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- [00:00]
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- [00:46]
Podcast Host Dr. Christina Gessler
Welcome to the New Books Network. Hello, everyone, and welcome to Academic Life. This is a podcast for your academic journey and beyond. I I'm the producer and your host, Dr. Christina Gessler. And today I am pleased to be joined by Dr. Allison Daminger, who is the author of what's on her the Mental Workload of Family Life. Welcome to the show, Dr. Daminger.
- [01:12]
Dr. Allison Daminger
Thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited for this conversation.
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Podcast Host Dr. Christina Gessler
I am glad that you're here and that we're going to dive into this book. Before we do that, could you tell us a little bit about yourself, please?
- [01:23]
Dr. Allison Daminger
Yeah. So I am currently an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. I've been here for about four, almost four years now. Prior to that, I did my PhD in Sociology and social policy at Harvard University. I am a mostly qualitative researcher. Interviews are my primary method, although I've dabbled in others as well. I'm really interested in questions about gender and family life, particularly the division of labor and the way that couples negotiate power in their relationship.
- [02:00]
Podcast Host Dr. Christina Gessler
It sounds like from your acknowledgments, it surprised you to be a sociologist who is interested in gender.
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Dr. Allison Daminger
Yeah, this was not the plan. Since I was an undergraduate, kind of had a feeling that I would get a PhD. But at the time I was studying anthropology and I had this idea that I would become a medical anthropologist based on my undergraduate research. And then I took a few years between undergrad and my PhD program. And during that time my interests shifted quite a bit. I got more interested in inequality, I got more interested in issues in the United States context, whereas before I had been looking in Latin America, and it seemed to me like, okay, sociology is going to be a More comfortable home for those research interests. But, you know, when I had to put together a research statement for my graduate applications, I proposed something that has very little overlap with what I now do. What really happened was I got to grad school, I was casting around for a research project. Nothing was clicking. And then I took some classes where I was assigned readings in family demography and family sociology. And I got so excited about all the research ideas that I could do to really understand why gender inequality was persisting in family life. And so at that point, I said, okay, you know, maybe. Maybe this is something that I should pursue. So I got a lot of supportive mentorship from faculty in the program and, you know, kind of hit the ground running on this particular project that has snowballed over time into a master's thesis and a dissertation and now a book. And I don't have any regrets.
- [03:53]
Podcast Host Dr. Christina Gessler
When you started working on what's on her mind, the mental workload of family life, you tell us that you were in your 20s, you were not managing a household, you were not married. The book took about eight years from first idea to when you get to hold the book in your hand. And a lot changed for you during that time. When you started doing the research, it sounds like you were. You were doing it all around, sort of Harvard area. And you give us a nice view of how you went about creating this book in part of the back matter called the methodological appendix. Can you take us into the making of this book, specifically how you figured out your research and finding your subjects?
