I get stuck with all the event planning due to my male coworkers’ weaponized incompetence

A reader writes:

I’m a woman working in a male-dominated profession. I do most of the planning and organizing for company events—not by choice or job description, but because I’m told I’m such a good planner.

While I’m planning something, I’m rarely offered help. However, right before the event, I’m often asked by male coworkers if they can do anything or if I need anything. “Are we all good for Thursday? Can I do anything?”

Of course, it’s way too late for them to do anything, and they know that. Is this weaponized incompetence? Or what is it? Whatever it is, it’s incredibly annoying, and I’d love to come up with a comeback that shows I’m onto them.

You’re focusing on the wrong problem. You don’t need a comeback for last-minute offers of help — you need to stop agreeing to do all the event planning when it’s not part of your job.

For what it’s worth, it’s possible those offers of help aren’t deliberately insincere, but rather people haven’t thought about the event at all until right before it (because they don’t have to, because they know you are handling it). Then they see it on the calendar for the next day and figure it would be polite to ask if you need help. And if they never plan events themselves, they genuinely may not realize how ridiculous it is to wait until the last minute to make that offer.

If there is weaponized incompetence here, it’s probably happening much earlier — when you’re somehow the only person capable of planning events because you’re so good at them. You will remain better at it than everyone else if no one else is ever expected to do it, and your colleagues are probably happy for that to remain the case.

Regardless, you don’t need a comeback. You need to talk to your own boss and say that you don’t want all the event planning to continue falling to you and you want to focus on the parts of your job that you were hired to do (and which you’re presumably evaluated on when it your performance is assessed and raises are considered), just like your male coworkers get to do. And you should feel free to name the gender disparity — as in, “I’m concerned that this is falling to the one woman on the team, while male team members are free to stay focused on work that’s more advantageous to their careers.”

You can also try just saying no the next time you’re asked to organize an event: “I don’t have room on my plate for that right now, but I’ve done quite a few this year. Could you check with Brian or Roger about this one?”

If that doesn’t work, your back-up strategy should be to stop waiting for offers of help and instead announce what help you need and either assign pieces of the work to people or ask your boss to. But that still leaves you as the person ultimately responsible for making it all come together, so it’s far from ideal.

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