Invisible labor. It’s the work — in our households especially — that has to happen but that no one sees. It’s making the doctor’s appointment, ensuring the Valentine’s cards are purchased, remembering the milk. When we think about equity in household labor, we often find that there are already inequities in the visible work, and they can become insurmountable when the invisible work is added in.
My guest on this episode, Eve Rodsky, has come up with a solution here, or at least a way for us to recognize the problem and make our own solutions. I’ve wanted to speak with Eve for ages, since I read her book Fair Play, and I was delighted to have this conversation. We talk about the problem, about solutions, and I swoon over a question she has about mustard. Enjoy!
To spark your interest, here are three highlights from the conversation:
What is invisible work?
And what she argued was that the work that women do in the home will never, ever be valued because we are the social safety net of countries, especially in America. And if we try to illuminate that work, add it to the GDP, or create any value for it, then societies would collapse. So instead, what we do is we convince women that their time is worthless. And that article changed the whole trajectory of my life.
How do you transfer household tasks to a partner?
What’s one way to start to address the invisible labor in your family?
And so the internal audit would be, how am I feeling right now? And this is the most important question: Do I feel like I have the time and bandwidth to be consistently interested in my own life? That is my threshold question. If you do, then I would say you start with the systems. You can always make yourself more efficient. If you feel like I’m so far from having time and bandwidth to be consistently interested in my own life, then what I would say is just listen to this episode a couple more times. Sit with it, because this is the first time you may be hearing these things, and they’re overwhelming and it takes a really, really long time to process. [My husband] Seth and I are 10 years longer into this work, and it’s still a practice. And so what I would just say is be patient. But it starts with that threshold to me.
Full transcript
This transcript was automatically generated and may contain small errors.
In your household, whose job is kids’ doctor’s appointments?
In some ways that sounds like a really simple question and probably the first thing that comes to your mind is, well, who takes the kid to the doctor? But actually doctor’s appointments is not just the job of taking the kid to the doctor. It’s the job of remembering when the kid has to go to the doctor. It’s the job of calling the doctor and making the appointment for the kid. It’s the job of making sure that the school knows that they’ll be out of school for that time while you take them to the doctor. The last mile there, the driving, the sitting in the office, that’s only a little part of the job, but it’s the visible part of the job. The rest of that, it’s all invisible.
And when we talk about household work, this idea of invisible work, it comes up for a lot of families. And in a lot of cases, it seems like the woman in the family, particularly in heterosexual couples, is doing most of that invisible work. This is one of the most common sources of resentment, unhappiness, anger, in parents that I talk to. Once we have kids, there’s a lot more work visible and invisible. And when one person is doing the lion’s share of that work and doesn’t always feel acknowledged for it, it can bubble up, it can linger. It can cause our marriages, our relationships to be less than they would be otherwise.
Today on the podcast, I’m talking to Eve Rodsky, who has written a book Fair Play, which is all about this gender division of labor in the household and all about solutions. All of that thinking about really how can we get to a better place, a place where we are happier with the way that work is allocated inside our homes. And her insight is that we need to treat our homes more like businesses inside, which I certainly appreciate and one I’ve talked about in other contexts before. I think this kind of approach, focusing on systems, focusing on organization, focusing on being honest about who’s really doing what and what we really want, that’s kind of the key to fixing some of these problems. So I’m delighted to talk to Eve about this and I think everyone, whether they’re doing the invisible work or the visible work or all of the work will get something out of this episode. After the break, my conversation with Eve Rodsky.
I want to start by talking about something I wrote a couple months ago about how schools always called moms. So the title of the post was Schools Call Moms. And it was a post based on an academic paper in which some researchers had done what we call an audit study. Sorry. You’ll edit this tomorrow. So they had done what they call an audit study where they called schools and they pretended to be either a man or a woman, and they said something like, “Can you call me back?” They were looking for some information about the school and they said some version of either I’m very busy, but you can call my wife or I’m very busy, but you can call my husband. And they varied all these things. And basically what they found is the schools were a lot more likely to call moms if it was both options. If the woman said, “I’m free, but my husband is busy,” they never called the husband. Whereas if the husband said, “I’m free, but my wife is busy,” sometimes they still called the wife.
And I was thinking about this this morning because my son vomited at school and they called me and I didn’t answer. Not out of spite, but just because I didn’t hear the phone then they did call my husband afterwards. But it strikes me always as it’s one small thing of many things, but for me, this is the story I would tell if somebody said, can you describe what invisible labor is? This might be where I would start. But I’m curious if I said to you, when we say the phrase invisible labor in the household, what is the story you would tell? What is the way you would go into that?
