In any organisation there is work that keeps it standing and yet barely counts for anything: taking the minutes of the meeting; organising the event; looking after whoever has just arrived; mediating in a conflict that was becoming entrenched; remembering birthdays, that something needs restocking, that a colleague is on leave; coordinating calendars; solving the small problem before it becomes a big one. It is indispensable work, and yet it does not show up in the annual review, does not raise your salary and does not lead to promotion. Researchers call it non-promotable work: necessary to keep the house running, and invisible in the career of whoever does it.
According to a solid line of research, this work is not distributed at random. Experiments by Linda Babcock and her team showed two things that fit together like a mechanism: women are asked to take on this kind of task more often and, when asked, face greater social pressure to accept. In mixed groups, women volunteered for thankless tasks roughly twice as often as men; the difference disappeared when the groups were single-sex, which indicates that it cannot simply be explained by a female preference for caring. It is not that women necessarily prefer this work. It is that it is expected of them, and saying no can carry a cost for them that men do not face to the same degree. A study published in January 2026, using data from a US financial services firm with around five hundred employees, found the same kind of inequality under a different name: women did almost twice as much office housework and were about a third less likely to take part in high-profile projects, the ones that bring visibility and advance careers.
This research was carried out in companies, especially financial ones, and largely in the United States. Not in the cultural sector, and not in Spain. What we do know about Spain, from other sources, sketches the context. Women hold 16.9% of the management positions analysed by EADA and ICSA in their 2025 report, and the average pay of a male executive is 12.9% higher than that of a female executive, a gap that widened by 1.7 percentage points on the previous year. On the boards of IBEX companies, women held 35.1% of seats in 2024, according to EIGE data cited in the Esade Gender Monitor 2025; that figure refers to boards, not to executive committees, for which the report gives no directly comparable Spanish figure. And outside the office, the burden of care remains unequal: in Spain, according to the 2024 European care survey, among people caring for children aged zero to eleven, 56% of women spend thirty-five hours a week or more on care, compared with 29% of men. The woman who arrives at work has often already been caring.
Anyone who has worked in a foundation, a museum, an association or a cultural project will recognise at least that there are two layers of work. There are the tasks that hold things up: mediation with audiences, supporting artists, internal coordination, community management, solving a thousand small problems, the day-to-day care of a team that is almost always precarious. And there are the tasks that bring visibility: representing the organisation externally, dealing with institutions and sponsors, putting one's name to projects, intellectual authorship, the public voice. Research in other sectors forces us to ask whether culture, too, divides these two layers unequally. If it did, some people would be holding the institution up while others accumulate a larger share of the reputational capital it produces. But in Spain we do not yet have the data to know whether this happens, how intensely or in what way.
And that is the problem: it has not been measured. I looked for Spanish studies on how invisible work is divided by gender within the cultural sector (who takes the minutes and who signs, who mediates and who represents) in museums, foundations and third-sector organisations. I have not found an equivalent measurement. There are cultural employment statistics broken down by sex, and there are studies on precarity and on the role of women in community culture, but none compares women and men in the internal distribution of promotable and non-promotable tasks. The pattern has been measured in corporate and financial settings. In Spanish culture, often presented as more aware, more egalitarian and more critical, the question still has no quantitative answer.
This absence is not neutral in its effects, even if it cannot be attributed to a conscious decision by the sector. Female visitors are counted, as are women artists in exhibitions and women on governing bodies, because there are categories and tools for doing so. Nobody counts who holds each institution up from the inside. That may be due to the difficulty of measuring informal tasks, to the fragmentation of the sector or simply to the fact that it has not yet been seen as a relevant question. Whatever the cause, the result is the same: what is not recorded is hard to recognise, to share out and to claim. The lack of data does not in itself prove the suspected inequality, but it prevents us from seeing it and correcting it, if it exists.
There is also a particularly powerful factor in culture: the word vocation. In a small organisation, in the third sector, the work of institutional care gets confused with commitment, with love for the project, with devotion to the cause. Someone has to deal with the minutes, with welcoming people, with volunteers, with conflict, with logistics, and since no department takes it on, it falls to whoever is considered most responsible or most available, and often to the same person again and again. And that person is thanked in the language of family and vocation, which is a lovely language and also a way of not paying. If, as the general framework would lead us to expect, that person turns out more often to be a woman, the mechanism works without anyone deciding it. Vocation is often the word that saves on wages. What ought to be recognised as work can be presented, in a foundation with a noble cause, as personal devotion, and so it becomes almost unseemly to ask for it to be recorded, rotated and counted.
I chair a foundation and I am a man. I therefore occupy one of the most visible positions in an organisation: that of the person who signs, represents and is publicly associated with it. When I speak of the reputational capital an institution produces, I am also speaking of the capital I receive. That does not in itself show how work is divided within my own foundation, something I would have to measure before asserting it, but it does stop me from presenting the problem as if it always belonged to other organisations. I do not say this to absolve myself in advance, which would be another form of display, but because the first obligation consistent with this text is to review who does each task, who is recognised for it and how the visible opportunities are shared out. Until I do, this will remain just an article, and an article, as I have written before, is the easiest thing to put on display without changing anything.