- [04:38]
Dr. Allison Daminger
So this is something that I love to geek out on. So thank you for giving me this forum. So the way that this. This really got started was I started thinking about decision making. My work in between undergrad and grad school was for a behavioral economics research firm. And so we talked a lot about how decision making is taxing, right? We all have limited bandwidth, and you get to the end of the day, you've made a ton of decisions. Sometimes it just feels overwhelming to make more. And around the time of my first year in graduate school, I was talking with parents about how they were making decisions about where to send their kids to school. The Boston area context. This is a lot more complicated than just, okay, public school. Down the street, parents were engaged in a quite lengthy and complex process of researching their options, weighing the pros, cons, and cons, visiting schools for open houses, running the numbers financially, if they were also contemplating private school. And what I heard was that while partners, often married couples who I was talking to but partnered Co parents talked in the language of we as of we made this school decision. When I probed a little bit deeper, it was clear that she was the one who was doing a lot of the legwork to get them to and through the decision stage. She was usually the one who realized that this particular decision point was coming up. She was usually the one who polled her friends for how they had approached the process. They had older children. She was the one who got the open houses on the calendar, et cetera. So I kind of went back to my desk and said, huh? Oh, I shouldn't say all. Most of the research we have on how gender shapes the division of labor in homes is really not set up to capture these gender dynamics in decision making. What I thought about was, well, what if I understand decision making as work? If this was a form of labor, how might I go about studying how this work gets divided up in families? And so then the real challenge was, okay, thinking of decision making as work is not the way that most people are kind of contemplating the contributions they make to a family. And when I ask you to talk about the chores you do, the childcare you do, probably you're going to be thinking about things like cooking or cleaning or driving the child somewhere, maybe mowing the lawn. And so the really core question as I was designing this study was how do I create an interview protocol that will enable people to really talk about these aspects of their life that are often taken for granted? What I ended up coming up with was what I called a decision diary or decision log. This was modeled after time logs, right? You may have seen these where keep a minute by minute account of what you're doing, right? So 4:15 to 5:15. Today I am doing this podcast interview. 5:15 to 5:45, I'll be cooking dinner, et cetera. So I took that and I said, well, what if I asked participants to log the decisions they were making or even just thinking about making for their families? And I had participants keep a simple table or document where they wrote down these decisions over the course of 24 hours or so before we were set up for the interview. And then for the first part of the interview, we spent a lot of time really going in depth about the individual decisions they had wrote down on that piece of paper. So some of those might be very small scale, like decided to make stir fry for dinner. Some of them, their logs included much more consequential decisions, like decided whether to make an offer on a house or decided how to handle this crisis that's come up with my elderly parent. And that allowed me to really kind of work backwards and say, okay, we've talked about how you made this particular decision on this particular day. How does that compare to the way that you normally handle issues related to food or finances or health care in your family? That was a really key tactic for surfacing this aspect of family life that we tend to take for granted. The other part of your question was how I found my participants. I ended up interviewing the members of. I think it's. You might be able to check the book if you have it at hand. I think it's about 94 couples, 170 something individuals. And the study started out with a focus on college educated, different gender couples raising young kids ages 0 to 5. And I can talk if you're interested, about why I made that choice to look at that particular population. But the short version of it is I wanted to look at people who. Who are experiencing high demands on their. On their time, on their energy, on their cognitive bandwidth, and also who are part of a demographic but is known to be relatively more gender egalitarian. Right. So in this kind of, you know, best case scenario, folks who are, you know, economically privileged are going to be most likely leaning egalitarian, but with these heavy demands, or how are they going to divide up this work? When I recruited, I did so through a number of methods, but some of the most successful were to post or have others post on my behalf on social media forums dedicated to parents in particular neighborhoods. I also tapped into my extended social network, and later on, I partnered with a few school districts and had them send home flyers about the study to all the kids in particular grades. Those tended to be the most effective, although I also tried a bunch of other things that were not quite as successful.
- [11:18]
Podcast Host Dr. Christina Gessler
Yes. In the book, you tell us that you interviewed 172 people, which means 94 couples, 76 of them were in different gender couples, and 18 of the couples were LGBTQ couples. You also tell us that while you were committed to talking to both halves of every couple, that when you interviewed them, you interviewed them separately. And you dive into that a bit in the methodological appendix. There was a method for that of why you wanted to interview them separately. And the other part of your method that you realized was important was to interview people fairly quickly after you had them write the log. You didn't want them to have time to start contesting, contextualizing certain events. Can you talk about how you arrived at these two ideas? Absolutely.
