September 24, 2025 • 25 mins
The author of What's On Her Mind talks about sharing and reducing organizational work
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of iHeartRadio. Good Morning.
This is Laura, Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast. Today's
episode is going to be a longer one part of
the series where I interview fascinating people about how they
take their days from great to awesome and any advice
they have for the rest of us. So today, I'm
(00:24):
delighted to welcome Alison Damager to the Before Breakfast. She
is a professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin Madison.
She's also the author of the brand new book What's
on Her Mind, which is about the mental load of
family life. So Allison, welcome to the show.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
Thanks for having me, Laura, it's great to be with you.
Speaker 1 (00:42):
Yeah, excited to have you. So why don't you introduce
yourself to our listeners?
Speaker 2 (00:45):
Absolutely so, As Laura said, I am a sociologist by
training and profession, and I study how gender shows up
in family life. So most of my work so far
has looked at what that means for both different gender
and same gender couples. How do they divide up the
work that goes into keeping a household running, keeping children
(01:09):
alive and reasonably happy, And in particular focus on the
cognitive or mental aspects of that work.
Speaker 1 (01:16):
Yeah, how would you define mental load?
Speaker 2 (01:19):
So I think it's easiest to start with what it's not.
When we talk about housework, usually what people have in
mind is I'm washing the dishes, I am cooking a meal,
I am driving someone somewhere. And what I have tried
to show is that we also have to think about
what's going on in people's minds, what decisions are they making,
(01:42):
what problems are they travel shooting? And so I think
about cognitive labor as sort of the work behind the
scenes that makes everything else possible. It's scanning the horizon
for potential problems or opportunities or upcoming issues, doing research
to figure out how to handle those, making decisions, and
then following up to make sure all of that happened
(02:02):
as you expected it to.
Speaker 1 (02:04):
And what drew you to this topic.
Speaker 2 (02:07):
I went into grad school intending to study something completely different,
and then in my first year classes I kept really
feeling fired up by the readings I was assigned that
talked about gender and equality in households, and I had
that sort of classic awakening moment where I realized that, oh,
(02:27):
these are not issues that were dealt with entirely by
prior generations. This is something that is still very much ongoing.
And I also thought that, you know, most of the
studies that I'm reading really focus on how people are
using their time, and there's important, right I'm talking to you, Laura,
(02:47):
who's of course the expert on this, But I think
so much of what households need is hard to capture
with a staff watch. It's all of the things that
we know can be really taxing about making decisions in particular,
and I couldn't find work that really rigorously measured that
(03:09):
thinking labor and captured you know, how it was divided
between men and women in households, and so I set
out to create an interview study where I could figure
it out.
Speaker 1 (03:20):
Yeah, well, that's an interesting question because if you're trying
to ascertain how people are spending their time, I mean,
there's sort of relatively well established ways of doing this.
I mean something like the American time you survey asking
people what they were doing over the course of twenty
four hours, for instance, or people send out stop watches
and say, you know, okay, every time this time, you know,
what are you doing? Right down in a journal? What
(03:41):
you're doing and we'll record it that way. I know
you've thought about this. How does one measure what people
are thinking about and sort of the you know, stress
or ease associated with what they're thinking about. I mean,
I could be thinking about what's for life lunch, but
it doesn't really stress me out that much. So it's
(04:03):
a different matter of that versus you know, how is
this kindergarten teacher going to be this year? So how
does one or any ideas you've come up with for
how to measure that.
Speaker 2 (04:12):
So one thing that some people have tried is what's
called the experienced sampling method. In the old days, this
would be a pager, you know. Nowadays it'd be a
text notification where you randomly check in with people throughout
the day and say, what are you doing and what
are you thinking about? And how are you feeling about
those things? So that's one approach some people have taken.
(04:34):
I think the downside with that is it's hard to
capture the complexities of thought. Often I'm thinking about, you know,
ten things over the course of a five minute period,
and I probably wouldn't write all of those things down.
Another thing that people have tried to do is to
(04:57):
put together a list of common areas of life that
someone might be thinking about and say, within the last
X hours or days, have you thought about this? What
I did, because I was doing a smaller sample study
with you know, a couple hundred people, I had this
really painstaking approach where I asked people to do a
(05:17):
modified version of a timelog, but rather than tracking their
time and activities, I asked them to track their decisions.
Because my thinking was usually we know when some sort
of decision outcome has been reached, and then when I
met with them in the interview, I would have them
work backwards and say, oh, you decided to sign your
(05:38):
child up for this camp? How did you start thinking
about this right? What other options did you consider? Did
you talk to your partner about it? And so on?
And so then I would take what they told me
in the interview and put together a picture of who
was doing what in their household.
