The Unseen Burden: How Invisible Labor Shapes Women's Relationships and Family Life

In this episode of No Shrinking Violets, Dr. Christine Nowik returns to explore the often-overlooked weight of invisible labor—this time, in personal relationships. From holiday planning to the mental load of family schedules, women continue to carry an unspoken responsibility that takes a toll on both mental and physical well-being. We dive into the latest research, unpack the deep-rooted societal norms at play, and discuss how these ingrained patterns affect everything from career advancement to personal fulfillment. Tune in for an insightful conversation that sheds light on this hidden burden—and what we can do about it.

Click HERE to get Mary's Communication Equation for Relationship Roles

You can find Christine HERE

Links to information mentioned in this episode:

Pew study

Arlie Hochschild on YouTube

Second Shift book

The Will to Change - bell hooks

Riane Eisler

Tressie McMillan Cottom

Transcript

Mary

Welcome to the show. Today I'm sharing the mic yet again with my friend Dr Christine Nowik. She was here with me for Episode 5 when we talked about invisible labor in the workplace. In a quick recap, invisible labor consists of the unpaid and often unacknowledged tasks that women tend to assume, commonly as a result of both socialization and unwritten expectations. These are many times tasks that are not part of their – or any – job description. Things like organizing welcome events or retirement parties for coworkers, acknowledging birthdays, and in the actual context of a workplace, anticipating and addressing potential problems before they manifest into actual issues and/or recognizing and helping with others’ tasks, often without reward or acknowledgement of upper management. 

I know I was typically the one with a stash of birthday and sympathy cards in my desk, and most female administrative assistants would make sure all staff birthdays were acknowledged. If, as a woman, these situations resonate with you or you thought, like I used to, “But it feels good and right to help my coworkers,” you're both not wrong and, well, not 100% correct. 

In spite of the content of this podcast, I really try to be aware of stereotyping. Yet the vast majority of invisible labor is clearly performed by women, although as I hinted at in episode 5, men in certain careers, like helping professions, may be more likely to perform tasks that are connecting and supporting as a context of the environment and the lack of a corporate type career ladder. But overall, especially in corporate settings, women tend to engage in the typically female tend-and-befriend behaviors that don't yield career rewards in the form of advancement or even manager acknowledgement.

Well, today we're going to steer into the realm of invisible labor in the world of personal relationships. As Christine noted in our past discussion, the holiday stockings lining the fireplace mantle that are often filled are not those belonging to Mom. From buying and wrapping gifts to planning the menu for the holiday to cooking the meal, and tending to guests, women are often the elves of the traditional holiday. In everyday life, we tend to slip into the same traditional roles: planning meals, cooking meals, cleaning up, bathing, dressing and feeding kids, communicating with teachers, (although probably not coaches), doing laundry and replacing worn out socks and underwear, stripping beds and washing sheets and dirty towels. 

OK, Christine, I don't know if I'm overdoing it here. I mean, it's so easy to fall into traditional roles in a heterosexual marriage and in a family. Even women with really supportive partners still often find themselves doing the majority of the household work, even if they are employed outside the home. Research from Pew, in fact, indicates that, even when women and men earn roughly the same salary in what we call an egalitarian household, women are performing more than twice the domestic labor. So let's dive into this subject and dissect it a bit. 

But before we do, a quick intro: Christine has 25 years of leadership experience in non-profit organizations, as well as higher education. She is currently a professor of English and an organizational and leadership consultant. She has a PhD in Leadership and Administration with a focus on power structure and gender roles in organizational change. On the flip side, Christine is a wife, human mom and cat mom, and an excellent cook, writer and friend. Welcome to No Shrinking Violets. I'm so happy to have you here again.