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Dr. Allison Daminger
So one of the challenges in a lot of the research on the division of household labor of various kinds is that in many cases, we're only getting one person's perspective. And there's been some cool research done by other folks showing that partners often disagree quite a lot on how much each of them is doing for their household. Right. Sometimes you hear the statistic that if you added up the percentage that each partner feels they're contributing to housework or childcare, the total would be well over 100%. What I wanted to do was include both partners wherever possible. Later in the process, I relaxed that requirement. I can talk about why, but for the most part, I wanted to understand. Understand what each person's perspective was and not just rely on one person's account. And that initially I was a little bit nervous. Right. Like, what if partners contradict each other and tell me totally different things? How am I going to differentiate? But fortunately, their accounts were usually pretty consistent. And oftentimes there were clues that I could use to sort of figure out what was going on. So for one example would be how much detail do they describe this particular process in? Usually the person who described it in more detail with more specifics, they would be the person who was leading that process or kind of managing it. Toward the end of each interview, I got into the more subjective questions, Their perceptions of, you know, how much of this work they were doing overall and why that was the case. But because we grounded the interviews in specific recent events.
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Podcast Host Dr. Christina Gessler
Right.
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Dr. Allison Daminger
There was less room for interpretation. Right. And so on the back end, I did a lot of work to sort of triangulate across the two interview transcripts and come up with a more complete picture of who I thought was managing which aspects of their house. The other thing I wanted to make sure was that partners were giving independent interviews. So I had them wherever possible. I scheduled the interviews back to back or within a day or two days of each other. And I asked them, don't talk about this with your partner until after you both have given your interview. Because I didn't want them to be kind of, oh, well, what did she ask you? What did you say? Okay, now I need to share a consistent story or else this interviewer is going to judge us as a dysfunctional couple. And so I tried to do the interviews back to back. And then I also wanted to make sure that if they had completed a decision log, that it was super fresh in their minds. So that if I'm asking them very detailed questions about this particular thing that happened. Right. There's a good chance I'll remember A thing that happened yesterday. But you asked me about specifics of something that I wrote down last week. A lot of that is going to be lost by now. So I wanted to really preserve as much of that in participants memories as I could.
- [15:34]
Podcast Host Dr. Christina Gessler
And you tell us that these are face to face interviews. And you also go into your own positionality, what people might assume because you look young for your age, what they might assume based on where you went to school and a presumed socioeconomic background. How did you navigate your own positionality and what that might make your participants assume about you and perhaps then mask or change how they were handling themselves around you.
- [16:07]
Dr. Allison Daminger
So this is a kind of perennial challenge for this sort of, you know, face to face qualitative research, right. That we can't really, you know, get our, our own identities out of the process. And so what I tried to do was just be reflective about what I thought was happening and to present to respondents as kind of a neutral, a sort of canvas as I could. Right. That's not totally possible. Of course they were projecting things on me on the basis of my education, my appearance, etc.
- [16:42]
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Dr. Allison Daminger
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Dr. Allison Daminger
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- [16:56]
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Dr. Allison Daminger
But one of the things I worked really hard to do was to not seem like I was kind of on anybody's side or pushing a particular agenda. I went out of my way to advertise the study as one about how parents make decisions rather than about how labor gets divided or about gender issues. So that was one way that I tried to signal or tried not to Signal rather that there was a particular, you know, a topic that I wanted them to talk about. And I also tried, you know, sometimes people would sort of make assumptions about what I must know because I am a woman, right, or because I am X, Y or Z. And in those cases I tried to say, oh, like, well, tell me what you mean, right, to pretend I'm, I don't know, tried to sort of, you know, make sure that they were explaining themselves so that I wasn't reading too much into what they were saying. But I think, you know, another way that this, this my own, you know, identity and positionality shaped the study is that I was not able to get as much diversity, particularly on the lines of race, ethnicity and social class. So I took some, some strong efforts to diversify, diversify along those lines. And the sample has folks of various racial backgrounds, has folks who are earning below the poverty line all the way up to in the hundreds of thousands. So it's not that there's not range, but I do think that who I am, my networks, my affiliations definitely meant that this study skewed more privileged. And so when I talk about the results, I always try to couch it in those terms. As I'm not trying to present these universal patterns. I always try to advocate for additional research that brings in different populations. And some of that is ongoing, which has been really cool to see.
