We call it emotional labor, or invisible labor. It’s all those little tasks you do that nobody can see, like figuring out what’s for supper and whether the ingredients are in the house or need to be picked up, and remembering that your son needs his gym bag for school on Tuesdays.
When you do it at work, your boss calls it by names like “taking initiative” and “being on top of things,” and in good workplaces, it’s often a key to raises and promotions. In the home, most of it falls on moms, leaving them exhausted and often feeling unappreciated.
As researchers call attention to it, though, families are finally seeing some shifts.
The Gender Imbalance
We can see it anecdotally everywhere, in an overheard conversation between two members of school staff about not expecting a particular parent to know the drop-off system because he’s the dad; in social media posts from frustrated men who can’t figure out why their wives are too exhausted to focus on them after chasing toddlers and trying to keep the house running all day; from our worn-out fellow moms having crying jags over coffee because they feel like they’ve failed everyone at once.
As the saying goes, however, the plural of anecdote is not data, which is why researchers have dug in and found the actual data. One such recent study, released earlier this year, examined the emotional labor balance in 415 couples.
The study found that 63% of women report being the primary organizer of childcare and household duties, and over half of men agree that their wives do the bulk of this work. Notably, it found that women are (statistically speaking) frustrated by this arrangement, and men are generally satisfied with it.
This isn’t a product of male breadwinners and stay-at-home moms, either — the study specifically examined how much of their employment time parents spent on household responsibilities. It concluded:
“[I]n our sample 41.10% of employed women report frequently thinking about the organization of household activities while at work, compared to only 9.58% of men. For childcare activities, 47.26% of women report doing so, versus 13.51% of men.”
The Numbers Vary, But The Trend Holds
Other studies and surveys produce slightly varying numbers, but a similar picture. One done by Motherly last year found 42% of moms reporting that they’re responsible for the invisible labor of running a household. Another, published in the Archives of Women’s Health last year, broke down household tasks into categories and found that women, on average, were responsible for about 72% of the cognitive labor in the household (and about 64% of all household physical labor).
Some of the variability may be attributable to specific methods (like breaking down the mental load into different tasks, or asking how much time one spends thinking about childcare tasks during employment hours). Still, there’s also a generational difference beginning to show, and we can find some hope in it.
The Young Adults Are Alright (At Least, Some Of Them)
Here’s where the stats seem to shift: that same Motherly survey that found 42% of moms handling all the invisible labor found that when you narrow the scope to moms under 30, 59% of them say they share labor equally with their partners.
The same survey also found that over 60% of women overall say they don’t get a whole hour to themselves daily, but 53% of Gen Z moms say they get an hour or more.
Meanwhile, the study linked above in Archives of Women’s Health found strong links between one person carrying the bulk of the emotional labor and that person suffering negative effects to “relationship quality, depression, stress, burnout, and overall mental health,” clearly indicating that this shift is much-needed and long overdue.
Fifty-nine percent of couples sharing labor equally shouldn’t be groundbreaking, but it’s certainly a step in the right direction.