Christine

Thank you, Mary. And I'm delighted to be here. And I'm also happy to hear you mention that Pew study, because we're going to get into that in just a minute. So let's start with a little definition. So invisible labor, as you aptly described, refers to the often unseen tasks and responsibilities that contribute to the smooth functioning of a household or organization, but are neither formally acknowledged or directly rewarded. We have sociologist Arlie Hochschild, who coined the term Second Shift, to thank, because she highlighted how working women take on disproportionate shares of domestic responsibilities after their paid work day ends. And let me be clear when I say working women: everyone's working, right? Whether they're working in the domestic sphere or the paid sphere, or both. But here I'm referring specifically to women who are doing work outside of the home. So examples of the kind of invisible labor she was talking about include things that you mentioned, managing the mental load, such as keeping track of family schedules, appointments, and commitments. Less preferences, tastes, and proclivities and emotional labor, such as mediating conflicts or providing support to family members. Other examples include coordinating household chores, organizing spaces, and handling administrative tasks like paying bills. Or communicating with schools. All of the great things that you already mentioned, and I want to be clear about one thing. This is certainly a “not all relationships” situation, because of course, we'll always have evidence to the contrary. That’s just how dynamics are in any situation. 

I know your astute listeners are already aware of how data distribution works. We’ll always have examples on the edges, where we see patterns of the exact opposite of what I've described here, or places where relationships are more balanced. But we have so much data to support the idea of the invisible labor divide. So let's get to that Pew study, for example, that you mentioned. 

In 2023, they released their study on earnings and domestic labor. In households where the adults are a man and a woman and their earnings are equal – what we call the egalitarian household, as you noted – men spend more time on paid work and leisure, while women spend more time on caregiving and housework. In households with children under 18, women spend almost 7 hours per week taking care of individuals in the household and four and a half hours doing housework per week, while husbands spend roughly five and two hours on these activities, respectively. So that's the divide that we're talking about here and it's supported by research. I look forward to talking a little more about what we can do and how we can manage the situation.

Mary

Yeah, we will definitely get to that because I know that is the most challenging because I mean, often it's an ingrained pattern, and women may not really recognize their own resentment until they're several years into a partnership and then they're not sure what to do. We'll definitely get to that. But why do you think that invisible labor at home is often so unrecognized?

Christine

I think invisible labor often goes unrecognized for reasons you've already touched on: these deeply entrenched cultural norms and societal expectations. These traditional gender roles have historically framed caregiving and domestic tasks as women's work, making those contributions less visible and undervalued. Additionally, the nature of the tasks, many of which occur in the background, or are taken for granted because they lack visibility, further obscures their importance. 

Other research from Pew actually shows us that women are more likely than men to feel responsible for managing their family's schedule and maintaining household order, often internalizing these roles as part of their identity. I often think about the origin of that idea, right? Where did it come from? We don't emerge from the womb with these tendencies, but rather we're socialized into them at a very young age. We see models of caregiving and nurturing that are largely female, which then helps establish our expectation of norms for ourselves and others. And that applies to anyone living in our culture. So men and women both are socialized by those models and those traditional gender roles based on what they're experiencing in their own lives. 

I've been really interested to see a sociologist like Dr Tressie McMillan Cottom’s take on the idea of the trad wife. We're seeing this new, not so new, but emerging, more visible social media trend of the idea of the trad wife, and I think that brings us sort of full circle in this conversation and we're back to explicitly talking about these gender roles in the domestic sphere.

Mary

Well, of course you hit on something that, you know, lights me up – the idea of socialization. And I think still a lot of our young women come directly out of high school or out of college, and one of their goals is to actually find a partner and settle down, which I think is fine, except you know, when sometimes we don't really internally want to do that. We know that's not really what would make us happy, but there is that expectation that, not even so much as women should establish a career, but women should establish a marriage and a family and fit a career into that. 

Christine

Absolutely. 

Mary

So when you think about that whole huge set of expectations, and again, many women I think don't really realize what all that means until they move into trying to make all of those roles fit together like a puzzle. They never really do. So how do you think that that invisible labor, especially in a partnership, a family setting, how does it impact women's mental and physical health?