Speaker 1 (05:54):
And I know you found that there was certainly a
gendered aspect to this. I'm sure are life listeners are
not surprised to hear that in at least many heterosexual
couples that wound up being more women who were likely
to do it but with that, many of your people
that you were interviewed didn't have that as the explanation.
(06:17):
They weren't just like, well, yes, she does it because
she's the mom or something like that. They had other
reasons they gave you as modern enlightened people. Right, This
is the.
Speaker 2 (06:26):
Part that I found most interesting and in a little
bit surprising. So you're absolutely right that most of the
people I talked to, many of them were college educated
living in big cities, the kinds of people who research
would suggest are likely to have more egalitarian beliefs. So
they didn't tell me, oh, she does most of this
thinking work because she's a woman and that's her job.
(06:48):
They told me she does most of this because she's typing.
She is just such an organized person. She plans ten
steps ahead. She's just on top of everything. She's supermum.
And they wouldn't tell me, oh, he leaves all the
thinking work to his wife because he's a man and
it's not a man's job. They would say, he's just
(07:09):
so laid back, he goes with the flow. He is
just in the moment and kind of taking things as
they come. But what I was able to show was, Okay,
I don't think that I accidentally discovered a cluster of
Type A women. I think what was happening was people
were taking gender stereotypes and gender roles and sort of
(07:30):
switching the language a little bit to make it seem
like it was about their individual personalities. Because that's you know,
as you said, modern lane people, we don't necessarily want
to think of ourselves as falling into traditional roles, and
so it's much easier and a way to prevent conflict
to say, you know what, it's just our personalities. But
I think gender has a lot to do with it.
Speaker 1 (07:51):
Yeah, I was gonna say, because then when you looked
at LGBT couples, it it didn't. I mean, it wasn't
quite like you weren't suddenly having two women in a
couple both being Type A about it necessarily exactly.
Speaker 2 (08:05):
So, there are a number of couples who, especially with
the LGBTQ couples, they didn't necessarily divide this work fifty
to fifty. But they also didn't fall into this very
clear role where one person is the main thinker in
all aspects of life and the other person is more
(08:27):
laid back. It was much more mix and match, where Okay,
Partner one does most of the thinking work related to
food and shopping and home maintenance, and partner too does
most of the thinking related to the kids and travel
and things like that. So they mixed and matched in
a way that didn't map onto any particular gender stereotype,
which alerted me to, Okay, I think there's a gender
(08:49):
thing going on here for the street couples.
Speaker 1 (08:51):
Yeah. Absolutely, Well, we're going to take a quick ad
break and then we'll be back talking about more of
the practical side of this, how various people can sort
of change them of mental load that they are carrying. Well,
I am back talking with Professor Allison Damager, who's at
(09:12):
the University of Wisconsin. She is the author of the
brand new book What's on Her Mind about Mental Load
and Family Life. So we've been talking a little bit
about her research and how one figures out how much
mental load people are carrying and the gendered aspects of that.
But you know, this is a very practical show. The
gender stuff is fascinating, but we want to talk more
about practical Somebody listening to this feeling like I am
(09:34):
feeling overwhelmed. I have a lot of mental load that
I am carrying and planning stuff all the time, keeping
track of all the calendar. How what are some practical
ways that they can go about carrying less? And maybe
that's not always just getting the other person to carry more.
I mean, there might be many ways to approach that.
Speaker 2 (09:55):
You're absolutely right. I think there are at least a
couple pathways. So I'm imagine it could be someone of
any gender, but let's imagine it's you know, the more
common Okay, it's a woman carrying more of this work
for her family. Her two main options are to get
someone else in her family to take on that work,
or someone beyond her family, right. I know folks who
(10:17):
have household managers and others who they pay to share
the load in this way with them. Number two would
be find ways to just take more things off the
family's collective plate, right, so that no one has to
work up on this sort of thing. Now, if you
want to go with path number one, reallocation, I think
(10:39):
step one has to be making what you are currently
doing visible. Oftentimes in households, one partner who's doing this
work is feeling burdened by it, but their spouse either
doesn't know all that they're holding, or it only comes
up in times of conflict, right when we're fighting about oh,
I'm stressed and you're not doing enough. It doesn't necessarily
(11:01):
happen where we sit down and have a really strategic
discussion about here are all the things I'm holding, what
are you holding? How can we think about this? What
I find most commonly in couples is that they've sort
of slid into particular patterns. Oftentimes that is coming from
you know, what did their parents do, what have they
(11:22):
seen modeled around them? All sorts of factors that sort
of make it the path of least resistance for many
couples to fall into a she does most of the
planning and life management and he does less of it.
