Being CEO of the household is weighing women down

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Cognitive labour – the anticipating of the family’s needs, identifying options for filling them, planning, organising, scheduling, monitoring progress and everything else that goes into managing a household – often falls on women, leaving them frustrated and burnt out. Photo / Getty Images

When I found myself thoroughly burned out seven months into parenthood, I first thought I needed to change my attitude and get better organised. My husband and I, both immigrants with full-time work, were lucky to have family members come from overseas to help with our baby during the first
year of his life. So a lot of childcare and light housework were taken care of.

And yet, the ceaseless anticipating of everyone’s needs, identifying options for filling them, planning, organising, scheduling, monitoring progress and everything else that goes into managing a household – what is now called “cognitive labour” – left me depleted. My husband promised he would “try to help” but didn’t.
As I tried to concentrate on my research job, my mind jumped from “Did I leave enough cream soup for my son’s lunch and, if not, should I contact my aunt-in-law [who was caring for him at the time] to suggest how she could supplement it?” and “I better buy that baby walker while it’s on sale even though we won’t need it for a while”, to “I need to invite friends who speak our native language next weekend so my aunt-in-law doesn’t end up isolated”.
I was overwhelmed and felt I was neither excelling at my work nor being fully present with my family. When my childless friends expressed surprise at my husband’s lack of involvement, given how egalitarian our relationship seemed before we had a child, I was ashamed that I hadn’t seen it coming. My resentment and hopelessness grew by the day.
I didn’t know it at the time, but our pattern was far from unique. “The amount of cognitive labour skyrockets after kids are born,” said Darby Saxbe, a professor of psychology at the University of Southern California. Sometimes men handle many of these tasks, and can end up grappling with similar feelings, but “typically women assume the lion’s share of the burden in heterosexual relationships”.
As women started joining the workforce in higher numbers around 1970, dynamics at home began to shift, too, albeit more slowly. In my decades-long work as a psychologist, I have noticed men gradually – if sometimes begrudgingly – assuming a greater share of domestic tasks, such as cleaning, grocery shopping, children’s bedtime routines or helping kids with homework.
Indeed, some researchers have found that women who work outside the home went from doing about four times as much caretaking as men in the 1960s to about two times in this century. Women reduced their housework share from 88% to 64% during the same period.
And yet, the progress all but stopped around 2000 and inequality persists in many domains. For example, wives still devote more time to domestic labour while husbands spend more time on paid work and leisure. And the mental work of managing the household has stubbornly stayed in women’s purview.
While most markers of gender equality reached their peak around 2000, they have not budged much since. “The invisible, amorphous cognitive labour that goes on behind the scenes has been especially slow to change,” said Allison Daminger, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison whose book on the subject will be published next year.
Many of my female patients have expressed strikingly similar sentiments: they are de facto CEOs of their family, but their management work – planning meals, updating grocery lists, communicating with kids’ schools and babysitters, and organising family outings – largely goes unrecognised, unacknowledged and unappreciated. And they are exhausted, frustrated and angry about it.
In a recent study of 322 mothers of young children, Saxbe and colleagues found the division of cognitive labour was more unevenly shared than even “physical” household work. Women reported being responsible for 73% of the cognitive labour, leading them to feel stressed, depressed, burned out and dissatisfied with their relationship. Other recent research has found similar negative effects, with additional influence on women’s job performance and careers.
The lopsided distribution of cognitive labour doesn’t just affect women. “Men need to realise that their marriage suffers when the unfairness is drowning women,” said Eve Rodsky, the author of Fair Play: A Game-Changing Solution for When You Have Too Much to Do (and More Life to Live). “For starters, sex goes out the window.”
So how do you bring more balance to the cognitive labour in your relationship? Here are several strategies that can help.
“It’s very hard to quantify mental load because it often happens concurrently with other behaviours,” Daminger said. “Sometimes even women don’t recognise how much cognitive labour they’re doing.” For example, you might be responding to an email chain about the football carpool throughout an afternoon at the office while preparing for a meeting or monitoring the weather while cooking dinner to help you decide whether to reschedule the next day’s outdoor birthday party.
Most of us are socialised in a way that makes it “natural” and thus habitual that women take on this work.
Darcy Lockman, clinical psychologist and the author of All the Rage: Mothers, Fathers, and the Myth of Equal Partnership, said it is hard to change patterns learned in childhood. “Our behaviour is often guided not by our values, but by all the implicit beliefs and assumptions absorbed in the culture that is still far from equal,” she said.
So the first task is to figure out how much mental work is required to keep the household running. Consider deliberately tracking and logging all cognitive labour being done by the adults for a week.
If you realise you will run out of toilet paper soon and add it to the grocery list – write that down. Other examples might include planning a family trip, constantly checking the online registration for summer camp so you can jump on it, talking with your in-law’s assisted-living facility about a lapse in care, texting with other parents to organise a playdate or scheduling your spouse or partner’s dental appointment.
Once there is a clearer picture of the cognitive labour in a family, partners should designate a time and place to discuss the existing distribution and negotiate any changes to help balance things out, if possible. It’s important to come to the table non-defensive, open to understanding each other’s experience and willing to unite against the load that needs to be done, as opposed to turning against each other.
Engage in these discussions only when both parties are calm and not when emotions are running high. I’ve observed a self-perpetuating cycle of women breaking down under a heavy burden of domestic labour and then, exasperated, shouting at their husbands, which in turn makes men more likely to shut down and disengage.
A helpful approach might be to take some time apart to cool off, note what led to the escalation and then come back to the table when both parties can have a cool, respectful conversation. I suggest at least an hour and no more than 48 hours – giving everyone a breather but not a way to avoid the topic.
Additionally, you should not expect to have one major discussion and be done. Many of my patients have found weekly check-ins to be valuable in changing patterns and adjusting to needs and demands.
When renegotiating the status quo, couples can take turns taking ownership of all the cognitive labour or they can divide and conquer. “In my card-game-based approach, I suggest that partners divide 60 cards that represent household tasks – and 40 additional cards if there are kids – in a way that feels fair to both of them,” Rodsky said. “Importantly, whoever holds a card, they have full responsibility for that task, from conception and planning to execution.”
The experts I talked to provided several additional pointers regarding communication about the division of cognitive labour. Saxbe said both members of a couple tend to mispredict how the labour eventually would be split, especially after children arrive. Therefore, “you should have very specific, concrete discussions early on and then again and again as you go through different life stages,” she said. Changing old habits and behaviour takes a lot of time and effort.
Rodsky concurred, warning there is no approach less likely to work than just saying, “We’ll figure it out”.
“This is how we got here,” she said. “We need to be very deliberate and explicit about the division of labour – otherwise, the old patterns will prevail.”
If we had the knowledge, wisdom and patience to implement these approaches in my first marriage, that might have turned the tide. Instead, our relationship was another casualty of the gender inequality that, Lockman said, still “poisons the water we all drink”. By reckoning with the status quo and joining forces, couples can work to clean it up. For my part, I was much older and wiser when I got married again – now we share cognitive labour pretty equally.
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