Gender Differences in Accepting and Receiving Requests for Tasks with Low Promotability

In mixed-sex environments when an undesirable task is presented, women volunteer twice as often as men, but only do so once it’s clear that no one else will. In same-sex environments, the gender gap disappears and men volunteer to perform undesirable tasks at the same rate as women.

• In one experiment that required a group of men and women to volunteer to earn less so that their group members could earn more (the volunteer only receives $1.25, while the other group members receive $2; if no one volunteers everyone earns $1), women were 50% more likely to volunteer than men.
• When men and women know they are grouped only with members of their same sex, the gender gap disappears and they are equally likely to volunteer for non-promotable tasks.
• Both men and women are 12 percentage points more likely to ask women to volunteer to take the non-promotable task than they are to ask men. People expect women to volunteer and agree to requests to volunteer more often than men do. Women are also in fact more likely to agree to requests to volunteer than men are.
• The gender gap in women doing more non-promotable tasks than men does not appear to be driven by women being more altruistic than men, but rather by people’s tendency to be more likely to be generous towards men than women.
• Only 3.7% of faculty at a large university volunteered to participate on a faculty senate committee, which is a non-promotable task. However, female faculty are 2.7 times more likely than male faculty to volunteer to be on a committee.
• Women are more likely to feel pressure to do non-promotable tasks and are more worried than men about the negative repercussions of declining such requests.

In mixed-sex environments, the gender gap in women’s likelihood to accept tasks that do not lead to promotion, as compared to men, may create barriers for the advancement of women in organizations. These researchers recommend moving to a system that is not volunteer-based for assigning non-promotable tasks in order to address this barrier to women’s advancement.

The first laboratory experiment was conducted at the Pittsburgh Experimental Economics Laboratory at the University of Pittsburgh. Participants included 82 male and 68 female undergraduate students. In each of ten rounds, participants were randomly and anonymously assigned to groups of 3. Members of the group were then given 2 minutes to make an investment decision. Individual earnings were $1 in the event that no one invested before the end of 2 minutes. If one group member made the investment, the round ended, and the individual making the investment secured a payment of $1.25, while the other two group members each received $2.

The methodology of the second experiment was identical to the first, except the participants knew that their groups were all the same gender. Participants included 117 undergraduate students from the University of Pittsburgh.

In the third experiment, researchers recruited 80 participants from introductory classes in the social sciences the University of Pittsburgh. One participant was assigned the role of the “requester,” meaning that they were responsible for picking one person within a group to volunteer for the non-promotable task. The chosen person could accept or reject the request to volunteer. If they rejected, then the participants who were not asked to volunteer could volunteer themselves.

In experiments four and five, 189 undergraduates were recruited from introductory economics courses at the Univeristy of Pittsburgh. In experiment four, participants were asked to predict which participant would be most likely to volunteer for the non-promotable task. In experiment five, researchers analyzed whether women were more likely than men to make the economically altruistic choice, or whether they were willing to bet that another member of the group would volunteer.

The researchers also analyzed data on volunteering for committees at a large public university. The university sends an email each year to all faculty members asking them to serve on a university committee, which is a non-promotable task. The email was sent from the Chair of the Faculty Senate to 3,271 faculty members. The researchers analyzed which faculty agreed to serve on committees.