervisor wrote 40% more comments about resident errors, 32% more helpful comments, and 50% more comments offering reassurance compared to her male colleagues.

Men were more than twice as likely (18%) to submit only a numerical score with no written feedback at all compared to 7% of women.

In other words, women are not only taking on more feedback and mentoring responsibilities — they’re doing it with greater cognitive and emotional investment. Nelson highlights that although these service tasks aren’t quantified or counted, they are essential to organizational success.

“These service tasks aren’t just there,” she says. “They are meant to make the program better. They are meant to mentor employees or students.”

In the study, longer, more specific written comments – most often written by women – were more likely to include task-specific advice, context for errors, and encouragement. By contrast, male attendants were more likely to write short, vague praise such as “Great job” or nothing at all.

And yet, this cognitive and emotional effort does not show up in most performance review rubrics.

Nelson warns: “It’s taking real time, real cognitive effort, but does not get translated to the merit reviews.”

Opt-out promotions: why the way we ask matters

Nelson identifies opt-out promotion structures as a practical and research-backed strategy that can counter the effects of low-promotability work for women. The strategy essentially makes promotion participation automatic for all qualified, unless they choose to opt out.

“So you say, ‘Here’s a promotion. If you meet the eligibility requirements for this promotion, we are going to opt you in. You are going to be applying for this promotion unless you explicitly tell us you don’t want to,’” Nelson explains.

This kind of opt-out strategy can help balance gender disparities in applications and reduce reliance on self-promotion, she says, because when organizations use traditional opt-in systems, men dominate – even when the women are equally qualified.

“Women only apply to jobs that they think they're really, really qualified for, including the optional qualifications, whereas men will just apply for all the jobs, whether or not they're qualified,” Nelson says.

“But that leads to a scenario where people who put the applications out get more men than women. Because there's more men applying, they're more likely to choose a man. So we have this scenario where in organizations, women are not applying for promotions, they're not asking for raises, which is reflected in [the Robert Half] survey data.”

Formalizing informal, low-promotability work

Many essential workplace activities – mentoring new hires, writing reference letters, organizing team culture events – are not formally assigned, tracked, or evaluated.

“That's part of the problem,” Nelson says.

“It doesn't get measured and counted … so when you lay [it] side by side, men are like, ‘Here’s all the prestigious publications I got, here's all the programs I started that contributed to the bottom line,' and women are like, ‘Well, I helped 10 employees, and I made sure that all of that prestigious stuff got done. I made sure there were structures in place to allow that to get done.’ The man's going to get promoted, and not the woman, even though that effort is very, very important for the organization. In fact, the organization will fall apart without it.”

To address this, Nelson recommends creating clear guidelines and accountability mechanisms. Suggested tools include:

• Service dashboards (anonymous or named) to track task distribution
• Standardized expectations for feedback: For example, “3–4 sentences mentioning 2–3 job-specific tasks”
• Performance evaluation criteria that include service and mentoring
• Rotations for recurring roles (e.g., hiring committees, onboarding)

“Provide guidelines,” Nelson advises. “Without guidelines, that gives people the leeway to either do a lot or do a little.”

Redesigning ‘the moment of the ask’

A major contributor to inequity is how tasks are assigned, and it all comes down to the ‘moment of the ask’, as Nelson calls it.

Research on “relational work” shows that women are more likely to comply when asked to take on extra work, while men are more likely to delay, deflect, or negotiate.

Changing the way the “ask” is delivered, by literally removing the chance to volunteer or decline, can help remove this gendered dynamic, she says.

“Changing the way the ask is done removes that relational moment where women are saying, ‘Yeah, I’ll do it,’ and men are saying, ‘I don’t think so.'"

As Nelson explains, best practices include:

• Automatically assigning low-promotability tasks based on rotation
• Avoiding open requests for volunteers
• Embedding expectations for low-promotability work in official job roles

And when the inevitable pushback on equal expectations for service tasks occurs, Nelson says to rely on most peoples’ desire to help – and possible ignorance to what’s been missed.

“Some people are genuinely not aware of how much other people are doing, and so they see that they're like, ‘Wow, it takes a lot to keep this organization going, and I'm really not contributing' … you don't make it a detriment, you make it a potential benefit for them to do it,” she says.

“That also requires deciding what it is that really matters to the organization, which of these tasks really do matter, and rewarding people for doing it, not just doing it, but doing it well.”

While evaluating the quality of low-promotability tasks may seem difficult, Nelson admits, there are ways to do it, such as having employees rate their supervisors on the feedback they’re receiving.

Why ‘just saying no’ to low-promotability tasks doesn’t work

In the end, failing to account for low-promotability work simply moves inequality downstream, she says. Pointing to other research that showed men strategically choosing to evade low-promotability tasks in academia, Nelson stresses that the “just say no” narrative isn’t helpful.

“For the stuff that they have to do that's not going to contribute to their promotions, they just do the minimum one. So it's very, very calculating,” she says.

“So one of the solutions is to say, ‘Women, you should just be as equally calculating and instrumental as the men, right? You should do all the same calculations, and only do service that's going to get you something that you know is going to get you promoted.’”

If women stop volunteering for this labour, it may benefit their own careers – but junior women and marginalized employees may no longer receive the mentoring and feedback they need to succeed.

“You’re just displacing the inequality from the senior women, and you’re pushing it down to the junior people,” Nelson says. "Inequality is still there.”

Shifting the mindset to valuing community building

However, by valuing and redistributing this work fairly, organizations can retain the people who contribute to culture, mentorship, and employee development, instead of perpetuating a toxic environment of only doing what will benefit one’s own advancement.

“Once people adjust to the new system, maybe there actually won't be as much pushback, because maybe men do want to do this, but they know that they need to be recognized for it first,” Nelson says.

“And so if you set it up so that they're actually getting commendation, you can lean into that instrumental mentality and say, ‘Yeah, this is actually going to be recognized as really important work, and it will help you get promoted if you do this work.’ And so then they can actually lean into that.”