- [19:51]
Podcast Host Dr. Christina Gessler
And on page 164, Table 8.1, it outlines all the demographic characteristics of your sample by gender, race, ethnicity, national origin, age, educational attainment, employment status, and household income. So listeners who want to can dive into that. And you also on that page, take us into the interview process. You've been doing quite a lot of that. But there's one thing I kind of want to circle back on, which is while you did meet people at their workplace or a cafe or a library, something, you often met with them while they were in their home. Can you talk about why that choice was important to you?
- [20:31]
Dr. Allison Daminger
Absolutely. So it wasn't necessarily something that I set out to do. I always gave participants the option. But you're right that the majority chose having me come to their home. And I think because it was convenient. These were parents, they had busy lives and schedules, and if they didn't have to go somewhere, drive, et cetera, they were all for Satan time. But I was actually really pleased with the fact that so many people chose that option because even though this is an interview based study rather than an ethnography, being in someone's home gives you a real sense of A lot of things about them. I would be sitting at kitchen tables, and I could see, okay, here's the calendar on the fridge, and right there's a grocery list on a whiteboard. You know, we tried to ensure that the interviews were relatively private. So if their partner was present or their children were present, they would usually be in another part of the house. But occasionally they would pass through and ask a question, you know, let's forget her, or, oh, you know, what's going on with that? And those little interactions were often quite telling, Right. And they gave me a flavor for how their particular family operated. And so in the book, I tried to incorporate some of those more ethnographic details to give people a sense of the scene so they could picture themselves and really remember that these are fully realized people with full and interesting lives.
- [22:12]
Podcast Host Dr. Christina Gessler
The book is called what's on Her Mind? The Mental Workload of Family Life. And right away in the book, you point out that most studies of household labor center on how people use their time. And you very intentionally are looking at cognitive Labor. On page 28 of chapter one, figure one takes us through the four components of cognitive labor. They are anticipate, identify options, decide, and monitor. It's easy to dismiss the cognitive load and the components of cognitive labor. Hence, so many studies being done on how households are run, and this has been skipped. You're very intentional that this is your focus. Can you talk to us about what those four components are and why they are so load heavy on us?
- [23:06]
Dr. Allison Daminger
I think the easiest way or the clearest way to do this is to give a few examples. So the. The way I like to approach this is often to give a very, you know, everyday example and then a bigger one to sort of illustrate the range. So on the everyday side of things, you know, I. I'm recording this interview with you at the end of my work day, and in the back of my mind, I am thinking, oh, gosh, we need to have dinner tonight. Right? So I'm anticipating our. Our need for, you know, myself, my partner, and. And our daughter to. To have something for dinner, right? So then stage two is identifying options. And so I happen to have a. You know, I did the grocery shopping this week, and so I know that, okay, there's some leftover rice. I could turn that into fried rice. Oh, I also have, you know, this. This chicken in the freezer, but that would take a while to thaw. And so I'm kind of going through the possible ways that we can meet this need of eating an evening meal. And so Ultimately, I'm going to decide, right? I'll get off the call with you today and, you know, I'll see, like, okay, it's, it's going to be, you know, veggie fried rice for dinner. And then the, the final stage is, is monitoring, right? So in this case, maybe I start cooking the, the meal and then I suddenly realize that we're out of soy sauce, right? And then I need to kind of go back to identifying options and come up with a backup plan. In other cases, it might be, okay, my daughter is refusing to eat this meal. How can I ensure that her nutritional needs are met? What are the alternatives here? Now a second example, much different than that, goes back to those school choice conversations that I mentioned at the top of the episode there. The first stage anticipating would be, okay, we have a preschooler who is going to need to go to kindergarten, right? That is a need that we're going to have to address. Then identifying options would mean, what are the available schools, right? Are we considering charter schools? Are we considering only public schools? Will we look at private or parochial schools? Right? Which ones are within a reasonable distance of our home? Which ones have good ratings? Do we know anyone who's going to those schools? So this would be a more kind of extensive, almost research like process. Lots of parents had spreadsheets and things like that. The third, they would decide, right? They would look at the schools on their spreadsheet, maybe they had visited some of them and they'd say, all right, we are going to prioritize this school as our first choice in the lottery. If we don't get our first choice, right? That's where the monitoring comes in. All right, we are watching