Christine

I think we see lots of things out in the world that help us get a grip on the impact. It's always difficult to draw a straight causal line, but I do think that we've got a good many studies that help us see that women are certainly affected by the cumulative effect of invisible labor in important ways, both mentally and physically. Constantly juggling responsibilities can lead to burnout. And chronic stress. And anxiety. And maybe many of your listeners feel that when I say those words. A study, in fact, from the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, found that women who bear the brunt of household labor report higher levels of psychological distress. Physically, the stress associated with managing unacknowledged labor can manifest as fatigue, disrupted sleep, and even long term health conditions like hypertension or immune system suppression. I am not that kind of doctor, Mary, but I do read widely and I'm very interested in these dynamics, because I think everything is linked up in our ecosystem. When women are more likely to suffer from depression and autoimmune disorders, I'm left wondering, is there a direct causal relationship between these outcomes and the stress of invisible labor? And I think I can hypothesize safely that, yes. And so women who wake up in the middle of the night, for example, and are trying to keep their brains turned off so that they don't start cranking over their to do lists and all of those tabs they have opened in their minds… That's how I view it. My own brain is that I've got all of these tabs and they're all functioning independently and collectively, but they're always cranking, so they're running in the background all the time. And I think many women, especially those who are juggling these multiple, competing responsibilities in systems that don't bend and flex for those needs experience the same thing, and over time we have again a cumulative effect that manifests then as physical and mental distress.

Mary

Well, I don't think it's any mystery why, out of 80 million autoimmune disease diagnoses in the United States, 75% of those are women. 60 million. And why is it so? I think we know that and we also have been socialized not only to take on all these roles and the pressure to think we have to do everything well and to look good doing it. But we've also been socialized that you don't really complain. Kind of, you know, put the extra rocks in your backpack and you just keep going. And I think we have to start to normalize that we need, just like anything in nature, we need to rest and we need to be able to set boundaries. And that doesn't mean that we are nagging and it doesn't mean that we are lazy. I mean so many of those traditional adjectives that I think pop into our minds, you know when… and I think historically we see sitcoms or we see even memes now where the wife is simply addressing a need and that becomes a very unsavory description like nagging. And so I think we have to start to shed those things. And that's partly what we're going to talk about before the end of the episode, is how to start to change a mindset for women about what it means to set boundaries and communicate. So when we think about this dawning realization, sometimes that women sort of, you know, drink the kool-aid, they follow all those societal markers, at least in Western Society of you know, you either get an education and you know, then move into this committed relationship and you should want to have children. And that's part of what a woman does. As this might dawn on a woman, or maybe even stay unconscious for some women, how do you see that affecting relationships and family dynamics?

Christine

Yeah, there's a pretty big impact and before we move into that, I just want to reference what you said about rest because I think that is a key component of understanding the effects of this dynamic that we're talking about, the unequal distribution of invisible labor because it strains. But you're right, it also strains relationships and creates tensions and. So if one partner disproportionately shoulders these responsibilities, it does often lead to feelings of resentment and undervaluation over time that can erode trust and intimacy between partners. Children in households where one parent consistently takes on most of the labor may in fact, internalize these patterns perpetuating this idea of traditional gender roles and inequities in their own future. And worse, they might enact them in their own children, too, coming to expect the women in their lives will organize, coordinate, and meet their emotional needs in ways they don't expect from the men in their lives. So what I mean by that is they do 2 things. They may enact those dynamics in their own relationships, and they may socialize their own children for these dynamics as well. 

And I do think the situation creates a challenge for men. We're talking about the effects on women, but the expectations for gender are very damaging for men, too. We see this research about, for example, the male loneliness epidemic. Well, why are you lonely? What is the nature of the connections men make or feel they can make with one another? What are they permitted to admit to and share and still “be a man?” What vulnerability can they show and still quote “be a man?” One of the most transformative texts for me as a practitioner, a partner, a parent was bell hooks’s The Will to Change. In this piece, she invites us to reimagine masculinity as something that can exist outside the confines of domination and repression. And if your listeners want more on the idea of cultures of domination, which I would argue Western cultures are, and cultures of care and connection, which is what I hope we aspire to, I recommend Riane Eisler, who helps us better understand these dynamics. 

But these two pieces in tandem help us understand that someone like bell hooks challenges the cultural narrative that equates emotional suppression with strength, instead of advocating for a vision of masculinity grounded in love, connection, and vulnerability, which I think would go a long way to easing the dynamics that we're talking about here on the matter of invisible labor, because at the heart of it is who does the caring? And that's where I think we're all complicit. How do we raise our boys in these systems, for example. What emotions are they allowed to show, even as children. Boys don't cry. Be a man. The whole thing starts isolating boys from their own emotions at a very young age. We treat children differently, whether they're boys or girls. 