So what I first say is, you want to decide
not default, make a conscious decision about what are we
aiming for as a couple, as a family. Are we
(11:45):
okay with the current imbalance? Presumably you know, if they're
asking this question, at least one partner is not okay
with it, So then the question becomes, okay, what would
be more realistic given our current constraints. I don't think
it's realistic for people to go from eighty twenty to
fifty to fifty overnight. There are many households for various
(12:06):
reasons where that just would not be the ideal, and
so I think it's important for both partners to agree
on what are we aiming for, what's important to us,
and then to think about, Okay, how can we close
the gap between where we are and where we want.
Speaker 1 (12:20):
To be now?
Speaker 2 (12:21):
There are some approaches that, you know, suggest sort of
a complete overhaul of who's doing what. My personal suggestion
is to start small, pick the low hanging fruit. And
what I have seen is that for a lot of reasons,
the low hanging fruit is not the kid's birthday party,
or interacting with the teachers at school, or planning the
(12:45):
family gatherings. The low hanging fruit for most families tends
to be more internal to the household. Right what are
we eating for dinner? How often are we cleaning things
and repairing things? Stuff that has lower stakes for doing
differently or not being done in the exact same timeframe.
So I recommend picking a place where the person who's
(13:07):
the primary cognitive labor doesn't have super strong feelings. They
want it to get done, but they don't necessarily care
that it be done. In a particular way. And then
the crucial part is you've got to have some patience.
Most of this stuff is a set of skills that
gets built up over time, and it's not reasonable to
expect that the minute you say, okay, we're switching and
(13:30):
now person two is in charge of this, that they're
going to do it exactly right. So that's why I
think picking something that's a little bit lower stakes gives
you a bit of wiggle room when there's some inevitable
hiccups along the way.
Speaker 1 (13:42):
Yeah, oh, that's funny because the skills, I mean, you
mentioned it's skills, but the idea of scanning their horizon,
seeing a problem or an opportunity and taking action toward
it is not I mean domestic. That's what people do
at work all the time. So it's not that people
don't don't have those skills regardless of their gender, it's
that they're usually not used to applying them in this
(14:05):
particular context.
Speaker 2 (14:06):
Correct. And so that's another piece of advice that I
often give to people, where you know, couples who feel
like I'm just not he's just not good at this,
or she's just not good at this. I recommend looking
at what you do or have done professionally as a
sort of a proven ground, right, most professions require some
level of as you say, it's getting the horizon, planning ahead,
(14:29):
being strategic, and so asking well, how have you done
that in your hobbies or in your paid work or
in school, and then what skills might you transfer? Because
you're exactly right that I think it's not that these
skills aren't there, it's just they have not historically been
deployed in this particular context.
Speaker 1 (14:49):
And what about the option of kind of caring less.
I mean, you said, look at the low hanging fruit,
but it's possible when you sort of identify low hanging fruit.
And some people aren't part too. I mean, it's not
there's there's somebody else that they can delegate this too.
If they need to reduce the mental loads, some of
it's going to have to come from not doing things.
I mean, is that reasonable?
Speaker 2 (15:11):
So I think it is very reasonable. I do want
to be realistic that women especially are held accountable for
a lot of domestic outcomes. And so while I would
be the first to say I don't think it matters
if your child is matching, you know, at school, I
don't think it necessarily matters that you've got to thank
you card out within six months of the event. But
(15:34):
you have to decide whether you're okay with the potential
social consequences of not doing these things in this particular way.
If you are, then great, absolutely drop it, let it go,
or find a less time intensive or mental energy intensive
way to perform the same function of say, acknowledging that
you received a gift, maybe as a text that's in
(15:56):
a picture or something like that. Right, they're often less
labor intensive ways to achieve the same aims.
Speaker 1 (16:04):
Yes, absolutely, And with this even if people don't wind
up shifting how the mental load gets allocated. You mentioned
something that I read in the book that appreciation helps
a lot. That some of this labor is just invisible,
like nobody even knows that it happened. You know, you
come to your partner with like a list of your
top two camps. Your partner is like, yeah, that looks
(16:25):
like I like this one. You're like, yeah, I like
that one too, and they don't know that there were
ten other camps that were examined and discarded before we
got to the final two. But making just making sure
it's visible and then the other person. Expressing appreciation can
go a long.
Speaker 2 (16:43):
Way, absolutely So. One thing that my partner and I
have have done inconsistently, but when we do it it's great,
is at night we say one thing that we appreciated
the other person having done that day. And what often that's,
you know, work for our household. What that does is
sort of signal, hey, I saw that you were doing this.
(17:06):
I saw that you were working hard on this thing.
Sometimes we also share, hey, here's all the work that
went into planning this trip. Just that you know, right,
and the other person knows, oh, that's a signal that
you are looking for some gratitude from me. So I
find too that it can be really helpful to have
some shared household project management tools. We like to use
(17:28):
Apple Notes and Google Calendar. There are plenty of other
technologies and more springing up every day, it seems, and
part of that is just a way of making it visible,
whether or not you were equally sharing it or changing
anything about how you're doing it, at least you can
show yourself as well as your partner that hey, this
(17:50):
is valuable, this is a lot I'm holding it. I
think for many people who are their family's primary cognitive labor,
just having language to say Okay, even if I am
not outside mowing the lawn or cooking a meal, there's
a lot that I'm doing, a lot that I'm holding,
and it makes sense that I might feel tired or
(18:10):
overwhelmed from time to time.
