Marketing, HR, and who does the nice, unmeasurable work

I printed new-year calendars for our team.

They were created by our internal design department, thoughtful and genuinely appreciated. In Mexico, I organised the printing myself. For the US team—for whom I also lead marketing—I sent the PDF to HR and asked them to print it. Only later did it occur to me that this was one of those tasks that live in a grey area. Was it marketing? Was it HR? Or was it simply a “someone will take care of it” task?

In our company, this ambiguity isn’t a problem. We’re a local team with no dedicated HR person in Mexico. Since I'm here in Mexico City, there’s no dedicated marketing team physically in the US. I covered this small gap without thinking twice or asking anyone, others do too, and the work gets done.

But the moment stuck with me because I’ve seen this dynamic play out in other organisations where the overlap was equally accidental, but much more avoidable.

Who should take on "people stuff"´?

Ordering employee swag. Collecting personal data for IDs. Designing invitations for internal events. Organising culture initiatives. All these tasks sit somewhere between HR and Marketing in many companies, and all these tasks are routinely undervalued precisely because they’re framed as “people stuff.”

And this is where it stops being neutral.

Marketing and HR teams are still overwhelmingly women-dominated. There may be a man at the top of the department, and if an external agency is involved, in my experience, it’s more likely to be led by a man. But the operational, emotional, and logistical labour of keeping a workplace functioning smoothly tends to land elsewhere: On women.

This isn’t about competence. It’s about expectation.

"People task" assignments are rarely questioned because they align neatly with gendered assumptions: women are organised, empathetic, good communicators, happy to help. So the work slides into our laps with heavy assumptions, to which we rarely want to respond, "Is this definitely my expertise?"

Worst of all, because this labour is associated with care, culture, and “niceness,” it’s rarely treated as strategic. It doesn’t show up in performance reviews. It doesn’t carry the same weight as revenue generation or technical output. It’s essential, but somehow still optional, except for the person doing it...

To be clear, I don’t think teams should operate in rigid silos.

I enjoy stepping outside my usual remit occasionally and it can be refreshing to work on something tangible that directly benefits colleagues, rather than chasing leads or optimising funnels. But there’s a difference between choosing to help and being expected to carry invisible labour.

Because once this work becomes assumed, it becomes part of the job, but not a part that is acknowledged, rewarded, or redistributed.

And that’s the issue here. Not who prints a calendar, but why certain types of work—supportive, connective, administrative, emotional work—consistently migrate toward women-dominated teams, while remaining undervalued and undercounted.

So if you find yourself picking up one of these tasks, pause. Not to refuse—but to notice.

Who usually does this? Why is it assumed to be “mine”? And what would it look like if this labour were named, valued, and shared more equitably?

I don’t have a tidy solution. Just a growing discomfort with how familiar this pattern feels. And a sense that if we don’t start naming this work, women will keep doing it quietly, competently, and at a cost only to them.

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