So the story that I typically tell is a story that I write in Fair Play. I write a couple of stories, but one of the stories that was the hardest for me, Emily, was the abandonment of what it felt like to be a parent. There’s a lot of talk about I think the isolation now. Whereas when I had Zach, my first child, in 2008, the only book and resource I had was What To Expect When You’re Expecting, which was like your child’s a jellybean size, but nothing really about what to expect, what you’re expecting. And so I came into motherhood really shocked like many of us are, with just the magnitude of work that was required that I didn’t expect and the toll it was taking on me and my husband. But the hardest for me I think was I didn’t realize that it was a toll until my second child came. And that’s why it’s actually hard to collect data because it’s a longitudinal death by a thousand cuts where women start getting sick physically and mentally over time, and it gets worse exponentially by how many children they have.
And I promise we’re going to get to the light part because one man said to me I go very dark to go light. So we’re going really in the darkness right now. But in the darkness what I want to say was that after my second son was born and I was trying to go back to work, that’s when everything hit me. Because what I realized was my first son, I was hearing in America that we don’t really have a social safety net, but that school is a social safety net. That once they get to school, I’ll have people who can support me, help me carpool. And so I was really excited to have a social safety net. That social safety net I was waiting for at the same time I was negotiating to go back to work after my second son was born.
My workplace was the first place to abandon me because they did not want to take me back in the same capacity. They did not want to offer any flexibility. They did not want to allow me to pump. There were many issues that made me feel like I quit, but really I was not opting out. I was forced out of the workplace. So I was abandoned by my workplace. Then I was abandoned by my school community because I was so excited to join this community. And when I finally got there for a toddler transition program, I saw my name tag around with just other mothers and a couple of gay fathers, and my name tag said Zach’s mom. So all of a sudden, these people who are supposed to know me better than anyone’s ever supposed to know me, which is what the preschool teacher said, don’t even know my fucking name.
I am Zach’s mom. I don’t have a job anymore. And then on top of it, as I was negotiating going back to work because I’m a lawyer by trade. I believe in behavior design as a legal issue. If you want to get people to stop at a stop sign, what you do is you pass a law. If you don’t want them to vote in Georgia, guess what you do? You pass a law. So I look at myself as a behavior designer. When I went back to work to do that, work with the families I work with … I work for families that look like the HBO show succession and everyone should feel bad for me because those families are hard. But I went back and started my own law firm at this time and my husband was very supportive of that. But the third failure in this trifecta after school was failing me by calling me Zach’s mom, and my workplace had told me I couldn’t come back, and then I decided to start my own firm with the support of my husband. My husband failed me. That was in a story that I tell about going on my first work trip back. It was a day trip to Seattle where Seth texted me at 7:00 AM, “A guy left a jacket and beer bottle on our lawn.”
But I think what was the most interesting about timing myself and having that 12 minutes was I realized that the text Seth sent me wasn’t a hey, this is so weird. It was a, this is on you text. And then I started to multiply at that point almost 10 years of marriage times how many this is on you texts I had received from Seth. And I started to realize that we are literally racing up against a clock from the moment we wake up. And that started a path for me that I never thought and expected would ever happen to me. Because at that time, the only narrative I was hearing was the Eat, Pray, Love narrative, which was like, get the fuck out.
My mother is a single mother. My father and her divorced. I knew that narrative, but I was trying to look for an alternative. Could I find divorce for married people? And that’s when I said to myself, I could either eat, pray, love this out of my marriage or get my ass in gear and become my own client. And because I’m an expert at organizational management and behavior design through a legal lens, I sat down in 2012 … Again, so far away from a book or writing it down systemically or collecting data just to understand what was happening to me. And I went to the library. And that’s when I realized what was happening to me had a name. It was called the second shift.
So as you know from being an economist, where would I start? The boundaries is the thing we were just talking about. We can talk about that later. About why we don’t come to the table. Why women are conditioned to believe this. Why we believe our time is sand and men’s time is diamonds, and how we become complicit in our own oppression. That’s all the things we were going to talk about and we can always go back to that. But really I couldn’t deal with that at the time so I started with in boundary, systems, communication, where can I make a difference? And so I started with systems.
So that’s why this is a movement. Fair Play is a movement. But you can’t really have communication if you don’t know what to ask for. And you can’t really set a boundary over your time if you feel like you are the one who has to do it all. Because AKA, your school system, your community, your partner has the assumptions. So again, all I felt I could do was start with the place I can make a difference. Yes, there’s going to be polluted air. Yes, we don’t have paid leave. Yes, we don’t have universal child care, but you still have to breathe even if the air is polluted. And so to me, the first step was systematizing the unpaid labor because that’s what I knew how to do.
