Image credit: AI-generated using OpenAI (ChatGPT / DALL·E)
Every engineering team depends on work that leaves little trace in the commit log. Someone onboards a new hire and helps her become productive in weeks rather than months. Someone notices two teams building incompatible systems and brings them together before the problem becomes expensive. Someone reviews the design document, unblocks a stalled pull request, or resolves a frustrated customer's issue.
These contributions rarely headline a product launch or appear prominently in performance dashboards. Yet they often determine whether a project succeeds.
Software engineer Tanya Reilly calls this glue work: the less glamorous, often less-promotable work that holds technical teams together. Her warning is particularly relevant to early-career engineers. When someone spends too much time on glue work without corresponding recognition or opportunities to develop technical expertise, it can limit career progression and even push talented professionals away from engineering.
Research suggests women are especially vulnerable to this imbalance.
A 2017 study in the American Economic Review found that women were more likely than men to volunteer for, receive requests for, and accept tasks with low promotion potential. The researchers also found that expectations about women's willingness to accept these responsibilities helped explain the unequal distribution. In their subsequent discussion in Harvard Business Review, the researchers examined why women volunteer more frequently for tasks that do not lead to promotions.
The consequences extend beyond workload. When women spend substantial time making others successful, their own technical accomplishments may receive less attention.
The new hire excels. The project ships. The customer stays. But who receives recognition for making those outcomes possible?
That is the invisibility gap: the disconnect between valuable contributions and the credit those contributions receive.
How do you recognize employees for invisible work?
Invisible work becomes recognizable when organizations broaden what counts as evidence of contribution.
Most traditional recognition systems favor visible achievements: a successful launch, a measurable revenue improvement, a completed feature, or a prominent presentation. These accomplishments matter, but they represent only part of the work required to deliver results.
Consider a site reliability engineer who prevents a serious outage through proactive maintenance. The team's success appears as uninterrupted service, not as a dramatic incident resolution.
Similarly, a technical lead who mentors junior engineers may strengthen the entire team's performance without producing a directly attributable metric.
Recognition becomes more equitable when managers deliberately identify these contributions instead of relying exclusively on highly visible outcomes.
There is also evidence that perceptions of technical work can be influenced by gender.
A study of more than 1.4 million GitHub users found that women's pull requests were accepted more frequently than men's overall. However, among contributors who were outsiders to a project and whose gender was identifiable, men's pull requests had higher acceptance rates. These observational findings suggest that gender-related perceptions may influence how technical contributions are evaluated.
Invisibility also affects employees across different roles and backgrounds.
According to Giftogram's analysis of 43,513 public workplace conversations, collected between February 2025 and February 2026, employees described feeling overlooked or unappreciated 4.1 times more frequently than feeling valued. This company-conducted analysis of online conversations illustrates recurring concerns about recognition, although it is not a representative survey of the entire workforce.
For women in technology, these recognition challenges can intersect with expectations to mentor, coordinate, support colleagues, and maintain team relationships.
The problem is not that collaborative work lacks value. It is that organizations often lack consistent ways to recognize that value.
WomenTech Network has explored the importance of making women's contributions in tech visible. A meaningful next step is ensuring that visibility translates into fair performance assessments, advancement opportunities, and professional recognition.
How do you create a scalable employee recognition program?
An effective recognition program begins by defining what deserves recognition, rather than deciding which rewards to distribute.
Organizations often approach recognition through the mechanics of delivery: selecting gifts, setting budgets, organizing celebrations, or introducing digital recognition platforms.
These tools can make appreciation easier to distribute, but they cannot independently determine whose work has been overlooked.
A more sustainable approach starts with fair attribution.
Managers can begin by reviewing completed projects and identifying contributions beyond the most visible deliverables. Who resolved dependencies between teams? Who helped a colleague overcome a difficult technical problem? Who improved the onboarding process or prevented recurring operational failures?
Documenting these contributions creates a more complete picture of performance.
Once meaningful contributions have been identified, organizations can choose appropriate recognition methods. Options range from specific public acknowledgment and professional development opportunities to formal rewards, including employee reward gift cards.
However, recognition does not always require a monetary reward. A manager explicitly crediting an engineer's leadership during a project review, or documenting her contribution in a promotion case, may have greater long-term career value.
Scalability comes from consistency, not simply automation.
A practical starting point is a quarterly recognition audit. Compare employees who received formal recognition with those who regularly mentored colleagues, onboarded new hires, reviewed technical designs, or resolved cross-team challenges.
The lists will not necessarily match, nor does every contribution require the same form of recognition.
However, if the same employees repeatedly improve team performance without appearing in recognition or promotion discussions, the organization has identified a potential attribution problem.
Managers can also create structured opportunities for colleagues to acknowledge contributions that might otherwise go unnoticed.
For example, a project retrospective can include two distinct questions:
Who delivered the project's primary outcomes?
Who removed obstacles or enabled other people to deliver those outcomes?
Both categories provide valuable evidence of impact.