One thing that cracks me up about leadership and organizations, because you know that is really where my specialty is, is this idea that women are too emotional to lead. Y'all anger is an emotion, too, and I've seen it on display by coaches, for example, literally performing their jobs. Anger is an emotion. It may be one of the few allowable emotions for men. Maybe grief is another one, but only if your dog or your dad dies. 

And for the men listening, I would ask them how the women in their lives respond to their vulnerability. Do girlfriends get the ick when you open up? And if so, that's a problem of culture and socialization. On one hand, we want and need our men to be strong, but our definition of strong often means unemotional or inattentive to the needs of others. And again, that's at the heart of this invisible labor. How then do we ever expect men to scan the environment for what needs to be done, right? for the needs of others in the home, in the workplace and pick up the slack of invisible labor. We literally train them for not attending to these invisible needs, which is why we want to be careful not to place the blame on either men or women. It’s a cultural problem that's reinforced by structural problems like the lack of support for caregivers. We discussed this in the last episode when we talked about Dr Jessica Calarco’s work. So that was a lot, Mary. Do we need to unpack anything further?

Mary

Well, before we kind of go into that part, what else do we need to unpack, one of the things that came to mind as you were talking is that men, yes, are absolutely socialized for their roles also. And interestingly, I had a male person that I know who listened to our first episode we did on invisible labor and, at the time he had just been coming through an illness and he said to me, you know, I was thinking about that episode on invisible labor, and I think that when I was sick, my mom took care of me. And then later, my wife took care of me. And so when we talk about men, you know how they are when they're sick, sort of stereotypically, you know, they don't really know what to do. They want to be taken care of. That's part of that socialization. I don't think they have the script. So I think it's really important.... well, you make an important point that we need to remember that they've been socialized too. I'm going to own this, in the past there have been relationships where I didn't even bother to ask because I'm like, I'm just going to do it. It’s easier to do it because I want it to be “done right.” We have to also take responsibility and that's what hopefully we'll get to before the end of the episode today is, how can you be aware of when you are stepping into a space that really isn't your responsibility, and after our last episode, part of what we talked about was responsible versus response-able, and I had a link to a kind of checklist for that. 

But I think inviting men into the conversation in a way, as you said, we're not blaming. So, you know, I think about Brene Brown. There's a video that quite frequently comes up on social media where she talks about relationships are never 50/50. The best you can hope is that it averages out to that. But I think if you can have a conversation – and in this video she was giving an example of, you know, when we have other things come into play, like maybe there's stressors at work or we have an issue with parents – we could say OK, today I’m at about 20%. Can you cover the other 80%? And that doesn't mean that person or that partner has to do that. They can say, well, I can give you 30 and then you're a team in looking at what has to get done. And you are respecting that neither person is quite able to assume even half of the responsibilities for what needs to happen, and sometimes you will cover 80 and I think again, as women, we might understand that, but we don't need to keep taking responsibility for the 80% if we don't have that in the tank.

Christine

Absolutely. It's an excellent point and making those tasks visible, making that invisible labor visible is absolutely a key element. Then it shifts around, as you said. It's never, always going to be 50/50 and you're right. The question is how do we negotiate and navigate that, especially as we, over the lifespan, start encountering new changes.

Mary

And one of the things that would be a change for a lot of people from our generation is we have aging parents and then that idea of the sandwich generation. We're still raising kids, but then we have the responsibility for caring for aging parents or other relatives. So does that tend to play into it also?

Christine

Absolutely. The caregiving responsibilities for aging parents and relatives do often fall disproportionately on women, so that adds another layer of labor to an already demanding load, especially when you've got children under 18 in the home. That is why we use that term, the sandwich generation, because you've got demands on either side of you. 