Speaker 1 (18:12):
Absolutely, all right, We're going to take one more quick
ad break and then I will be back with more
from Alison Damager. Well, I am back talking with Alison Damager,
who is the author of the brand new book What's
on Her Mind about the Mental Load of Family Life,
professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin Madison. So
(18:35):
pivoting a bit more toward your own schedule, I always
like to hear, do you have any routines that make
you more productive?
Speaker 2 (18:42):
Well, I am a bit influx at the moment. I
have a five month old baby, my first child, and
so I am in the process of trying to figure
out which of my old routines still holds in this
new era. But the one thing that I'm definitely holding
on to is a kind of weekly planning session where
I do both the professional and personal. It's a brain
(19:02):
dump of everything that I could possibly get done in
that week, and then I try to assign tasks two days.
So that is something that even if the task lists
are shorter and more flexible than they used to be,
really keeps me grounded. The other thing that I try
to do is really sit down every morning and map
(19:23):
out the day. Sometimes that's how Newport time blocking style.
Sometimes more often lately it's just a post it note
where I list the five things that I must do.
But those help me to not face so much decision fatigue.
To cite some of my own research, it's taxing to
have to constantly make decisions about what you're doing, and
(19:44):
so I like to chunk that sort of thing and have,
you know, my Sunday night self make most of those
decisions about what I'll do.
Speaker 1 (19:54):
Are you a morning person? I mean you said you're
doing this in the morning, you're mapping out the day?
Is Are you a morning routine kind of person?
Speaker 2 (20:00):
I am? And that's been one of the hardest parts
so far about adjusting is my daughter is also a
morning person, often a five am morning person, and so
whereas previously I had time to kind of ease into
the day, reflect this is often happening much later in
the morning, but Usually it's when I first sit down
at my desk. This is the time when I get organized,
(20:22):
think about the priorities, and move forward, even if it's
at nine am rather than seven am as it used
to be.
Speaker 1 (20:28):
Yeah, and do you guys, I mean you and your
partner have active discussions about then, you know, looking forward
and knowing your research as you're going to be making
decisions about life for all three of you. Who does what?
Speaker 2 (20:41):
Yeah? So we have historically had a Google document where
we list out all of the different chores and areas
of life that we're responsible for. You know, who's going
to take our pet to the vet and who's going
to make sure of the car gets maintained. We've been
pretty good about putting both the physical and the associated
cognitive work in that document, and then we revisit when
(21:05):
there's big transitions. So we bought a house last year.
That was exciting, but it brought a whole new set
of tasks and chores. And we try not to assume him, right.
I think it's very easy just to be like, oh,
he's a man, and so mowing the lawn is going
to be him. But we had a conversation earlier this
(21:26):
year where I said, actually, I think I would enjoy
mowing the lawn right It's time outside, getting some exercise.
So that has become my task. And we keep this
spreadsheet updated and have to keep ourselves honest by periodically
revisiting to make sure we haven't stray too far from
what we were intending to do.
Speaker 1 (21:44):
I love that. I love that you are mowing the lawn.
And I suspect many people have in fact chosen lawnmowing
as a chore because it's like, Hey, on the weekend,
I gotta get outside. I got it. Sorry, I can't
help with everything inside the house right now, I gotta
get out and mow the lawn.
Speaker 2 (21:58):
It's exactly right. But don't tell my husband that.
Speaker 1 (22:01):
Don't tell your husband that. Yeah, exactly exactly. So I
always asked my guests, what is something you've done recently
to take a day from great to awesome.
Speaker 2 (22:10):
Well, I am in the stage of promoting my book,
and that is something that does not come naturally to
me as a rather introverted academic type. I much prefer
to quietly do my writing and then hope that people
find it. But what I have been doing is really
reaching out to my network and saying, hey, I've got
(22:31):
this coming out, you might be interested in it. And
it's been so nice to hear from people who I
haven't connected with. I feel a little bit weird about
reaching out to them, but almost one hundred percent of
the time people are kind and excited and glad that
I thought of them. And so it's been a really
good reminder for me that if I believe that work
(22:52):
is the work that I'm doing is important, sharing it
with others is you know, not just a benefit to me,
hopefully it's it's enjoyable for them to reconnect with me.
So that's been something that I've been trying to build
into my work each day.
Speaker 1 (23:07):
Yeah, Well, it's always fun to reconnect with people and
to share good news. What's something you are looking forward to?