the results of the lottery. Oh, we didn't get choice one. Are we okay with choice two? Is there something we can do to, to advocate to get off a wait list? Right? Have we heard back from the principal? So those are kind of two examples you can probably think of, of many more because this is really ubiquitous in pretty much everybody's life, right? We all have needs that need to get met in some way and we need to figure out how to move them. And so I think the, the part of this that is a load, right, is that there are so many of these decisions, big and small, that everybody, and particularly parents and others with caregiving needs face on a daily and weekly basis. And oftentimes, a single cognitive labor episode of anticipation through monitoring isn't that big in the scheme of things. My decision about what to have for dinner, not going to make or break anything. But it's the fact that all of these really add up. When you're holding tons of things in your head, that's when things get stressful. Oftentimes people are doing this cognitive labor, they're not necessarily recognizing it as an important household contribution. When we don't give ourselves credit or don't get credit from our family members for this work that we're doing, that can make this load feel a bit heavier. Another factor that is quite challenging is that a lot of this work is pretty abstract and open ended. One example I give is making sure that your kids have seasonally appropriate clothing that fits them right. This is a task that is ongoing for many years, at least until your children start shopping for themselves. And so it's never really done. It's something that's always kind of on your mind as you are dressing your toddler in the morning, as you are seeing the weather change. And so that never done nature of this work also adds to the load.
- [28:06]
Podcast Host Dr. Christina Gessler
In the book, in chapter two, on page 49, you talk about this cognitive labor, and you say it is work that remains largely invisible except when something goes awry. You also tell us that research into psychology and behavioral science tell us that decision making is mentally taxing and that mental bandwidth is frustratingly finite to the point you were making a few moments ago about how the work never feels so done. There are multiple people that you interviewed who talked about how things were always on their mind, how they felt, that kind of constant nagging stress. And you, on page 38, you say the mind is not a device that can be switched into silent mode or deposited in the next room. So that gives kind of a sense of why it feels the way that it does. And I was using the word women in my description there because when you were doing this research, you found that when women were in different gender couples, they overwhelmingly did most of this type of work. And you called those women led decision makers or women led homes. Even though you, you are careful to note the work that their male partner is doing and to look at the different kinds. Can you talk about this idea of these women led decision makers?
- [29:21]
Dr. Allison Daminger
4 out of 5 of the different gender couples that I interviewed were woman led. And the way that I came to that conclusion was really carefully combing through the interview transcripts and their decision logs and saying, okay, when an issue related to food comes up, right, who is kind of thinking through that? Who is, who is anticipating, who is monitoring, who is deciding when an issue related to finance comes up, right? Who is doing that? I had a number of these domains of life, and for each one, I made a judgment about who was leading and who was following. And based on those domains and the leadership in each of them, I said, okay, either this is a woman led couple, this is a balanced couple, or this is a man led couple. And As I said, 80% of the different gender couples came out as woman led, meaning that she was doing more of this work. And that in itself is probably not all that surprising for folks. Right. When I started this research, I had a mentor say to me, well, you're going to need to find something more interesting than just women do more. And so what I try to do in the book is to say, well, what exactly did they do more of? Because it was not equal or rather unequal in the same way, across the board, women's work was disproportionately concentrated in the anticipation part of things and the monitoring part of things. Right. So women were primarily the ones looking out for potential needs, opportunities, problems. They were also the ones sort of following up on the back end to say, did this get done? Can we move on? Or is this something that's still ongoing? And in between, it was a little bit different. Right. The identification stage varied a bit by domain. Right. So men were doing a lot of identification work when it came to finances, when it came to home maintenance. Right. That probably maps onto a lot of what folks know about health work more generally. Women were doing a lot of that identification work when it came to managing their calendars and their social life, handling childcare matters and so on. And then the decision making, if it was a decision like what should we have for dinner, then couples would not necessarily be sitting down to talk it over. But if it was a decision that involved some significant outlay of time or money, or that had the potential to have an impact on their kids, couples preferred to make a mutual decision, even if a lot of the work to get them to that decision stage was led by her.