And so balancing the care of children and elderly relatives can lead to significant emotional and financial strain for anyone performing that labor. The AARP highlights that women caregivers are more likely to experience high levels of stress and are less likely to seek support for themselves. I think sometimes we feel like we're the only ones going through something and I feel for Gen. X right now, especially our generation, because many of us are in that very situation and many of us waited to have children until we finished our education. So we really are tightly sandwiched. Get a degree, they said before you have children. Get yourself situated in your career. Well, that's all well and good, except for the fact that now we have both aging parents and children at home who need our time and attention, plus a career to manage and balance. That's a lot for one person, and I think it's especially a lot if we are not in the habit of articulating the things that go into keeping this caregiving process moving smoothly. There's bureaucracy involved. Calls need to be made. Forms need to be filled out and that is just sort of the stuff that surrounds the caregiving relationship, the mental and emotional burden of caring for someone who is aging, especially someone who's aging in place. Let’s forget the services for a minute and just managing someone else’s life changes, so you're managing caring for your children who are going through life changes. You're going through life changes and then you've got your aging relatives who are also going through serious life changing issues. And matters on the health front and that can be incredibly difficult and challenging.

Mary

It is. And you mentioned this, but we don't really have a society set up to care for older people. There aren't a lot of places to turn, and I'm going to say as a daughter who ended up needing to take a lot of responsibility for two aging parents at different times in my life. Please do a financial power of attorney. Please do a medical power of attorney, because too, that generation didn't often plan for those things because I think the assumption was, well, my kids will take care of me. That is a societal kind of template that I think that generation had, but it's so hard because you want to do the right thing, but sometimes you don't know what that is. So again. Whole other episode if we decided to do that, but I want to sort of circle back quick before we start to talk about applicable steps or things that people can actually do to start to change this dynamic. What are the unique challenges that women face now when they're balancing this invisible labor at home with their careers?

Christine

Yeah. This is a huge challenge. So even in dual income households, we have research that shows us that mothers spend significantly more time on childcare and household tasks than fathers. So that widens the leader gap and you heard me share the Pew Research. There are other studies, of course. Again, this is a cultural issue. What is the support available for families raising children here in the US, where you and I are both located? How do policies help support a more equal distribution of labor? And here's another spot where we see some imbalance in what we perceive as acceptable gender norms. So for the men listening, I would ask them to think how they'd be viewed if they chose to take paternity leave to bond with their child. What is the impact on the career or the possible impact? And what is the impact when we are, I think, the only industrialized nation that doesn't provide robust leave for new parents? These are the intersecting dynamics that influence our current challenges in invisible labor. Care is not built into the bureaucracy. It is one of the things that I see often in my own work. Care is not built into our policies at any level. The national level. That would be a huge improvement if we actually built in the structures for the very things that we know are part of human existance. In many cases, that's child rearing. In all cases, that's death and aging. So how do we build in at the national level, some policies? We've got great models across the world. We just choose not to enact them, and that is a different conversation for show. As we consider sort of the politics of care, and again I'll refer back to Dr Jessica Calarco, who makes a very compelling case about this very thing. Countries have safety nets. We, in the United States, have women. And we fill in those gaps, and it becomes extremely difficult when women again are trying to balance the double burden of managing the home life and managing career. 

Arlie Hochschild, that sociologist I mentioned earlier, makes the point in The Second Shift, that we've got a situation of faster changing women, and she says, slower changing men. I say it's slower changing structures. Slower changing policies. The container in which we are operating has not changed, so the need to fulfill both professional and domestic roles often has to require sacrifice, like reducing work hours, declining promotions, stepping back from career ambitions altogether, so McKinsey & Co’s annual Women in the Workplace report says the unequal distribution of household responsibilities remains a critical factor in women's slower career advancement compared to men, and that has ripple effects down the line that is then creating an impact on our lifelong earnings and even the amount of Social Security we collect.

So now we're moving into an era where this idea of women in the domestic sphere, in the professional sphere, and the mismatch that we're experiencing because of our policies and structures, it seems to be not only acceptable now, but also desirable as we move into this era of what I've heard titled Masculine Energy, which harkins back to a time when the paid sector was largely populated by men and the domestic by women. Our policies haven't changed from that time. And I think we're headed down a dangerous path right now in terms of the discourse, which then influences policy. And I don't think we'll be headed in the right direction. I'm not super optimistic in this conversation, Mary, unfortunately. But I hope I’m wrong.

