Women are burning out doing invisible 'office housework'

Women are working harder – and getting more burned out – but their efforts are being overlooked, according to a new study.

COVID-19 has seen women take on extra work supporting the wellbeing, diversity, equity and inclusion of their colleagues. But it’s “invisible” labour – because companies aren’t recognizing or rewarding it.

This is a key finding of the Women in the Workplace 2021 report, by management consultancy McKinsey & Company and the women’s campaign group LeanIn.Org.

“This mission-critical work is in danger of being relegated to ‘office housework’: Necessary tasks and activities that benefit the company but go unrecognized, are underappreciated, and don’t lead to career advancement,” says report co-author Marianne Cooper in an article for management magazine Harvard Business Review.

Women leaders are more likely to be exhausted and chronically stressed at work, compared to men in similar roles, Cooper notes.

And almost 40% of them have considered quitting work altogether, or downshifting to part-time hours.

Yet almost seven in 10 companies say the work employees do to promote diversity, inclusion and equity – opportunities for all – is “very” or “extremely critical”.

Women managers quoted in the Women in the Workplace report say they are doing this “emotional labour” “after hours in the evenings, on weekends and on vacation” – but it’s being “taken for granted,” with no formal recognition.

The report states that less than a quarter of companies are recognizing this work to a substantial extent in formal evaluations like performance reviews.

Women in the Workplace 2021 also finds that women - especially women of colour - are still significantly underrepresented in leadership roles.

For every 100 men promoted to manager, only 86 women are promoted. And women of colour represent only 4% of “C-suite” leaders – executive-level managers who typically have the word “chief” in their job title.

Women in the Workplace 2021 is based on information from 423 participating organizations with 12 million employees and a survey of more than 65,000 employees. The authors also interviewed women with diverse colour, gender and disability identities.

The Women in the Workplace 2021 findings mirror those of the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2021. It found the impact of COVID-19 had delayed the likely timetable to gender parity by a generation, from 99.5 years to 135.6 years.

The gap is almost twice this length when measured by participation and opportunity for women in the world of work. On this measure, it will take another 267.6 years to close the gender gap, the Forum found, with only “marginal” improvement since last year’s report.