Making the Unseen Seen: Valuing Invisible Work for Fairer Employment and Stronger Economies

3 min read 

In this piece I discuss the difference between what people think women do in their jobs (prescribed work or planned work) and what they actually do in their jobs (real work, or situated actions). I outline the significance of invisible work as an equity issue, and argue that recognising invisible work will be essential to achieving many EU policy goals aimed at supporting workplace equity and a robust economy.

Prescribed Work and Real Work

When Catherine Teiger, a French ergonomist died recently, Teiger’s colleague Karen Messing recalled that Teiger was among the first to note that there was a difference between women’s prescribed work (what an employer and union thought women did), and the work which women actually did (“real work”). Through careful observation Teiger was able to identify the aspects of women glove sewers’ jobs (perceived by the employer and union alike to be easy), which caused them to “age out” of the work by the time they were 26. In a subsequent study, Teiger documented the invisible work of caring women did in computer service jobs (where women were heavily represented, and which required the lowest level of qualification).

Similar observations about differences in what system designers thought women did and what they actually did were made by Lucy Suchman, in her 1987 book Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem of Human-Machine Communication, and its follow up, Human-Machine Reconfigurations: Plans and Situated Actions, published in 2007. Like Tieger, Suchman—an anthropologist working in computer science—documented how plans (how work is supposed to be carried out) differed from situated actions-- the things workers actually have to do in order to achieve or accomplish work – and how that often differs from how work and system designers thought the work got done. Suchman, like Tieger, demonstrated that particularly for women, the complexity of the activities which contribute to accomplishing many work tasks in real life is often unrecognised, as are the skills needed to perform these activities, and that this is particularly true when workers are women.  

The Gendered Nature of Invisible Work

Concerned that insights about the gender based differences between planned and situated work, and insights about the gendered nature of invisible work which fieldwork-based studies of women’s work uncovered were being eclipsed by a focus on ethnographic methods at the expense of the insights they had uncovered about women’s work, my colleague Ina Wagner and I showed how fieldwork-based studies which focused on women’s work attempted to locate women’s work in a larger context that addresses its visibility and value. We returned to these themes in greater depth in our recent book, Gender and Technology at Work: From Workplace Studies to Social Justice in Design, which addresses how to design technological systems in general, and information technologies in particular to support women workers. 

Recognising Invisible Work Supports Policy Goals

Why does this matter, and why should we care? Policy is important. It reflects principles and values, and guides decision-making. In the EU, policies within varied portfolios (including employment policies, technology policies and gender policies, as well as policies which seek to govern collection of data required to monitor the EU’s progress in meeting policy goals) may be inadvertently undermined by our collective failure to recognise that (in the words of Catherine Teiger), prescribed work and real work differ. Until we recognise that those jobs women are concentrated in, in a largely sex segregated paid labour force are jobs which require significant amounts of invisible work, many of our collective efforts to achieve equality at work will fall short as we operationalise policies aimed at achieving gender equality at work, particularly in relation to technology.

The Strategic Agenda for 2024-2029 recently approved by the European Council has not escaped criticism (including for its lack of focus on the creation of quality jobs). Nonetheless, the third pillar of the 2024-2029 Strategic Agenda - which calls for creation of a prosperous and competitive Europe (and includes a renewed focus on the creation of good jobs) leaves open the possibility of advancing equity at work.  A number of EU and EC policy documents (such as the EU Directive on Equal Pay, and the related 2020 Commission Staff Working Evaluation Document (which offers a nuanced review of the challenges associated with operationalising notions of equal pay related to skill),  the European Commission’s action plan on Labour and skills shortages in the EU and other governance instruments such as the ETUC Resolution calling for an EU Directive on Algorithmic Systems at Work together create means for us to highlight the extent to which jobs in which women are concentrated depend upon invisible work, without which many systems would fail to run smoothly.

Strengthening Europe’s Economy and Moving Towards Equity by Recognising Invisible Work

Recognising the often invisible work and skill required to carry out many jobs women typically fill in a largely sex segregated labour force will be critical in creating a competitive Europe, because failing to recognise women’s invisible work can lead to poor and often costly failed work and technology design. Not recognising the skill content of work often carried out by women doesn’t just shortchange women in terms of compensation: it likely also causes us to overlook the possibility that many women workers- including those lacking in formal qualifications for jobs where labour is in short supply- may either have the skills to carry out jobs we need filled, or could be easily trained to do so.  Recognising invisible work and the skill required to perform it can lead to fairer compensation, better work and system design, the design of algorithms and artificial intelligence that are more accurate, effective and avoid costly errors resulting from an understanding of prescribed rather than real work. Recognising invisible work can also help move the EU towards pay equity, and help us make better use of our existing labour force.