The way out is not to teach women to say no, the answer that shifts the problem onto whoever suffers it and makes her pay the cost of refusing. The way out is institutional design, dull and concrete: take stock of invisible work and record it as part of the workload; rotate the necessary tasks that do not lead to promotion by rule, not by volunteering; audit, too, who keeps the visible tasks, who leads, who represents, who signs; distinguish between advising someone and genuinely championing their promotion; and publish the indicators, the distribution of tasks, authorship and representation by sex, so that it stops being invisible. None of this requires a large structure, but it does require time, follow-up and institutional will. And, above all, accepting that the current way of assigning and recognising tasks may benefit certain positions, and that measuring it creates the obligation to revise it.
Equality in a cultural institution is not decided only by how many women sit on its board of trustees, which is the easiest thing to show. It may also be decided, meeting by meeting, by who takes the minutes and who chairs; who supports and who represents; who solves the internal problem and whose name goes on the collective success. A foundation can have parity on its governing bodies, an impeccable discourse and a just cause, and still not know how it actually distributes these tasks. That is precisely the open question. Until the data are collected, we cannot know whether institutional care is shared fairly or whether it reproduces, within culture, the pattern already observed in other sectors.
On the open conversation
This piece starts from an article in The Conversation (17 September 2026) on non-promotable work and its unequal distribution by gender, and takes it into my own field, culture. I carefully distinguish three levels: what research has shown (in corporate and financial settings, mostly in the United States), general Spanish context data (management, pay gap, IBEX boards, care), and a hypothesis that has not been measured: that the Spanish cultural sector, given the weight of mediation, relational work and precarity within it, reproduces that pattern. I do not claim it has been proven in culture, because it has not been measured; I argue that this lack of measurement is part of the problem. And I write from a position that the text itself brings into the question: I chair a foundation and occupy one of its most visible places, that of the person who signs, represents and is publicly associated with it, which obliges me to examine inside what I propose to investigate outside before putting the article on display. If anyone wishes to contribute from gender studies, cultural management or the experience of working in these organisations, this notebook remains open.
Sources
Starting point: The Conversation, «¿Quién cuida de las organizaciones? El trabajo que invisibiliza a las mujeres y frena su ascenso» [Who looks after organisations? The work that makes women invisible and holds back their advancement], 17 September 2026. https://theconversation.com/quien-cuida-de-las-organizaciones-el-trabajo-que-invisibiliza-a-las-mujeres-y-frena-su-ascenso-290918
International evidence (corporate settings, not cultural ones):
- Linda Babcock, Maria P. Recalde, Lise Vesterlund, and Laurie Weingart, "Gender Differences in Accepting and Receiving Requests for Tasks with Low Promotability", American Economic Review 107(3), 2017, pp. 714-747 (DOI 10.1257/aer.20141734). This line of research was later popularised in the book The No Club.
- Jasmijn C. Bol, Hila Fogel-Yaari, Isabella Grabner, and Karen L. Sedatole, "Promoting Organizational Citizenship Behavior (OCB): Unintended Gender Disparities in the Participation and Evaluation of Different Types of OCB", The Accounting Review 101(1), January 2026, pp. 27-55 (DOI 10.2308/TAR-2024-0149). Data from a US financial services firm. According to WU Vienna’s press release on the study, women did almost twice as much office housework and were about a third less likely to participate in career-enhancing projects.
- McKinsey and LeanIn.Org, "Women in the Workplace 2025", 9 December 2025, referring to the United States ("broken rung": 100 men for every 93 women promoted to the first level of management); cannot be extrapolated to Spain.
Spanish contextual data (not specific to the cultural sector):
- EADA and ICSA, «Brecha salarial y presencia de la mujer en puestos directivos 2025» [Pay gap and women in management positions 2025], April 2025. Data from March 2024 to February 2025: 16.9% women in management and a 12.9% executive pay gap, 1.7 percentage points higher than in 2024.
- Esade, "Esade Gender Monitor 2025". Cites EIGE data indicating that in 2024, women held 35.1% of board seats in IBEX companies; it does not provide a directly comparable Spanish percentage for women in executive committees.
- SEPE, «Informe del Mercado de Trabajo de las Mujeres. Datos 2024» [Report on the Labour Market for Women. 2024 data], March 2025.
- European Institute for Gender Equality (EIGE), Spanish results of the 2024 CARE survey, published in 2026: among those caring for their own children aged zero to eleven, 56% of women spent thirty-five hours a week or more on care, compared to 29% of men.
Spanish cultural sector:
- Ministry of Culture, cultural employment statistics broken down by sex (with no indicator of the internal distribution of promotable and non-promotable tasks).
- Instituto de las Mujeres, «Cultura comunitaria e igualdad de género en España» [Community culture and gender equality in Spain], October 2024 (examines organisations, precarity, ties and care, but without a comparison by sex of the internal distribution of non-promotable work).
- No Spanish measurement has been found of the gender distribution of non-promotable work, mediation or institutional care within museums, foundations or cultural organisations. Applying the framework to the cultural sector is put forward as a hypothesis based on observable features of the sector, not as a quantified fact.