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Up until recently, the posts of nursing assistants in Quebec hospitals were attributed on the basis of sexual criteria. Following pressure from feminists, there is now no differentiation between men’s posts and women’s posts. However there were then complaints from both men and women nursing assistants that the women were no longer able “to do their share” In collaboration with the health workplace parity committees, the authors studied for a period of 63 hours how the physically demanding tasks were shared. Contrary to what was expected, women performed a much greater number of tasks per hour than men and carried out alone an equal number of demanding tasks. The nurses asked for the help of women nursing assistants much more often than men. In this article, on the basis of the discussion on the results of their study with the workers, the authors try to explain the gap between the impressions of these workers and their own observations.