The No Club began when four women found themselves filling their calendars with more meetings, tasks, and duties, yet they weren’t advancing in their careers and getting juicy promotions. Instead, they saw their male colleagues get further in the workplace. But why?
These women put their heads together and soon realized all the extra work they were doing was actually “non-promotable work.” And this non-promotable work was keeping them from the actual work that would advance them in their careers.
Now if these women were doing a lot of non-promotable work, they figured other women were doing the same thing. Hence, The No Club, putting an end to all that non-promotable work. This lead to Linda Babcock, Brenda Peyser, Lise Vesterlund, and Laurie Weingart’s book The No Club: Putting a Stop to Women’s Dead-End Work.
What is non-promotable work? Well, if you’re a women you’ve probably been tasked with planning the office holiday party, vetting interns, and writing for the company newsletter. On paper, these look like good things, and they often need to be done. But they won’t exactly getting your promoted and a fatter paycheck.
The four women interviewed many other women who were also doing too many non-promotable work, and were frustrating on how it was hindering their progress in the workplace. No matter how much devotion and hard work they were putting into these tasks, they were barely acknowledged, let alone being promoted.
But what can women do when it comes to non-promotable work? The authors offer many tangible solutions, for one thing, women have to recognize what is non-promotable work in the first place, and then utilize the solutions advised in the book, which there are quite a few.
Though I found The No Club valuable, I felt it would be better served as an article for it kept repeating the same information over and over again. I also thought this book was aimed more at women with more lofty careers. Some of these solutions may be hard to implement for women in more pink collar, lower level jobs. Still, I think The No Club is important and should be read by both working women and men alike.
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