The Specific Tasks A Boss Gives Female Employees That Don’t Just Create Burnout — They Mean You’re Exploited
Women are often pressured or guilted into doing work above their pay grade because of outdated gender expectations, which bosses often exploit.
Ground Picture / Shutterstock There seems to be a logical explanation for why many women have reported feeling extremely burnt out at work compared to their colleagues.
In a TikTok video, a career content creator named Gabrielle Judge shared that often, women talk about burnout as if it's our fault when, in reality, the corporate job system is simply broken, especially for women who are already at such a disadvantage.
She revealed the specific tasks a boss gives female employees that not only create burnout but mean they're being exploited.
"There's this thing called 'unnecessary work,'" Judge said, explaining how women are often victims of a rather unique experience in corporate America. It's essentially tasks that should not be carried out because they do not make sense or could have been avoided or carried out with less effort if things were organized more efficiently.
Of course, anyone can become a victim of unnecessary work, but there is a particular feminine spin to the concept that happens in many corporate jobs. Judge explained that women, from a very young age, are taught and encouraged to put aside their needs in favor of helping others. This mindset ends up following us into adulthood, especially once we start working.
"There's a very triggering sentence that you've probably heard from your boss or a co-worker at one point. It usually goes something along the lines of, 'We don't have enough hands on this, and we would like your help,'" Judge said. "This triggers something in our brain to help other people. We want to automatically say yes subconsciously."
If women are not aware that this is happening, the subconscious becomes conscious, and before we know it, we're saying yes without realizing how that will affect us. Just because a company is understaffed and doesn't have enough hands to help with certain tasks doesn't mean that we should suddenly jump in to help. Instead, management should be doing their best to remedy the issue, not relying on employees they know will agree without a second thought.
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It's extremely exploitative. Women were not put on this planet to cater to the needs of a company, especially if that means some of our own energy will be depleted in the process. Judge acknowledged that women are more than welcome to help if it's something that's normally included in their workload, but they should never feel guilted or trapped into saying yes.
'There are three different reasons why women and everyone else is being exploited at work,' she claimed.
Judge revealed the three reasons: conditioning we experience from a very early age, socioeconomic reasons, and the unnecessary work crisis that we're all facing today.
She emphasized that women are particularly vulnerable to this exploitation due to societal norms and expectations, which perpetuates the cycle of burnout. She argued that burnout doesn't happen to women but is done to them instead.
Women historically experience higher levels of burnout compared to men in the workplace.
According to research from UNICEF, women are less likely to be promoted than men, yet more likely to head single-parent families and take on unpaid labor — all things that can exacerbate burnout.
Similarly, the annual Women in the Workplace report from McKinsey & Co. and LeanIn.Org found that the gap between women and men who say they are burned out nearly doubled in 2021.
In the survey polling more than 65,000 American employees, 42% of women and 35% of men reported feeling burned out often or almost always in 2021, compared to 32% of women and 28% of men. It's no wonder that there are nearly 2 million fewer women in the workforce.
Photo: Ron Lach / Canva Pro
It's quite lazy for employers to depend on outdated gender norms and expectations of women to get work done in the workplace rather than implementing fair and equitable policies that can distribute tasks and responsibilities equally based on job responsibilities and abilities.
Nia Tipton is a Chicago-based entertainment, news, and lifestyle writer whose work delves into modern-day issues and experiences.