Speaker 2 (23:13):
Oh, I am really looking forward to. Uh. Next week
is my book Clunch event in here in Madison, Wisconsin,
and so there's going to be some celebrations at my
favorite bookstore in town, and I think that that will
be you know, a little nerve wracking, but also a
lot of fun. So that's on the horizon for next week.
Speaker 1 (23:32):
Oh, that's very exciting. Well, anything in a bookstore is
a big win in my book, as it were, So Allison,
where can people find you?
Speaker 2 (23:41):
The best way to find me is at my website,
Alisondamager dot com. It has links to my research to
buy the book where I'll be speaking this fall. You
can also sign up for my newsletter, The Damager Dispatch,
either via my website or at Alisondamager dot substack dot com.
And there I write about intersection of gender and family life.
Speaker 1 (24:03):
Absolutely all right, well please check that out. So Allison,
thank you so much for joining us. Thank you to
everyone for listening. If you have feedback about this or
any other episode, you can always reach me at Laura
at Laura vandercam dot com. In the meantime, this is Laura.
Thanks for listening, and here's to making the most of
our time. Thanks for listening to Before Breakfast. If you've
(24:31):
got questions, ideas, or feedback, you can reach me at
Laura at Laura vandercam dot com. Before Breakfast is a
production of iHeartMedia. For more podcasts from iHeartMedia, please visit
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
(24:53):
your favorite shows
Speaker 2 (25:00):
And
Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of iHeartRadio. Good Morning.
This is Laura, Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast. Today's
episode is going to be a longer one part of
the series where I interview fascinating people about how they
take their days from great to awesome and any advice
they have for the rest of us. So today, I'm
(00:24):
delighted to welcome Alison Damager to the Before Breakfast. She
is a professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin Madison.
She's also the author of the brand new book What's
on Her Mind, which is about the mental load of
family life. So Allison, welcome to the show.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
Thanks for having me, Laura, it's great to be with you.
Speaker 1 (00:42):
Yeah, excited to have you. So why don't you introduce
yourself to our listeners?
Speaker 2 (00:45):
Absolutely so, As Laura said, I am a sociologist by
training and profession, and I study how gender shows up
in family life. So most of my work so far
has looked at what that means for both different gender
and same gender couples. How do they divide up the
work that goes into keeping a household running, keeping children
(01:09):
alive and reasonably happy, And in particular focus on the
cognitive or mental aspects of that work.
Speaker 1 (01:16):
Yeah, how would you define mental load?
Speaker 2 (01:19):
So I think it's easiest to start with what it's not.
When we talk about housework, usually what people have in
mind is I'm washing the dishes, I am cooking a meal,
I am driving someone somewhere. And what I have tried
to show is that we also have to think about
what's going on in people's minds, what decisions are they making,
(01:42):
what problems are they travel shooting? And so I think
about cognitive labor as sort of the work behind the
scenes that makes everything else possible. It's scanning the horizon
for potential problems or opportunities or upcoming issues, doing research
to figure out how to handle those, making decisions, and
then following up to make sure all of that happened
(02:02):
as you expected it to.
Speaker 1 (02:04):
And what drew you to this topic.
Speaker 2 (02:07):
I went into grad school intending to study something completely different,
and then in my first year classes I kept really
feeling fired up by the readings I was assigned that
talked about gender and equality in households, and I had
that sort of classic awakening moment where I realized that, oh,
(02:27):
these are not issues that were dealt with entirely by
prior generations. This is something that is still very much ongoing.
And I also thought that, you know, most of the
studies that I'm reading really focus on how people are
using their time, and there's important, right I'm talking to you, Laura,
(02:47):
who's of course the expert on this, But I think
so much of what households need is hard to capture
with a staff watch. It's all of the things that
we know can be really taxing about making decisions in particular,
and I couldn't find work that really rigorously measured that
(03:09):
thinking labor and captured you know, how it was divided
between men and women in households, and so I set
out to create an interview study where I could figure
it out.
Speaker 1 (03:20):
Yeah, well, that's an interesting question because if you're trying
to ascertain how people are spending their time, I mean,
there's sort of relatively well established ways of doing this.
I mean something like the American time you survey asking
people what they were doing over the course of twenty
four hours, for instance, or people send out stop watches
and say, you know, okay, every time this time, you know,
what are you doing? Right down in a journal? What
(03:41):
you're doing and we'll record it that way. I know
you've thought about this. How does one measure what people
are thinking about and sort of the you know, stress
or ease associated with what they're thinking about. I mean,
I could be thinking about what's for life lunch, but
it doesn't really stress me out that much. So it's
(04:03):
a different matter of that versus you know, how is
this kindergarten teacher going to be this year? So how
does one or any ideas you've come up with for
how to measure that.
