Essay Series 7.2: Women’s unpaid labor at home and non-promotable paid work hurts them personally and professionally.

Western societies assume that women and men have opposing traits. Women are supposed to be empathetic and put others first. So, girls and women are socialized to put others’ needs before their own. This is called emotional labor, and societies expect women to do most of it.⁵⁰⁶ Women’s unpaid emotional, logistical, and domestic labor can hold them back at work and be a burden at home.

Society’s socialization limits the range of emotions boys are supposed to have from childhood. So men can end up cut off from their own emotions, with the exception of pride, anger, dominance, aggression, competitiveness, and risk-taking. In addition, men are supposed to be rational and decisive.⁵⁰⁷ None of these societal expectations relate to men doing emotional labor.

Women’s non-promotable labor can hold them back at work and limit their time with family. A work-life balance remains difficult to achieve for both sexes.

Women’s Unpaid Labor

Societal expectations are that women do unpaid emotional, logistical, and domestic labor, which require time, effort, and skill. These tasks include organizing the family’s child care, health care, schooling, and eldercare. Even when women work for pay, women do most of the unpaid domestic labor, including cooking, cleaning, and laundry. These types of labor are undervalued and unpaid, even though they support men and their careers. Unpaid labor is a root cause of inequality between the sexes since women generally keep families going with their unpaid labor.^508,509

Women also do much of the non-promotable labor at work. Employers assume that women are going to take notes, organize birthday parties, and train and mentor workers among other largely non-promotable tasks.⁵¹⁰

Theoretically, women can say no to or negotiate a fair division of labor with the men in their lives and their employers. Many women, however, are trapped by poverty, fear, or other circumstances that make such negotiations impossible. Women also can feel trapped by societal expectations.

The Price of Unpaid Labor

Society views women’s and men’s unpaid labor as a costless resource.⁵¹¹ The National Partnership for Women and Families analyzed data from the 2024 American Time Use Survey and found that the average person age 15 and over in the United States spends 248 hours a year doing unpaid care work for children and adults. If people doing this work received the pay that the care workforce (for example, child and elder care workers) does, the value of that care would be more than $1.1 trillion a year. Women do 63 percent of this work, and the average woman spends about 300 hours each year on caregiving. The value of women’s unpaid care work was $683 billion, and men’s was $413 billion.⁵¹² An AARP study found that in 2024, 24 percent of adults provided ongoing, unpaid care to an adult with a medical condition or disability. Again, women were most of these caregivers. AARP estimated that the economic value of all unpaid caregivers’ assistance was $1.01 trillion.⁵¹³ These two studies draw on different data sources and methodologies. However, the basic point is the same: unpaid care has a huge economic value and impact on the lives of the people providing and receiving care.

Women and men often don’t recognize that their partners’ unpaid labor supports their careers.⁵¹⁴ Women primarily subsidize government and society at large because they take on most caregiving and household management roles.⁵¹⁵ Men do this type of unpaid labor too. These women and men subsidize government because they do the caregiving tasks that public programs like Medicaid might otherwise cover.

The Price for Doing Non-promotable Labor at Work

It’s not just at home where women are at a disadvantage; women tend to do many non-promotable tasks at work. These are tasks that matter to the organization but don’t help the person advance their career or get higher wages. Such tasks include mentoring students, training new workers, helping others do their work, coordinating (not managing) others’ work, editing others’ work, doing special events and office housework, recruiting staff, and resolving staff conflicts.⁵¹⁶

Promotable tasks often connect with the organization’s goals and objectives. For example, in a company that sells a product, completing sales is a promotable task, while doing an inventory likely isn’t. Academics are more likely to be promoted when getting grants and publishing research papers than when mentoring students. Researchers have found overwhelming evidence that women receive and agree to more non-promotable requests than men, driven by societal expectations that women will take on this work.⁵¹⁷

