Whether it’s clearing out the staffroom fridge, collecting tickets at the school fete or handing out the photocopies on Inset day, education has its share of essential tasks that won’t put you in line for a promotion. And according to recent research from the US, more often than not, women are the ones who volunteer for them. 

As well as being unfair, the research says, this can also have real implications not only for individual career progression but also for the overall balance of power - and pay - between the genders in a workplace. 

Surely, that makes this something that school leaders should be taking heed of?

Biased choices

The 2017 study found that female participants were 48 per cent more likely to volunteer for tasks with low promotability than male ones. But this wasn’t down to a greater sense of altruism. Instead, the researchers found that women were simply expected to volunteer, and did so.

During one of the experiments, a manager figure could ask participants to volunteer; the women received 44 per cent more requests than the men, regardless of whether the manager was male or female. Male participants accepted the request 51 per cent of the time, while women accepted 76 per cent of the time.

“If you need to get something done, you’re going to ask a woman because she’s going to say ‘yes’,” says Linda Babcock, professor of economics at Carnegie Mellon University in the US, who carried out the study. “There are a lot of norms for women against saying ‘no’ to things like that. Research shows that women get penalised when they say ‘no’, so they’re constrained in a way that men are not.”

Other options

Babcock praises an approach adopted by the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. To combat discrepancies in how tasks were distributed, leaders developed a points system.

“You get points for doing things and everybody has to get a certain number,” she explains. “If you don’t do one thing, you have to teach more, or do something else. It’s mandatory, and that means things are a lot more fair.”

Ultimately, she says, it all comes down to fairness. “It is fundamentally unfair if women are picking up more of the slack,” she says. “Leaders can help by not going to the same women over and over because they know they’re going to help and instead go to men. To be presiding over this unfairness is something that most leaders will want to change.”

This is an edited version of an article that appears in the 28 September issue of Tes