Speaker 2 (04:12):
So one thing that some people have tried is what's
called the experienced sampling method. In the old days, this
would be a pager, you know. Nowadays it'd be a
text notification where you randomly check in with people throughout
the day and say, what are you doing and what
are you thinking about? And how are you feeling about
those things? So that's one approach some people have taken.
(04:34):
I think the downside with that is it's hard to
capture the complexities of thought. Often I'm thinking about, you know,
ten things over the course of a five minute period,
and I probably wouldn't write all of those things down.
Another thing that people have tried to do is to
(04:57):
put together a list of common areas of life that
someone might be thinking about and say, within the last
X hours or days, have you thought about this? What
I did, because I was doing a smaller sample study
with you know, a couple hundred people, I had this
really painstaking approach where I asked people to do a
(05:17):
modified version of a timelog, but rather than tracking their
time and activities, I asked them to track their decisions.
Because my thinking was usually we know when some sort
of decision outcome has been reached, and then when I
met with them in the interview, I would have them
work backwards and say, oh, you decided to sign your
(05:38):
child up for this camp? How did you start thinking
about this right? What other options did you consider? Did
you talk to your partner about it? And so on?
And so then I would take what they told me
in the interview and put together a picture of who
was doing what in their household.
Speaker 1 (05:54):
And I know you found that there was certainly a
gendered aspect to this. I'm sure are life listeners are
not surprised to hear that in at least many heterosexual
couples that wound up being more women who were likely
to do it but with that, many of your people
that you were interviewed didn't have that as the explanation.
(06:17):
They weren't just like, well, yes, she does it because
she's the mom or something like that. They had other
reasons they gave you as modern enlightened people. Right, This
is the.
Speaker 2 (06:26):
Part that I found most interesting and in a little
bit surprising. So you're absolutely right that most of the
people I talked to, many of them were college educated
living in big cities, the kinds of people who research
would suggest are likely to have more egalitarian beliefs. So
they didn't tell me, oh, she does most of this
thinking work because she's a woman and that's her job.
(06:48):
They told me she does most of this because she's typing.
She is just such an organized person. She plans ten
steps ahead. She's just on top of everything. She's supermum.
And they wouldn't tell me, oh, he leaves all the
thinking work to his wife because he's a man and
it's not a man's job. They would say, he's just
(07:09):
so laid back, he goes with the flow. He is
just in the moment and kind of taking things as
they come. But what I was able to show was, Okay,
I don't think that I accidentally discovered a cluster of
Type A women. I think what was happening was people
were taking gender stereotypes and gender roles and sort of
(07:30):
switching the language a little bit to make it seem
like it was about their individual personalities. Because that's you know,
as you said, modern lane people, we don't necessarily want
to think of ourselves as falling into traditional roles, and
so it's much easier and a way to prevent conflict
to say, you know what, it's just our personalities. But
I think gender has a lot to do with it.
Speaker 1 (07:51):
Yeah, I was gonna say, because then when you looked
at LGBT couples, it it didn't. I mean, it wasn't
quite like you weren't suddenly having two women in a
couple both being Type A about it necessarily exactly.
Speaker 2 (08:05):
So, there are a number of couples who, especially with
the LGBTQ couples, they didn't necessarily divide this work fifty
to fifty. But they also didn't fall into this very
clear role where one person is the main thinker in
all aspects of life and the other person is more
(08:27):
laid back. It was much more mix and match, where Okay,
Partner one does most of the thinking work related to
food and shopping and home maintenance, and partner too does
most of the thinking related to the kids and travel
and things like that. So they mixed and matched in
a way that didn't map onto any particular gender stereotype,
which alerted me to, Okay, I think there's a gender
(08:49):
thing going on here for the street couples.
Speaker 1 (08:51):
Yeah. Absolutely, Well, we're going to take a quick ad
break and then we'll be back talking about more of
the practical side of this, how various people can sort
of change them of mental load that they are carrying. Well,
I am back talking with Professor Allison Damager, who's at
(09:12):
the University of Wisconsin. She is the author of the
brand new book What's on Her Mind about Mental Load
and Family Life. So we've been talking a little bit
about her research and how one figures out how much
mental load people are carrying and the gendered aspects of that.
But you know, this is a very practical show. The
gender stuff is fascinating, but we want to talk more
about practical Somebody listening to this feeling like I am
(09:34):
feeling overwhelmed. I have a lot of mental load that
I am carrying and planning stuff all the time, keeping
track of all the calendar. How what are some practical
ways that they can go about carrying less? And maybe
that's not always just getting the other person to carry more.
I mean, there might be many ways to approach that.
