Given popular press mentions of ‘office housework’ and current gendered social roles in society, it seems obvious that women subsume a greater helping burden in the workplace than men. In this article, Diane Bergeron and Kylie Rochford point out a potential explanation for why meta-analyses on workplace helping behaviors fail to find significant gender differences – namely, that the most commonly-used helping measures were developed on (likely white) men. After pointing out some of the problems with gender-biased measures, they discuss the types of helping that women do which are not reflected in research measures. They suggest that current research conclusions are flawed due to faulty measurement. They also point out how such measures likely ignore EDI-related helping behaviors at work and issue a call to action in terms of more inclusive research measure development.