So I started with the shit I do spreadsheet, which I talk about in the book. And that became 98 tabs and 2000 items of invisible work. So there would be a sub tab of say like medical living. Medical and healthy living. That would be a tab. And then the sub tabs would have things like application of sunscreen. And next to it used to say two minutes. But then people would weigh in and say, “No, no, you need to add 30 minutes for the chase.” So then it would say two minutes for application plus 30 minutes for the chase. That would be a sub tab. So that’s how granular the shit I do spreadsheet became. So it was 98 tabs, 2000 items of invisible work. Oh yeah, things like extracurricular non-sports. God forbid I forgot Girl Scout cookies ordering in sales. So I put in, of course, Girl Scout cookies ordering in sales.
So it became very, very granular. And then what I decided to do when I wrote boundary, systems, communication to design a system to divide up this work was I needed to figure out who was doing what in hetero cisgender couples especially. So I went out to the snowball research effect at the time. This is 2012. I didn’t really have TikTok. I wish I did. But I started with the snowball effect of just asking people and asking people. And I grew up in a very, very diverse lower middle class neighborhood on Avenue C and 14th street so I could get a good socioeconomic diversity just by my snowball research. And I found out that when I asked couples who does what, I couldn’t get any accurate data. Because if I said, who handles groceries, who handles pickup and drop off of kids from school … Just looking at my cards. Who handles bedtime routine? The answer I heard over and over again is we both do it.
So I was feeling very frustrated because I knew I was missing something in the data because we know that women shoulder two thirds or more of what it takes to run a home in family, and so I was missing something. So then I found a study that showed me that men over report what they do and women significantly under report. So I was thinking, how can I break through this gap of figuring out this over reporting under reporting mystery?
So then I finally came upon a question, a data question, a survey question that changed my life.And you’ve heard me talk about this before, but for those who don’t know me, the question was how does mustard get in your refrigerator? That question … Because you can ask about condiments in 16, 17 at this point over 20 countries. It doesn’t have to be mustard. There’s other condiments. This is how I knew Norway and the Nordic countries weren’t doing it any better, even though finally data is coming out to show that now. Because it was the same. Every country, Emily, it was the same. It was women telling me that they were the ones noticing that their second son Johnny only liked yellow mustard on their hot dog or their protein, otherwise they would choke. The kids would choke if they didn’t douse their protein and mustard. And so then I knew, okay, well that’s a conception problem. That’s an organizational management, project management … We have these phases. So I said, okay, that’s conception.
And then the both trap was that men were going to the store to get the mustard but they bring home spicy Dijon every fucking time. And then women were saying, I’m not going to trust my husband with my living will Eve. The dude can’t even bring home the right type of mustard. So then because the women were holding conception and planning and they were breaking up the execution, CPE, there was a breakup. I could see that the CPE breakup was leading to the things that are most important in an organization failing. And the things that are most important in an organization, the outcomes, not the inputs, the outcomes are accountability and trust. So accountability and trust were not happening anymore because of this mustard breakdown. Then it was like, oh my god, there’s something you can do here. You can hold an ownership mindset and put conception, planning, and execution together on the shit I do spreadsheet and start to play with what it looks like for someone to own a task. And so in 2012, that’s what Seth and I started doing.
So I knew that I couldn’t probably bring women to the table because we’re conditioned that our time is sand. I knew I couldn’t really get them to communicate by just saying, emotion is low, cognition is high, you got to do it then because they were in these Facebook groups ranting. But I knew that at least for myself, I could design a system that would be based on organizational principles that already were rooted in organizational science and just bringing them to the home made Seth very open to receiving them because … He’s now more of a feminist, but as a resolute sexist probably at the time hearing from the Peter Drucker’s and the organizational management specialists with my studies and my binders along with the system I had developed gave it more validity than if it was just me making it up from nowhere. So he needed to see that this is based in this organizational science of a DRI. This idea that ownership.
And we now know … There are studies now that show that when people have context … And we see this all over Fair Play. People who play Fair Play. When you have context, your standards automatically go up. So this whole idea, well, I can never trust my partner because they bring home the wrong type of mustard. Or as one woman said … She showed me a picture of a pairing knife in her car seat because her husband’s a chef and left a knife in the car seat. How can I trust my husband to transport my kid? He leaves knives in car seats. The only thing I was hearing at the time in 2012 for women was Lower your standards. Fuck that. So instead what you do is you put a reasonable person standard, which is a legal standard that we use for tort law. We have a trillion dollar tort system that works fine with a reasonable person standard. I took a reasonable person standard, I applied it to the 98 tabs and I broke out the CPE for each one of those tabs and I gave it to Seth and we started to play with it. And then we started to have beta testers and more beta testers and thousands of beta testers and now hundreds of thousands of beta testers, and we’ve been collecting data for 10 years.