Speaker 2 (09:55):
You're absolutely right. I think there are at least a
couple pathways. So I'm imagine it could be someone of
any gender, but let's imagine it's you know, the more
common Okay, it's a woman carrying more of this work
for her family. Her two main options are to get
someone else in her family to take on that work,
or someone beyond her family, right. I know folks who
(10:17):
have household managers and others who they pay to share
the load in this way with them. Number two would
be find ways to just take more things off the
family's collective plate, right, so that no one has to
work up on this sort of thing. Now, if you
want to go with path number one, reallocation, I think
(10:39):
step one has to be making what you are currently
doing visible. Oftentimes in households, one partner who's doing this
work is feeling burdened by it, but their spouse either
doesn't know all that they're holding, or it only comes
up in times of conflict, right when we're fighting about oh,
I'm stressed and you're not doing enough. It doesn't necessarily
(11:01):
happen where we sit down and have a really strategic
discussion about here are all the things I'm holding, what
are you holding? How can we think about this? What
I find most commonly in couples is that they've sort
of slid into particular patterns. Oftentimes that is coming from
you know, what did their parents do, what have they
(11:22):
seen modeled around them? All sorts of factors that sort
of make it the path of least resistance for many
couples to fall into a she does most of the
planning and life management and he does less of it.
So what I first say is, you want to decide
not default, make a conscious decision about what are we
aiming for as a couple, as a family. Are we
(11:45):
okay with the current imbalance? Presumably you know, if they're
asking this question, at least one partner is not okay
with it, So then the question becomes, okay, what would
be more realistic given our current constraints. I don't think
it's realistic for people to go from eighty twenty to
fifty to fifty overnight. There are many households for various
(12:06):
reasons where that just would not be the ideal, and
so I think it's important for both partners to agree
on what are we aiming for, what's important to us,
and then to think about, Okay, how can we close
the gap between where we are and where we want.
Speaker 1 (12:20):
To be now?
Speaker 2 (12:21):
There are some approaches that, you know, suggest sort of
a complete overhaul of who's doing what. My personal suggestion
is to start small, pick the low hanging fruit. And
what I have seen is that for a lot of reasons,
the low hanging fruit is not the kid's birthday party,
or interacting with the teachers at school, or planning the
(12:45):
family gatherings. The low hanging fruit for most families tends
to be more internal to the household. Right what are
we eating for dinner? How often are we cleaning things
and repairing things? Stuff that has lower stakes for doing
differently or not being done in the exact same timeframe.
So I recommend picking a place where the person who's
(13:07):
the primary cognitive labor doesn't have super strong feelings. They
want it to get done, but they don't necessarily care
that it be done. In a particular way. And then
the crucial part is you've got to have some patience.
Most of this stuff is a set of skills that
gets built up over time, and it's not reasonable to
expect that the minute you say, okay, we're switching and
(13:30):
now person two is in charge of this, that they're
going to do it exactly right. So that's why I
think picking something that's a little bit lower stakes gives
you a bit of wiggle room when there's some inevitable
hiccups along the way.
Speaker 1 (13:42):
Yeah, oh, that's funny because the skills, I mean, you
mentioned it's skills, but the idea of scanning their horizon,
seeing a problem or an opportunity and taking action toward
it is not I mean domestic. That's what people do
at work all the time. So it's not that people
don't don't have those skills regardless of their gender, it's
that they're usually not used to applying them in this
(14:05):
particular context.
Speaker 2 (14:06):
Correct. And so that's another piece of advice that I
often give to people, where you know, couples who feel
like I'm just not he's just not good at this,
or she's just not good at this. I recommend looking
at what you do or have done professionally as a
sort of a proven ground, right, most professions require some
level of as you say, it's getting the horizon, planning ahead,
(14:29):
being strategic, and so asking well, how have you done
that in your hobbies or in your paid work or
in school, and then what skills might you transfer? Because
you're exactly right that I think it's not that these
skills aren't there, it's just they have not historically been
deployed in this particular context.
Speaker 1 (14:49):
And what about the option of kind of caring less.
I mean, you said, look at the low hanging fruit,
but it's possible when you sort of identify low hanging fruit.
And some people aren't part too. I mean, it's not
there's there's somebody else that they can delegate this too.
If they need to reduce the mental loads, some of
it's going to have to come from not doing things.
I mean, is that reasonable?
Speaker 2 (15:11):
So I think it is very reasonable. I do want
to be realistic that women especially are held accountable for
a lot of domestic outcomes. And so while I would
be the first to say I don't think it matters
if your child is matching, you know, at school, I
don't think it necessarily matters that you've got to thank
you card out within six months of the event. But
(15:34):
you have to decide whether you're okay with the potential
social consequences of not doing these things in this particular way.
If you are, then great, absolutely drop it, let it go,
or find a less time intensive or mental energy intensive
way to perform the same function of say, acknowledging that
you received a gift, maybe as a text that's in
(15:56):
a picture or something like that. Right, they're often less
labor intensive ways to achieve the same aims.
