The No Club Putting a Stop to Women's Dead-End Work

In this “long overdue manifesto on gender equality in the workplace, a practical playbook with tips you can put into action immediately…simply priceless” (Angela Duckworth, bestselling author of Grit), The No Club offers a timely solution to achieving equity at work: unburden women’s careers from work that goes unrewarded.

The No Club started when four women, crushed by endless to-do lists, banded together to get their work lives under control. Running faster than ever, they still trailed behind male colleagues. And so, they vowed to say no to requests that pulled them away from the work that mattered most to their careers. This book reveals how their over-a-decade-long journey and subsequent groundbreaking research showing that women everywhere are unfairly burdened with “non-promotable work,” a tremendous problem we can—and must—solve.

All organizations have work that no one wants to do: planning the office party, screening interns, attending to that time-consuming client, or simply helping others with their work. A woman, most often, takes on these tasks. In study after study, professors Linda Babcock (bestselling author of Women Don’t Ask), Brenda Peyser, Lise Vesterlund, and Laurie Weingart—the original “No Club”—document that women are disproportionately asked and expected to do this work. The imbalance leaves women overcommitted and underutilized as companies forfeit revenue, productivity, and top talent.

The No Club walks you through how to change your workload, empowering women to make savvy decisions about the work they take on. The authors also illuminate how organizations can reassess how they assign and reward work to level the playing field. With hard data, personal anecdotes from women of all stripes, self- and workplace-assessments for immediate use, and innovative advice from the authors’ consulting Fortune 500 companies, this book will forever change the conversation about how we advance women’s careers and achieve equity in the 21st century.

Linda Babcock is a professor of economics at Carnegie Mellon University. She is the author of Women Don’t Ask: Negotiation and the Gender Divide and Ask for It: How Women Can Use the Power of Negotiation to Get What They Really Want. A behavioral economist, Babcock focuses on understanding barriers to women’s advancement in the workplace. She is the founder and director of PROGRESS, which pursues positive social change for women and girls through education, partnerships, and research. Babcock’s media appearances and mentions include Good Morning America, ABC’s World News Tonight, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Glamour, Cosmopolitan, USA TODAY, and more. She lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Brenda Peyser held leadership positions in the academic and corporate worlds for almost thirty-five years. Most recently, she was a professor of communications at Carnegie Mellon. She served as associate dean of the School of Public Policy and Management at Carnegie Mellon and was one of the founders of the Heinz College Institute for Social Innovation. She now lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Lise Vesterlund is a professor of economics at the University of Pittsburgh and director of the Pittsburgh Experimental Economics Laboratory. Her influential work shows how gender differences in competition, confidence, and expectations contribute to the persistent gender gap in advancement. She founded and directs the Behavioral Economic Design Initiative, to transform the world for the better through behavioral economic design. Her work has been published in leading economics journals and has garnered interest from The New York Times, NPR, The Washington Post, ABC, The Economist, The Atlantic, The Guardian, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, and more. She lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Laurie R. Weingart is a professor of organization behavior and theory at Carnegie Mellon University. She has served as CMU’s Interim Provost, Senior Associate Dean, and Director of the Accelerate Leadership Center while at Carnegie Mellon. Her research examines negotiation, conflict, and innovation in interdisciplinary teams. With a PhD from Northwestern University, she lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.