- [32:12]
Podcast Host Dr. Christina Gessler
Chapter one is called doing, feeling, Thinking. Chapter two is called the gender division of cognitive labor. Chapter three is called it's not a gender thing, it's a me thing. As you were going along and you were seeing this sort of lopsided way that cognitive labor was divided up in, in the household, and you were considering, well, is this a gender thing? Is this whose employment has more complicated hours? Or if one half of the is is not employed outside the home, is that a factor? And one of the things that you kept circling back to is that Amongst these couples, there was an underestimation of the effects of the social forces on gender roles. And instead they were saying, well, that's more her personality or more the type of thing that she likes to take on. And you talk about this idea of personal essentialism in chapter three. It's not a gender thing, it's a me thing. Can you talk about how people were looking at how they handle things as a couple and reducing it down to personal quirks?
- [33:18]
Dr. Allison Daminger
That's a really good summary of the findings there. So, yeah, I was finding that women were doing the majority of this cognitive labor. And toward the end of the interview, I would ask people, okay, there's this thing calling cognitive labor. Here's what it is in your household, right? What portion of it do you think you do and what portion do you think your partner does? And people vary, but oftentimes their assessments were pretty closely aligned with the way that I assessed their division of this work. And so then the follow up question would be, well, why do you think you do it this way? Many of them told me that if they had their way, if this was, you know, an ideal world, they would do things differently. So when, when asked to explain their allocation over and over, I heard things like, well, my wife is just type A, right? She's organized, she's on top of things. This is just her personality, right? She, she gets stuff done. And I would hear things like, oh, my husband's just kind of laid back, he likes to go with the flow, right? He's not really big on schedules and things like that. So, you know, I, it makes sense that I'm the one who manages these things. And so they were pointing to personality, right? This is something about our individual nature. And I'm a type A woman married to a type A, can't beat man, therefore we do it this way. But because I was doing, you know, multiple of these interviews, what I was able to see was, okay, the sort of type A organized person in a couple was almost always a woman, and the type B laid back, bumbling person was almost always a man. And so that raised questions for me. I started looking into some of the psychological research on personality and I was like, do we actually see differences, you know, stark gender differences in personality at the population level? And what I learned is that, yes, there are some differences, but they're pretty modest on the whole, right? Not anywhere near the kind of sharp divergence that I was hearing about in these interviews. And so why, what I came to believe and to argue is that respondents are a kind of, you know, making sense of their inequality in a way that didn't conflict with their beliefs and ideals, right. Most of the couples that I spoke with wanted so they aspired to something that was fair or equitable or mutual. Right? And, and yet they admitted that that was not what they were, were doing. And so I don't think most of them would have been satisfied with the explanation that, well, these are, these are gender roles, right? My wife is a woman and therefore the woman manages the household. I'm a man, and therefore, you know, I focus on my career. Right? That didn't sit well with many of the people that I interviewed. And so instead they, they looked to this personality explanation, right? And it makes a lot of sense. We know that people have different personalities. We know that personality shapes some of the decisions we make in our behaviors. And so they pointed to this explanation as a way to make sense of this inequality that they were on some level aware of in their relationship.