Mary

Well, you're a realist. So I think we can just leave that there. So let's start to turn the corner and I like to be hopeful. You know, I like to give concrete things that people can actually take and start to do. I feel like this is a huge mountain to climb, especially with certain relationships, not all relationships. But is there a way can start to…like what steps can women take to advocate for a fair division of invisible labor at home? And as part of that, maybe how can they communicate and what do you think the challenges might be if there are well established relationship dynamics already in place?

Christine

Yeah, it is definitely a challenge and I want to start this part of our conversation by saying that one of the things I repeat in my own work is that I am not a fan of taking macro or systemic dynamics and putting them on the backs of individuals to mitigate. At the same time, you said that I'm a realist and that is true. I do think that there are individual things that we can do to affect change in our own spheres, and I encourage people to take those steps while also recognizing that this is not a situation that we created for ourselves. This is the water in which we swim. But I do think open communication is crucial, and that means having honest discussions with partners about the scope and impact of the invisible labor. 

Whenever I hear or read about people having relationship or intimacy trouble, my first and often unspoken thought is who does the dishes? For me, that idea of doing the dishes is a proxy for domestic labour because it refers to the daily time sucking tasks that often consume one partner but not the other. And to their credit, the other partner might say, yeah, well, I do the things my partner doesn't want to do like changing the oil, mowing the lawn, putting up the holiday lights, shoveling the snow. Household maintenance tasks, on balance though, those tasks are periodic, not chronic. And that creates a very different daily balance. The daily tasks that grind us down. Especially where children are involved and those require much more investment of resources, including emotional bandwidth. I would much rather personally speaking, put on some headphones and go mow the lawn for two hours than entertain two children while I'm trying to clean the floors, scrub the toilet, and handle the dishes while also figuring out what these people are going to eat. And that's one place to start, I think, just opening the conversation in a non threatening way. We don't ever want our partners to feel like we're accusing them of not pulling their load. And I wonder if one way we can do that – and you can correct me here as an actual therapist, Mary – is to list out everything we do in a day, week and month, along with how much time these tasks take. Then without showing our partners, we can ask them to do the same. Like what does it take to run this household? How much time does it take to cook, for example? I remember reading a little vignette online from a woman who was home visiting her parents at the holiday. And her mom, who was Gen X, made a comment about having to make dinner again, and her dad said fine, I'll make dinner. He opened the refrigerator and said what should I make? What do we have? And buddy, that's literally part of the job. That's the invisible part of the work. The actual cooking and clean up is visible, but the execution of a meal requires much more than that. Making these things visible for our partners is really the first step, I think. But again, context is important. We can't do this at a hot moment when we're arguing about the fact that, yeah, you'll take the trash out, but only after I've asked you three times and threatened to do it myself. And so I'd love to talk a little bit more, Mary, about men's role in sharing responsibilities and some of the things that we can do on the micro level to help affect change, but I do want to pause right there and see if there's anything you want to jump in with.

Mary

Well, one thing that I was kind of snickering when you said about the man opening the refrigerator… I had a past partner who would not cook, and I got to the point where I said, you know, I don't mind cooking–  And, you know, it's funny, you and I, we talked about this recently. The Ina Garten quote of I love cooking dinner; I hate when someone expects it. But he actually said when I said, you know, you could make dinner sometimes, and he actually said, well, you don't like anything I make. And I said, well, do you know when I cook for you, I choose recipes that have things that you really like? It's that strange mindset. At the time, you know, I wasn't laughing. But now I can laugh about it and I think, like you know, when we talk about the micro level of this, it does come down to the woman is going to have to make the first step. And I love that you said, let's start to list everything that it takes to run a household, because that takes the emotion out. Do it at a time when you're not frustrated and you know standing there to wash the dishes before you can get in bed. 

