Melinda Seckington's theory: eldest daughters have been training for team glue work since childhood, keeping peace, organizing chaos, picking up slack. Her poll showed 60% of glue workers are eldest daughters.
Here's Melinda Seckington's sneaky suspicion: being an eldest daughter is basically unpaid training for doing team glue work. You know the drill: mentoring, unblocking, documentation, organizing things, all the invisible-but-essential work that keeps teams collaborating. And somewhere between childhood chores and homework, eldest daughters learned to keep the peace, organize chaos, and pick up whatever needs picking up.
She's preparing a talk on community glue work and decided to test this theory. The results? 60% of people who do glue work are eldest daughters. Another 25% do glue work but aren't eldest daughters, so it's not exclusively an eldest daughter thing, but the correlation is striking.
This matters because glue work is real work that often goes unrecognized. It's the stuff that doesn't show up in sprint velocity or commit counts but makes the difference between a team that ships and a team that's stuck. Understanding where these skills come from, and recognizing that some people have been unconsciously developing them their whole lives, helps teams value and distribute this work more intentionally.
The post is playful but the underlying question is serious: what childhood experiences prepare us for the invisible labor that holds teams together? And how do we make sure that work gets recognized and fairly distributed instead of falling to the same people over and over?
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