- [36:58]
Podcast Host Dr. Christina Gessler
Chapter four is called gendered investment, Gendered deployment. And there you're asserting that successful completion of cognitive labor depends on skills and capacities, not just innate traits. But you argue that people invest differently in building relevant skills, that different opportunities are made available to different people, how they prioritize taking that opportunity, what skills they continue to develop. Those all come out in, in, in a relationship setting. But you also notice that there's a gender deployment of this skills. So in a same sex couple, they, they negotiate things. You thought maybe were going to be differently, but when you got to chapters five and six, non traditional paths, and chapter six is called which of you is a woman? You found that it wasn't maybe as simple as we might have expected, that they had more equality worked out there. There were different problems. And, and, but overall what you were seeing is how things were deployed, made a difference within the household as well. Can you talk about different ways people are deploying skills and investing in skills?
- [38:15]
Dr. Allison Daminger
When I looked at the data, my own interviews and other research, what I came to believe is that in a very narrow sense, my respondents were often correct that when they said things like, well, she's better at this, right? She, she would do a better job at this. If I, if I did this, I would do it badly. But where I, I tended to disagree with them was, you know, as I said a minute ago, they were framing this in terms of innate personality traits. And what I saw was, well, actually the, the way you become a good cognitive libre is by building skills, right? No one that I know of is born knowing how to manage a Google Calendar, right? No one is born knowing how to coordinate the carpool or, you know, get an extended family holiday dinner together, right? These are things that, you know, you, you practice and you learn over time. And so what I saw was that women tended to invest in developing those skills much earlier and more extensively than men did. And that was particularly true in the parenting space, right? Women were often the ones doing a lot more reading about parenthood, you know, while they were pregnant, before they had kids, when their kids were young, they were often the ones who were, you know, out, you know, living their lives and just observing things like, oh, this kid has rain boots that look really easy to put on. Right? Maybe I should think about this. They're kind of antennae. We're always looking for potentially relevant information that could help them in their quest to parent and run a household more effectively. And then on the deployment side of things, so there's more family specific skills that come from reading and learning that also come from the relationships you build with people. But there's also a more generic set of skills that overlaps quite a bit with what psychologists call executive function. These are things like working memory, cognitive flexibility, problem solving. What I saw was that men whose day jobs, whose paid work required them to have a very high level of executive functioning, right? They were management consultants, they were lawyers, they were surgeons, they were literal project managers. Those same men were often the ones who described themselves as disorganized and bumbling on the home front. And so what I think was going on there was that, you know, men and women were really responding to different gendered accountability structures. What I mean by that is that men and women are still on the hook for different things when it comes to families. Men are still the ones who are sort of expected to make sure the family has enough money, right? Women are still the ones who are expected to make sure that the house is neat, that children have everything they need. And so they were kind of responding to those underlying expectations by deploying their attention, their energy, their bandwidth in ways that reflected what they expected to be held accountable for. So project managers, professional project managers would say to me, like, oh, I plan during the week, I don't want to do that at home. Whereas for women, they didn't seem to view it as an option that they could just say, this is something I'm not good at. This is something I'm too tired to do at the end of the workday, right? They believe that they had to preserve a certain amount of cognitive capacity to manage things at home. And if they felt like they weren't able to do that, they often would make shifts in their career, right? They would change jobs, they would pull back on their hours, et cetera, to make sure that they could fulfill what they saw as their responsibilities at home.
- [42:34]
Podcast Host Dr. Christina Gessler
As you've pointed out, four out of five couples that you interviewed said women did the majority of the cognitive labor for the couple, for the family. And as you did these interviews and you met with each person in the couple individually, whether they were same gender or different gender couples, what you found is that in order to stay together and make things work, they had to make peace with the gap. When they were naming to you the gap, they were saying things like, we're at 9010. I'm not hoping for 50. 50. I'd like to get to. I do 75% of this cognitive labor. In the conclusion, you talked to us about a number of forces in play while you were interviewing the people. They were seeing things at an individual level, but you see it also at an institutional level and a policy level of how it comes to be that women are doing such a tremendous amount of the cognitive labor in the home and why it falls on them. Can you talk about in the conclusion these recommendations you have for how things might be different and how the change has to go across a number of sectors and not just just each individual couple sitting down and trying to figure out how to get from 90, 10 to 75, 25.