You know it's funny. I talked with friends at one point about when women say, OK, I'm going to get ready for bed, that doesn't mean you go wash your face, brush your teeth and put your jammies on. It means get the coffee ready for the next day, load the dishwasher. You know, it's these things where I think when we end our day, most of us have these things that we check off to kind of put the house to bed, also. And we need to start being aware that that doesn't have to be our responsibility. But as we've said a couple times already, we need to do it in a way that is not blaming because I really do believe that most men just don't know. And I'm going to guess that if men and women make a list of household chores separately, one of those lists is going to be way longer. Don't need to say which one, but that's also an eye opener that here’s a factual document. And we can even start to then maybe quantify it. Here's how much time in a week this takes. You might think, Oh, it's 12 minutes to do the dishes, but 12 minutes times 7. Or 14. You know, if you're doing them twice a day and then if there's children involved. I think we have to start giving weight to some of these, also. 

Christine

Yeah, absolutely that we do have to give weight to them. And I think there's learning to be had on all sides of this equation. 

Just give you a quick funny story. I have a high domestic labor tasks in my own life and that includes things like being the person who checks the doors before we go to bed, right? So I was travelling with another family, and we were staying in a home where the last thing I did was to go check the doors. And some of them were still unlocked. And now this particular family we are traveling with is a two parent household. And I had to stop myself from my mental script, about to mentally criticize the dad in the relationship. I'm like, dude like your family is here and you didn't even take a minute to make sure these doors were locked. And so those are some of the things that I recognize in myself about my own socialization and how yeah, there are things that people just don't know or don't know to do. 

And so I think for men who are new to this conversation about domestic labor, they do want to recognize and understand the scope of invisible labor and the impact on their partners. So education and awareness for me, always those things are key and it's a willingness to take initiative rather than waiting to be asked. One thing that bugs me, Mary, personally is the idea that I'll do whatever she asks me to do. I am not the house manager. Look around. That's another burden for me to be the house manager. You, as a grown person, functioning in this environment, can look around to see what needs to be done, or let's make a list together, but don't expect me to serve as the house. That's not my job. When there are two adults here. Partners can, as we mentioned, work together by regularly assessing household responsibilities, discussing inequities, and then redistributing tasks, as needed. Research shows us that when men take an active role in household labor, it not only reduces their partner's stress but also strengthens family bonds. And for my money, it sets a great example for children and helps them unlearn some of the most troubling aspects of our culture on the matter of domestic labor. Boys can learn to do laundry and organize their socks too. And boys are allowed to have dolls as toys. They may very well grow up to be dads. Where do they learn how to caretake children except in childhood? And when they are told, oh, boys, don't play with dolls.

That sets us up for a lifetime of a misunderstanding of who does the caregiving and who does any active care in the form of household labor.

Mary

Yes, very true. We had a past episode with Dr Kelly Weaber talking about raising two boys as a single parent, working full time and getting an advanced degree, and she talked about not actually needing to articulate to her boys.... At the time, her sons were middle school, early high school. She said she didn't sit down and say to them, here's what has to happen. They were there when I was making dinner. We had study times that we coordinated. They learned by seeing an example of all the things that go into running a household, you know, doing the laundry, folding the laundry and. You know, it sounds like she had pretty good kids that would step up and they shared in making that home run. And that's the best way to do it is to show your kids from just seeing a healthy example. And I would also say that when it starts to dawn on a woman that she's taking on something she doesn't always want to take on… and I'm going to go back to the dinner thing…I think for me, I fell into a role early in my marriage of feeling like I needed to decide what was going to happen for dinner. Now, as a single person, I didn't always eat dinner. I would graze. You know. I kept sort of a deadline of when I wanted to finish eating for the day. But then when I had a partner living with me, it felt as though I should be planning because I was the one that had more experience with cooking, even though he's very, very willing to cook. Hadn't done it a lot historically, actually. Great at finding recipes now. I realized I was assuming that that needed to happen. And when I took that step – and I'm going to say, it felt kind of brave at the time because I talk a lot about taking up your space. But I think when you filled a role or or you've assumed a role that you think you're supposed to, and then it dawns on you that this doesn't feel good, and I don't like it, being able to communicate that. And I said I don't really like feeling this responsibility, that I need to plan a dinner. And of course his response was well, I don't assume that you're going to do that, and a lot of times we have these assumptions. And so I think women need to give themselves the permission to say, this evening I'm going to say hey, I'm just going to have a salad. Are you OK grabbing something yourself? You don't even need to sit down and eat together if that doesn't work for the two of you. So starting to step into that space and just observe: I'm feeling the pressure. I think I'm putting it on myself. What do you think about that? Can we do this in a different way?