So I was able to give these CPE checklists for 98 tasks to people if they were already there and they were like, we just want more efficiency in the home. That was awesome. The harder part and why Fair Play had to become a movement was when I had to diagnose the people who A wouldn’t come to the table and B, why. So typically people don’t come to the table for two reasons in our surveys now and our data. One because they can’t communicate about these issues. They believe that they’ve already tried to communicate about these issues and it has not worked, and they’ve had no practice in communication. And in fact, we ended up asking a thousand people in a survey, what is your most important practice? And I did this facetiously because I knew there would be nobody that came back and said communication at all. And I wanted that data for myself.
So I’m here to tell you, out of a thousand people, not one person said communication is their most important practice. Most people said it was religious or some meditation practice or they didn’t understand the question. So we know people don’t view communication as a practice. It’s a more important practice than exercise, but people look at it as one and done transactional. I try to have a conversation in 2005, it didn’t work. Just like I tell my doctor, Emily, I tried to exercise once in 2005 and I’m not fit.
And then the worst was that yes, we’re both two colorectal surgeons, but my husband is better at focusing on one task at a time whereas I can find the time. Emily, we’re not Albert Einstein. We can’t find time. We can’t fuck with the space time continuum. This was the hardest group to change because these women believed that their time was owned by their roles as parents, partners and professionals. And so they wouldn’t even entertain that these were toxic time messages that could be overturned. And it became a very triggering topic of a lot of sobbing, a lot of crying. And so that’s why I think this almost episode may need a trigger warning because a lot of people are not in the systems place or even the communication place. A lot of people are in this boundaries place where you are not even going to come to the table because you said one of those four toxic time messages to yourself.
So I think it’s in this space of whatever you’re going to say, it’s because my brain works more quickly. It’s because he’s better at his job. It’s because he makes a little more money. It’s because I’ve always done it. Because he doesn’t know where the mustard is. There are all of these pieces.
I’m more educated than my husband, but he makes more money than me. And so for me, it was this really deep work that I had to do to say to Seth … Especially after the Drunk Guy’s jacket, that this is not about you just taking and picking up a drunk guy’s jacket. This is about the fact that we both just have 24 hours in a day, Seth, and you look at our time as money. I see it. You think your hours are more valuable than mine. And I’m here to tell you that I deserve as equal time choice. May not be equal distribution of tasks, but I do deserve equal time choice. Agency over how I use my day. And when I’m doing things in service of our home until my head hits the pillow two hours after you go to bed, that’s fundamentally unfair.
And so that was the conversation that changed our marriage. Not you have to handle the drunk guy’s jacket. Even though ultimately that’s what he ended up doing. And that’s the dishes and all those other tasks we just read out. But it starts with, I think taking personal agency over how you view your own time. And I think as women, when we’ve been conditioned to believe our time is sand, it’s very hard. And if people don’t believe us, there is the data that shows that if women enter male professions, the salaries automatically come down. It’s called occupational segregation. So we know that society’s viewing women’s time as less important. Emily, you can still go to health systems in this day and age in 2024 and see that they hand out flyers that say breastfeeding is free. When it’s 1800 hours.
Because that’s ultimately what we found and that’s my whole second book, and hopefully I can come on to do the data that I found in that.
And then one day he was gone on a Monday and he sent me an email about the trash. I’m going to read you the email. It’s from Jesse to Emily. Subject, trash instructions. His emails always have detailed subject lines, not like mine, which have no subject lines. Section one, taking the trash out. Tie a bin liner in trash. This is a bulleted list. Roll trash out to street. Making sure to leave room for recycling. Roll recycling out to street. Make sure there is room between the two bins so they can lift them separately.
Section two, taking trash back in. It’s another list. Roll bins back to their area. Recycling goes in first, closest to garage, then trash goes. Put some diatomaceous earth in the trash and recycling. Put some baking soda if there is an odor. Put a new bin liner in the trash, not in the recycling. Then congratulations, you are done. That part was in bold. Apparently there are some maggot and fly issues and I really, really, really hate bugs. So he had come up with this elaborate diatomaceous earth system to fix the maggot and bug problem in our trash. I was sorry that he was gone on a Monday and I had to do this, but I was a lot more grateful for the 99% of the time that he does it for us.
ParentData is produced by Tamar Avishai with support from the ParentData team and PRX. Also, special thanks to our house violinist, my daughter, Penelope.
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This conversation reminded me a lot of the book “The Manager Mom Epidemic” by Thomas Phelan. I especially liked the idea from that book that letting things go means handing them off completely and being ok with with substandard results initially or even things just being done different than how you would do them.