The Gendering of Productivity

Maybe we need to reassess our relationship with data ...

Welcome to Dr Eliza Filby’s Newsletter,

This community is now over 6000 strong…. stay here to discover the key mega-generational trends that are defining how we live, love, work and consume. Do check out my website for my corporate content and courses. You can also mock as I attempt short-form video on Instagram.

In this week’s edition:

• Why most women live in a different time zone to men
• Amazon parcel glasses
• How class dynamics play out at university

The Female Time Penalty

1. Hair - 30 mins
2. Make-up - 15 mins
3. Choosing/changing outfit - 20mins

It takes an hour for me to get ready on a disciplined workday, often more. Meanwhile, my husband can roll out of bed and be out the door in 15 minutes—10 at a push. In that short time, he’s ready to face the world. I, however, often have to choose between being on time or leaving my home feeling polished and professionally presentable. And this is just the beginning. He doesn’t experience the frantic mid-evening outfit changes required for party season, often involving a Wonder Woman-style turnaround in a disabled toilet. Nor does he deal with hours-long appointments for nails, hair, or, as Miquita Oliver highlighted on the Miss Me podcast, the ten-plus hours needed to have her hair braided.

This isn’t about vanity, attractiveness, or fashion. It’s about the time women are expected to invest just to be deemed professionally presentable. Society’s judgment on appearance is of course universal, but it is not controversial to say that women face a harsher, more unforgiving scrutiny. Can she be taken seriously? Is she polished enough? This pressure—let’s call it the "grooming time penalty"—disproportionately impacts women in professional spaces. It’s no wonder women favour remote working; it saves us from paying this daily tax on our time.

But the grooming penalty doesn’t just waste women’s time—it highlights how deeply masculine the culture of productivity is. This disparity doesn’t just affect women’s grooming time; it shapes workplace expectations. Corporate culture rewards constant availability, quick turnarounds, and streamlined efficiency—standards that align with the predominantly male experience of unburdened time. Women, however, are often juggling more than just their workloads. Outside the office, experts have highlighted how they tended to carry the "mental hours" of parenting (planning playdates, shopping, and managing schedules) and emotional labour (soothing tensions, and worrying about well-being). Together, these form the "mental load," an exhausting and invisible burden that keeps both home and work running smoothly.

And just as these dynamics exist at home, they’re mirrored in the workplace. Women tend to excel at tasks that can’t be measured—listening, connecting, teaching, mentoring, yes, wellbeing—and often face disadvantages because of it. In a culture obsessed with metrics and quantifiable results, these intangible contributions are rarely recognised even in 360 assessments.

Yet, paradoxically, these "soft skills" are becoming increasingly important, especially in the age of AI. As automation takes over tasks that are easily measured and replicated, human qualities like empathy, adaptability, and the ability to listen and teach will define the future of work. These are the things that are hard to measure but tend to be the skills women master. In the age of AI, surely the hope should be that both genders are given the freedom to indulge in the unmeasurable.

The Reading Room

1. Did you know that the last mile of a delivery is the most expensive? For Amazon that is. Because it is time-consuming to find the right door in which to drop the package. This is why Amazon is developing smart eyeglasses for their delivery drivers to help them navigate the roads and buildings of the final moments to the door. The glasses will supposedly help drivers with routes to elevators, gates or even warn of aggressive dogs. It is designed to increase margins and decrease the time taken up in the last 100 yards. Just one problem, will delivery drivers willingly adopt them? Because, like all tech, as much as it is about efficiency, it is also about surveillance. It’s an advance that drivers should reject not least because the Amazon service is already dehumanised enough.
2. Edinburgh University has reportedly had to issue instructions to affluent students not to be ‘snobs’ to those from poorer backgrounds, acknowledging the issue of class-related prejudice on campus, where poorer students are often “inadvertently or intentionally shamed by their more privileged peers.” Edinburgh is not the only one. Durham is another. In 2020, Durham student Lauren White wrote a report outlining its negative class culture. ‘At first, when they mocked and mimicked my accent, I sort of went along with it, even laughed, but then when I persistently became the butt of jokes about coal mining and started to get called feral because I was local it started to feel malicious,’ she said. She wrote an article about discrimination and compiled a report on the ‘northern student experience at Durham University’. One contributor talked about the phenomenon of ‘rolling in the muck’, referring to posh students sleeping with a northern working-class person. The university had to launch an inquiry after wealthy prospective freshers reportedly planned a competition to have sex with the poorest student they could find. The reason for the rise of such incidents across UK universities? Yep, inheritocracy. Class is back on campus (as if it ever went away).

Recs

1. If you haven’t seen the Martha Stewart doc on Netflix, please watch the tale of the original trad wife, it’s wild.
2. This ‘chair’ has changed my back (and therefore my life). Also, is there anything more fun than bouncing on a ball during Zooms? Desk work now feels like a visit to a soft playzone.

This week I spoke at the Goldman Sachs Small Business Event, The Trouble Club, the Resolution Foundation and a global Law Forum. If you would like me to speak to your business or if you are interested in embedding the learning a little deeper through my courses and workshops, find out more here.

Thanks for reading,

Eliza