"Our research suggests that this reluctant volunteer is more likely to be female than male."

You are female, work in a company, want to get ahead. Committing to extra tasks is a way to show leader potential you have read somewhere. Volunteering is viewed positively. You go for it.

Not so fast.

Volunteer for Tasks That Don’t Lead to Promotions

Here’s a work scenario many of us know too well: You are in a meeting and your manager brings up a project that needs to be assigned. It’s not particularly challenging work, but it’s time-consuming, unlikely to drive revenue, and probably won’t be recognized or included in your performance evaluation. As your manager describes the project and asks for a volunteer, you and your colleagues become silent and uneasy, everyone hoping that someone else will raise their hand. The wait becomes increasingly uncomfortable. Then, finally, someone speaks up: “Okay, I’ll do it.”

Our research suggests that this reluctant volunteer is more likely to be female than male. 

Here is the NY Times article.

Who Is Asked to Volunteer, and Why?

To further confirm that people expect women to volunteer more than men, we conducted a third experiment, this time adding a fourth person, a manager, to the group. At the start of each round, the manager had to publicly ask one member of the new three-person group to volunteer. (The manager couldn’t personally volunteer. They saw pictures of the other members of their group and clicked on the picture of the person they wanted to ask.) The manager got $2 if someone in the group volunteered and $1 if no one volunteered. The rules for the group of three remained the same — $1 each if no one volunteered, but if someone volunteered, that person received $1.25 while the other group members each received $2. Managers were free to ask any member of the group to volunteer, but we expected they would be more likely to ask women than men.

This is precisely what we found: Women received 44% more requests to volunteer than men in mixed-sex groups. Intriguingly, the gender of the manager did not make a difference: Both male and female managers were more likely to ask a woman to volunteer than a man. This was apparently a wise decision: Women were also more likely to say yes. A request to volunteer was accepted by men 51% of the time and by women 76% of the time.

In the 'Anamnesis of the hidden constants' Pierre Bourdieu writes:

"It is no doubt in the encounter with the 'objective' expectations' inscribed, mostly in the implicit state, in the positions offered to women by the still very strongly sexually differentiated division of labour that the so-called 'feminine' dispositions inculcated by the family and the whole social order are able to be fulfilled or even blossom, and, in this very process, to be rewarded, thereby helping to reinforce the fundamental sexual dichotomy, both in the jobs, which seem to call for submissiveness and the need for security, and in their occupants, who are identified with positions in which, enchanted or alienated, they both find themselves and lose themselves."