An example of the difference between men’s and women’s non-promotable labor occurred at the Transportation Safety Administration (TSA). In a study at one airport, women agents did more pat downs than men. This happened because women were 33 percent of TSA employees and 40 percent of airline passengers. Because women must pat down women, the TSA women employees spent more time on this task. Men were able to do a wider variety of tasks that led them to more rapid advancement. Similar non-promotable task overload for women occurs in teaching, banking, law, engineering, and supermarket work.⁵¹⁸

Since men do fewer non-promotable tasks, they have more time to do the work that their organizations value. So, men advance more quickly in their careers. Men can also have more time with their family if they aren’t doing this type of work.⁵¹⁹

Women could say no to non-promotable labor. However, they may suffer consequences if they don’t do what society expects. Also, women may get the reputation of not being a team player. Women tend to feel guilty when they decline non-promotable labor because they have internalized assumptions about what working women should do.⁵²⁰

When women take on non-promotable tasks at work, the consequences can be:

1. Stalled careers when they can’t keep up with promotable work.

1. Less time with their families if they do both types of work.

1. Exhaustion, tension, and enough dissatisfaction that they leave their jobs or even their careers.

1. Physical and mental health problems.⁵²¹

Achieving Balance Between Personal Life and Work

While women have faced pressure to contribute more economically to their families, men haven’t received equivalent pressure to increase their contributions to the family’s emotional, logistical, and domestic labor. Even wives who provide most of their family’s income do twice the amount of cooking and cleaning as their husbands.⁵²²

Women live under additional limitations that make it difficult to achieve a balance between their personal and work lives. These constraints result from marriage, children, discrimination, and sexual harassment. If a woman is married to a man, society expects her to put his needs first. If this happens, she is doing emotional, domestic, and logistical labor that benefits his career and harms her own. If women want to have children, their years of peak fertility often coincide with critical early career development. Pregnancy, childbirth, and breastfeeding the baby is extra labor that only a woman can do. Generally, the woman becomes the child care expert. Women face discrimination in hiring, promotion, wage levels, and job evaluations. Sexual harassment is common, particularly in fields where men dominate.⁵²³

Corinne Low, PhD, author of Having it All, recommends that women go through an analytic process to determine what would make them happier in their personal lives and at work. Creating goals that achieve balance and fulfillment in their lives is the next step. Then Low recommends that women negotiate unpaid labor within the household and for support of their career aspirations at work.⁵²⁴ The book’s messages are feasible for some women, most likely those in the upper-income classes. The ability to negotiate depends upon a woman’s financial independence and job security. Women who have low wages, live paycheck to paycheck, fear unemployment, or endure domestic violence have little room to negotiate with anyone.

Reflections

We need to balance the responsibilities for unpaid work. Some women can negotiate who does these tasks, and most men need to take on more responsibility. Low recommends that when women are choosing whether to do an unpaid or non-promotable task, they consider what the task involves, who is asking them to do it, and ask for time to consider the request. If women say yes, they need to make sure they have the time and skills necessary to do the task, without their lives becoming overloaded.⁵²⁵ As noted above, many women aren’t in a position to negotiate at work or at home.

Men need to do their share of the emotional, logistical, and domestic labor that life, family, and jobs require. If men don’t, they are taking unfair advantage of the women in their lives.

My own experience illustrates how these dynamics play out in practice. My emotional and logistical labor enabled my ex-husband to become a successful international consultant. He got most of the financial rewards related to my unpaid labor. However, I had more time with my children. At the time, neither of us questioned our family roles; we just carried on.

However, in carrying on, I raised my children while my ex-husband traveled internationally half the time. I managed their sometimes complex medical care, took care of their emotional hurts, supervised their schooling, and helped them gain life skills like driving. I don’t believe I did anything particularly well — except for the management of their health care — because I was often exhausted.

I did a limited amount of non-promotable labor at work, mainly mentoring, which I enjoyed without it taking much time away from my children. I didn't participate in most work-related social activities, and at times this affected my performance ratings and salary increases.

What kind of unpaid labor have you done at home or at work? And what have been its consequences?