- [43:53]
Dr. Allison Daminger
This is something I'm really passionate about because it's been fascinating to sort of watch from the sidelines over the past five, six years as the popular and social media conversations about cognitive labor, sometimes called mental load, have really exploded. A lot more people outside of academia are talking and thinking about these issues than were when I started this work back in 2017. And what I've noticed about a lot of this popular discourse is that, as you say, it really focuses at the individual and the couple level. The questions are often, how do we get men to step up and do more? How do we get women to lower their standards, to drop the ball and do less? And those are good questions to ask. I, you know, don't want to suggest that we should stop asking them by any means, but I, as a sociologist, I'm really passionate about trying to understand, well, what are the, the conditions that nudge so many couples toward this kind of inequality, even when it goes against their, their stated intentions or values? Another question that I try to bring in is, well, why does it take so much work to run a household and to raise children in the first place, why is there so much cognitive labor to be done at all? When we start to ask these questions? I think that also lends itself to a different set of solutions. I talk, as you say, about a number of those in the conclusion. But one of the things that I hope that policymakers and leaders of various institutions will keep in mind is parents, particularly moms, are overstretched in many ways. They are juggling a ton of different physical and cognitive tasks. And so when we are designing systems that interface with parents, right, Whether that be, you know, enrollment forms, the way that you communicate with the parents of your students, right. You can also think about systems designed to help, you know, low income families, right, to receive benefits. How do we design systems that keep parents bandwidth constraints in mind and that try to reduce, simplify and streamline rather than shift the onus on parents to coordinate across the five different communication channels that school offers or to, you know, sift through byzantine bureaucratic requirements to achieve a certain benefit, right? That's not usually the lens through which people are designing policies and making programs. But when we generate labor for families, right, in the form of, you know, forms that need to be filled out, schedules that need to be managed, right. Spirit day, costumes that need to be procured, that is labor that, you know, we're pushing onto families and really pushing onto women. So I think that one way that we need to approach this is to think about, okay, how do we, how do we make this less laborious for parents and particularly for mothers who end up doing a bunch of this work. Now, another set of, you know, solutions or ways to address this really focus on, you know, the way that it is extremely difficult for many families to, to have, you know, two working parents with, you know, careers that are intensive, right? And so what that means is that families often end up, you know, they're, they're, they have to choose, right? They have to make a choice who is going to be the on call parent, who is going to be the parent who is managing things and that, that often becomes the, the woman partner if there's a woman in the relationship, right? And so I think there's a lot of reforms that, that could be pushed through in, in the era area of work, right? Where how do we push back against overwork? How do we take better account for the fact that, that many, if not most employees have caregiving demands for children, for parents, for others in their community? And those demands are definitely intense around birth, right? So we talk about, you know, parental leave. But the cognitive demands continue and even accelerate as children age. Right. Your physical demands go down in some ways. You're not changing diapers and, you know, carrying your kid to places, but you're managing a lot more. And so I think when we design employment policy, that's also something that we need to keep in mind is what our families hold in. Because while employers cannot, should not dictate, you know, how couples divvy up this work. Right. They do create the sort of conditions or constraints which couples are operating within. So I think that if we're going to move the needle on this issue, if we're going to reduce women and really all parents cognitive load, then we need to be thinking about all the different pieces that intersect to create that load in the first place.
- [49:30]
Podcast Host Dr. Christina Gessler
Thank you so much for being here today, Dr. Allison Damager, and taking us inside your book, what's on Her Mind? The mental workload of family life. You've been listening to the academic life. Please join us again.
- [49:57]
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