The aim is not to reward every helpful interaction. It is to ensure that sustained, meaningful contributions receive attention proportional to their organizational value.
Why invisible work is a double burden for women in tech
Women in technical roles may experience a double burden: carrying a disproportionate share of low-promotability work while also performing activities that help colleagues feel supported and recognized.
Research into workplace engagement highlights the value of these contributions.
In 2015, Gallup found that employees reporting to female managers were more likely than employees of male managers to report receiving recent recognition, conversations about professional progress, and encouragement to develop their skills.
Employee engagement was also higher among employees reporting to female managers, at 33% compared with 27% for those reporting to male managers.
These findings do not establish that women are inherently better managers. They do highlight the importance of developmental conversations, encouragement, and recognition as measurable aspects of leadership.
This creates an important question for technology organizations: when coaching, unblocking, mentoring, and recognizing others contribute to stronger teams, why are those activities sometimes treated as personality traits rather than professional skills?
Reilly's discussion of glue work illustrates the career consequences.
In a composite example, an engineer spends years filling organizational gaps, mentoring colleagues, and supporting essential processes. Despite helping the team succeed, she struggles to demonstrate the technical accomplishments required for promotion because so much of her work falls outside the criteria used to evaluate her.
The issue is not that mentoring or collaboration are inherently less valuable than writing code. Different responsibilities contribute to organizational success in different ways.
The problem arises when employees are repeatedly assigned essential responsibilities without receiving appropriate credit, career development opportunities, or a fair distribution of workload.
For women navigating technical careers, this imbalance can become particularly damaging when supportive behavior is expected rather than recognized.
A healthier approach acknowledges collaborative leadership while preserving opportunities to deepen technical expertise.
It also recognizes that responsibility for correcting the imbalance belongs to organizations and their managers, not solely to the women whose work has been overlooked.
Image credit: AI-generated using OpenAI (ChatGPT / DALL·E)
How do you recognize mentoring and onboarding work?
Mentoring, onboarding, troubleshooting, and cross-team collaboration become more visible when organizations treat them as evidence of professional contribution rather than informal acts of helpfulness.
Five practices provide a practical foundation.
1. Recognize the people who remove obstacles.
In project retrospectives, acknowledge individuals who resolved dependencies, clarified difficult requirements, improved communication, or prevented avoidable delays.
Rather than describing an engineer as simply supportive, explain the impact of her contribution.
For example, documenting that a technical lead coordinated two teams to resolve conflicting system requirements provides a clearer account of leadership than praising her willingness to help.
2. Include mentoring and onboarding in performance conversations.
When employees invest substantial time in developing colleagues, managers can record those responsibilities alongside other project contributions.
The evidence may include onboarding materials, mentorship milestones, improvements to development processes, or documented feedback from colleagues.
For example, an engineer who develops a reusable onboarding guide and supports several new team members has contributed to team capability beyond her individual technical output.
Recognition works best when those efforts form part of a consistent evaluation framework.
3. Monitor how collaborative responsibilities are distributed.
Repeated requests for the same employee to onboard colleagues, manage difficult conversations, troubleshoot urgent problems, or coordinate teams may indicate an uneven workload.
Managers can track these assignments and distribute them deliberately.
Sharing responsibilities across qualified team members reduces the risk of concentrating essential but less-promotable work among a small group of employees.
It also creates opportunities for more engineers to develop communication, mentoring, and technical leadership skills.
4. Define collaborative leadership in career progression criteria.
Recognition becomes more consistent when organizations describe the behaviors they value.
For senior engineering roles, these might include identifying architectural risks, mentoring less-experienced engineers, improving technical decision-making, and coordinating complex projects.
Clear criteria help managers distinguish meaningful leadership contributions from general helpfulness.
WomenTech Network has also examined how recognition systems can reward traditionally male-coded contributions while undervaluing collaboration and other forms of leadership.
Evaluating outcomes through clearly defined, gender-neutral criteria helps organizations recognize contributions more consistently.
5. Document impact without making self-promotion the solution.
Women engineers benefit from maintaining a record of their technical and collaborative contributions, particularly when preparing for performance reviews or promotion discussions.
Useful records may include design decisions, successful mentoring initiatives, cross-team improvements, and examples of complex problems resolved.
However, documentation is only one part of the solution.
Managers remain responsible for identifying contributions, providing development opportunities, and ensuring employees are not disadvantaged for undertaking work that benefits the organization.
An engineer's professional advancement cannot depend entirely on her ability to make previously invisible work visible.
Closing the invisibility gap
Invisible work is essential to successful engineering teams. It connects people, prevents problems, develops talent, and enables technical projects to move forward.
But when organizations overlook these contributions, they risk creating a workplace where the people making everyone else more effective receive less recognition for their own work.
For women in technology, the consequences can extend beyond appreciation to promotion opportunities, leadership development, and long-term career progression.
Closing the invisibility gap requires organizations to recognize not only the people delivering visible results but also those whose expertise and leadership make those results possible.
The most important question is not simply how to reward employees.
It is whether the organization has learned to recognize the full value of their work.