Spoons, Faith & Board Games

Think back to the office you used to work from. Who unloaded the dishwasher, stocked the snacks, circulated the get well cards, made the coffee, bought the birthday cakes?

Did she get paid for it? And did the man who never did any of those things get paid 20% less than she did? No, because that would be insane, right? Because a mother works for free, right?

There’s another term for the “extras” Merrill mentions. Researchers call them “non-promotable tasks.”

“Across field and laboratory studies, we found that women volunteer for these ‘non-promotable’ tasks more than men,” Linda Babcock, Maria P. Recalde, Lise Vesterlund, and Laurie Weingart wrote in Harvard Business Review wrote a couple years back, “that women are more frequently asked to take such tasks on; and that when asked, they are more likely to say yes.” (Lots of other research bears this out.)

When women agree to these tasks, it takes a toll on their career prospects. (If they say no, the researchers point out, it also hurts them — that’s why the solution has to be for “management to find ways to distribute tasks more equitably.”) From the paper:

Relative to men, women are more likely to volunteer, more likely to be asked to volunteer, and more likely to accept direct requests to volunteer. These results suggest that the allocation of tasks with low promotability may differ even when there are no gender differences in ability and preferences. The resulting differences in task allocations can create barriers to the advancement of women in organizations and in society as a whole.

And though managers claim to value women’s helpfulness, it doesn’t actually, um, help them all that much when it comes to performance reviews. Kate Weisshaar, an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and faculty fellow at the Carolina Population Center, summed up some of her recent research for me:

In a study I conducted with Shelley Correll, Alison Wynn, and JoAnne Delfino Wehner, we examined gendered language in performance evaluations and their association with ratings at a Fortune 500 company. We found that women were more likely than men to have “helpful” or community-oriented behaviors mentioned in their performance evaluations. Yet, being perceived as highly helpful was not associated with receiving the highest performance rating (for men or women). We suggest that women are “viewed” as having more communal or community-oriented qualities, but these qualities are not valued highly for top performance outcomes.

him: :)

Queen Elizabeth

Michelangelo’s David

Lady Liberty, Who Makes Me 😳

George Washington

Vincent Van Gogh

—

The crux of his argument is that humans are self-referential feedback loops. We take in information from the world and incorporate it into how we react the next time we receive information. A whole section of Strange Loop is dedicated to Hofstadter’s concern with the memory of his late wife, Carol. She died suddenly and he was left wondering what parts of her, if any, can “survive” in his memory. And he eventually concluded that every human is a combination and response to all the other humans they’ve ever interacted with:

Trialogo series By Gonzalo Orquin will finally be shown in New York after the Vatican threatened to sue the artist at the showing in Rome