volunteer

a volunteer can be either a woman or a man, of course, but volunteer work has traditionally been apportioned along sexist lines: "For men it usually means serving in prestigious policymaking or advisory capacities, with the encouragement of the employer to take time off from work to serve as the company's 'goodwill ambassador' to the community. For women, volunteerism means providing direct services at their own expense (transportation, lunch). Second, because women volunteers work almost exclusively at the lowest levels of the volunteer hierarchy, they obtain little valuable work experience or training. Popular mythologies to the contrary, displaced homemakers have been continuously frustrated to find that their résumés, which have meticulously translated fifteen to twenty-five years of volunteer activities into marketable skills, elicit ... negative responses from prospective employers" (Nijole V. Benokraitis and Joe R. Feagin, Modern Sexism).