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For Women and Minorities to Get Ahead, Managers Must Assign Work Fairly by Joan C. Williams and Marina Multhaup.

Points to Highlight  

• Our own research focused on engineering and law. We developed a tool, called the Workplace Experiences Survey, that tests for racial and gender bias in business systems, such as assignments. In a national study, our Center for WorkLife Lawand the Society of Women Engineers gave an early version of the survey to over 3,000 engineers. It found that women were 29% more likely than white men to report doing more office housework than their colleagues.”
  
  
• “The gaps with glamour work, too, are large. Female engineers of color were 35% less likely than white men to report having equal access to desirable assignments; white women were 20% less likely. For lawyers, the findings were remarkably similar: Women of color were almost 30% less likely than white men to say they had equal opportunity to high-quality assignments, and white women were 18% less likely.”
  
  
• “Moreover, because of these stereotypes, women and people of color are under social pressuresto volunteer for office housework activities. They also risk pushback if they don’t take on these tasks (“She’s just not a team player” or “She thinks highly of herself, doesn’t she?”). And women are more likely to be assigned office housework because assigners tend to believe that women will accept the task.”
  
  
• “Next, hold everyone accountable for the tasks they’ve been assigned — even small ones. If there’s someone on your team who never gets asked to do mundane tasks because he’s “just not a details guy,” that’s a performance problem. It should be addressed like any other performance issue.”