Christine

Absolutely, because from the partner's perspective, then they may very well be thinking well, if she didn't want to, she wouldn't. Right, But that's not how we are. As women, we do all sorts of things all the time because that pressure comes from all directions and so we aren't always stopping to question, do I want to do this? Should I be doing this? and if I feel like I should, why is that? Where did that come from and do I want to change it? 

I think there's lots of dynamics that can be changed, but it does require conversation and planning and you know this matter of dinner. It's a great point. I feel like you could spend a whole hour talking about this, Mary, but one of the things that I think individuals and couples can do is to engage in sort of the weekly state of the household meeting, right? Let's sit down for 30 minutes on a Sunday night and let's figure out what's going on with these meals for the week. Who needs to eat what, when and what's your schedule? Who’s cooking? Who's cleaning? and let it be a fluid conversation because it may not look the same every week and that will help us avoid falling into the trap of repetition and expectation, right? It's the expectation that breeds the resentment, and those are expectations, even that we carry for ourselves. Not that my partner is ever feeling like they're putting that expectation on me, but have I internalized an expectation that is flawed? And now I'm resentful because of that. Well, that's on me then as an individual to unpack and for us to communicate about it in a manner that will help us get to a different outcome.

Mary

Absolutely. So this I'm going to try to pull all this together. It's so much good information. This might be a little out there. And I don't typically think like this, but do you think there are ways that technology could help make invisible labor not only more visible, but maybe more manageable in the home?

Christine

I think there are some options here that can be helpful. I do want to be careful in this part of the conversation because for me, I have pretty significant reservations about trading off privacy for the sake of efficiency, but I think if people are smart about their use of technology and sure they know how their data are being used, I think technology can be helpful. Even simple things like a shared spreadsheet for example, or task management apps that can help families track and share responsibilities. The key would be for us to all have access to it. And so I'll give you one very specific example. I like the idea of keeping a home inventory of the foods, the Spices, any other food related stuff that we have, right? So that when we are out shopping, anyone can access that list and we don't end up with you know 16 containers of something, right? What do we actually have? Sort of an inventory, I think that helps us also take responsibility as individuals that if you see we're out of something and you're at the store, you can just grab it while you're there. You don't have to ask someone in the household who is responsible for managing your home inventory. I think some smart home devices can automate repetitive tasks like cleaning. I'm thinking about those room robots, although again personally for me, I'm not a huge fan, but I think that if people are comfortable with the idea of using technology this way, they can do that. They can use technology for grocery ordering or reducing the physical and mental workload. Tools that quantify and visualize the division of labor can foster awareness and facilitate discussions about equity in the home, and I think about how we might gamify some things for younger members of the household, right? Then they can accumulate some kind of visible or tangible reward for their efforts. Although we would love everyone to be intrinsically motivated to clean up their room or empty the cat litter or do any of those tasks in the household, I think the younger people are, the more likely they are to need some external validation and motivation for getting those things done. And so I think people know their households. They know how people operate and what can motivate them and what can serve as a reward. The reward in and of itself is a smoothly running household where everyone's labor is visible and valued. If we need to gamify a little bit, I think we should use whatever tools are available to us to help achieve those ends.

Mary

Excellent, excellent suggestions. A really great talk. I always love talking with you and I know we could probably go on twice as long, but I want to thank you for taking the time to be with me again today. 

Christine

It's always a pleasure. 

Mary

Yes, it always is so fun to talk and I think we think we know the direction this is going to go. And then once we start chatting about it, we always find a couple side roads to take. So I love that. And I want to thank everyone for listening. Check the show notes for a link to get a tip sheet on boundary setting: just some simple ways you can start to find the language that you need to communicate and set a couple boundaries. And then there will be some links to some of the research that we discussed today. Please comment or follow or click the link above the show notes to text me directly. And until next time, go out and be the amazing, resilient, vibrant Violet that you are.