Four years ago , I wrote about what I called the “office mom.” Women, particularly working mothers and women on male-dominated teams, could find themselves doing office housework: taking meeting notes, mentoring younger employees, organizing team activities, bringing in food for holidays and generally assuming responsibility for keeping the workplace running smoothly. Except they don’t work in HR.

For example, a company hires a woman to do marketing, operations or finance. Then, somewhere along the way, an expectation develops and she snowballs into the person coworkers go to when there’s a conflict. A death by a thousand paper cuts: women can easily slip from empathetic team member to office mom to the accidental HR manager. Job creep isn’t random; some of the tasks companies fail to formally assign or compensate for fall to women. Women have historically absorbed extra work outside of the workplace too.

The Job Change Without The Title Change

Research published in August 2026 by FrankCrum surveyed 1,000 small business owners and employees responsible for handling HR at their companies through Pollfish, an online survey platform. The study found that 43% of respondents spend at least 10 hours a week on HR duties. Among workers who took on HR responsibilities, 42% hadn’t received a raise. But among those who did, there was a significant gender gap: 45% of men received a raise, compared with just 22% of women. Thirty-four percent of women received neither a pay increase nor a title change after taking on HR duties, compared with 21% of men. FrankCrum analyzed the self-reported results by demographic groups, including gender and generation.

Unfortunately, jobs can expand without the title, pay or expectations changing with them. But there’s a difference between a role evolving and an employee absorbing another function of the business without anyone formally acknowledging that the job has changed.

In an August 2026 nationally representative survey conducted through Pollfish, ResumeBuilder.com surveyed 1,023 U.S. employees about hiring promises, daily role expectations, career advancement and workplace value. Eighteen percent said their current job had changed significantly or was completely different from what they were originally hired to do. Another 20% described their daily expectations as often unclear or completely unpredictable, while 30% said they felt undervalued or completely overlooked for their contributions.

Most employees negotiate compensation, titles and career paths based on the job they believe they’re accepting. When employers add substantial new responsibilities later, they have effectively changed part of that agreement. This is especially important for women, who already have a more complicated negotiation environment. Job creep makes it even harder because employers ask them to negotiate the value of work no one formally assigned or documented in the first place.

Adding another challenge to this, in today’s corporate world, AI-driven performance metrics might not consider this work valuable. Women may read emotions, calm conflict and prevent problems before they happen, but none of that necessarily shows up in KPIs. So AI can strengthen existing bias by rewarding the work that’s easiest to count instead of the work that keeps teams stable.

Gender Is Not An HR Qualification

FrankCrum found that women were the ones more likely to be running HR from an office manager or operations seat rather than a dedicated HR role, with many feeling unqualified or unprepared for a high-stakes HR situation. Among the situations they felt least prepared to handle were employee conflicts and disputes, harassment complaints and discrimination claims.

The FrankCrum study also found that, in addition to taking on invisible labor, employees face consequences from having no formal training in making decisions involving careers, workplace safety, discrimination and potentially significant legal risk. Seventy-one percent of respondents had experienced at least one concrete consequence from HR uncertainty during the previous year, including delayed terminations, disciplinary action, unresolved employee issues and delayed conversations about pay or promotions.

Managers should periodically compare employees’ actual responsibilities with the jobs they were hired to perform. Organizations need to know who is actually doing the work and compensate women for their increasing responsibilities. They should also pay attention to who repeatedly becomes the default person for work that falls between departments and rectify that. If the role has expanded significantly, employers should decide whether to redistribute the work, provide training, change the title or adjust compensation.

David Peasall, senior vice-president of human resources at FrankCrum , said in an interview: “If a woman is handling employee conflicts, onboarding, benefits questions, disciplinary issues or terminations, that isn’t simply being a helpful ‘people person.’ She’s doing HR work. Employers should recognize it, document it, compensate for it appropriately and make sure she has the training and support to do it well.”

Women will have to proactively document what invisible labor they’re doing for an organization: every “can you do me a favor?” and any small request they receive. No more assumptions or unspoken rules, whether or not their company has an HR department.

If a female associate hired into operations is spending a quarter of her week managing employee conflicts, there is a workplace issue at hand, yes. But more than likely this shouldn’t be a responsibility at the individual contributor level. But before a woman can negotiate the monetary value of the work, she may have to establish that the invisible work contributes to organizational growth and financial performance. She’ll have to prove she’s essentially been doing another person’s entire job while the company benefits from not paying for it.