Speaker 1 (16:04):
Yes, absolutely, And with this even if people don't wind
up shifting how the mental load gets allocated. You mentioned
something that I read in the book that appreciation helps
a lot. That some of this labor is just invisible,
like nobody even knows that it happened. You know, you
come to your partner with like a list of your
top two camps. Your partner is like, yeah, that looks
(16:25):
like I like this one. You're like, yeah, I like
that one too, and they don't know that there were
ten other camps that were examined and discarded before we
got to the final two. But making just making sure
it's visible and then the other person. Expressing appreciation can
go a long.
Speaker 2 (16:43):
Way, absolutely So. One thing that my partner and I
have have done inconsistently, but when we do it it's great,
is at night we say one thing that we appreciated
the other person having done that day. And what often that's,
you know, work for our household. What that does is
sort of signal, hey, I saw that you were doing this.
(17:06):
I saw that you were working hard on this thing.
Sometimes we also share, hey, here's all the work that
went into planning this trip. Just that you know, right,
and the other person knows, oh, that's a signal that
you are looking for some gratitude from me. So I
find too that it can be really helpful to have
some shared household project management tools. We like to use
(17:28):
Apple Notes and Google Calendar. There are plenty of other
technologies and more springing up every day, it seems, and
part of that is just a way of making it visible,
whether or not you were equally sharing it or changing
anything about how you're doing it, at least you can
show yourself as well as your partner that hey, this
(17:50):
is valuable, this is a lot I'm holding it. I
think for many people who are their family's primary cognitive labor,
just having language to say Okay, even if I am
not outside mowing the lawn or cooking a meal, there's
a lot that I'm doing, a lot that I'm holding,
and it makes sense that I might feel tired or
(18:10):
overwhelmed from time to time.
Speaker 1 (18:12):
Absolutely, all right, We're going to take one more quick
ad break and then I will be back with more
from Alison Damager. Well, I am back talking with Alison Damager,
who is the author of the brand new book What's
on Her Mind about the Mental Load of Family Life,
professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin Madison. So
(18:35):
pivoting a bit more toward your own schedule, I always
like to hear, do you have any routines that make
you more productive?
Speaker 2 (18:42):
Well, I am a bit influx at the moment. I
have a five month old baby, my first child, and
so I am in the process of trying to figure
out which of my old routines still holds in this
new era. But the one thing that I'm definitely holding
on to is a kind of weekly planning session where
I do both the professional and personal. It's a brain
(19:02):
dump of everything that I could possibly get done in
that week, and then I try to assign tasks two days.
So that is something that even if the task lists
are shorter and more flexible than they used to be,
really keeps me grounded. The other thing that I try
to do is really sit down every morning and map
(19:23):
out the day. Sometimes that's how Newport time blocking style.
Sometimes more often lately it's just a post it note
where I list the five things that I must do.
But those help me to not face so much decision fatigue.
To cite some of my own research, it's taxing to
have to constantly make decisions about what you're doing, and
(19:44):
so I like to chunk that sort of thing and have,
you know, my Sunday night self make most of those
decisions about what I'll do.
Speaker 1 (19:54):
Are you a morning person? I mean you said you're
doing this in the morning, you're mapping out the day?
Is Are you a morning routine kind of person?
Speaker 2 (20:00):
I am? And that's been one of the hardest parts
so far about adjusting is my daughter is also a
morning person, often a five am morning person, and so
whereas previously I had time to kind of ease into
the day, reflect this is often happening much later in
the morning, but Usually it's when I first sit down
at my desk. This is the time when I get organized,
(20:22):
think about the priorities, and move forward, even if it's
at nine am rather than seven am as it used
to be.
Speaker 1 (20:28):
Yeah, and do you guys, I mean you and your
partner have active discussions about then, you know, looking forward
and knowing your research as you're going to be making
decisions about life for all three of you. Who does what?
Speaker 2 (20:41):
Yeah? So we have historically had a Google document where
we list out all of the different chores and areas
of life that we're responsible for. You know, who's going
to take our pet to the vet and who's going
to make sure of the car gets maintained. We've been
pretty good about putting both the physical and the associated
cognitive work in that document, and then we revisit when
(21:05):
there's big transitions. So we bought a house last year.
That was exciting, but it brought a whole new set
of tasks and chores. And we try not to assume him, right.
I think it's very easy just to be like, oh,
he's a man, and so mowing the lawn is going
to be him. But we had a conversation earlier this
(21:26):
year where I said, actually, I think I would enjoy
mowing the lawn right It's time outside, getting some exercise.
So that has become my task. And we keep this
spreadsheet updated and have to keep ourselves honest by periodically
revisiting to make sure we haven't stray too far from
what we were intending to do.
Speaker 1 (21:44):
I love that. I love that you are mowing the lawn.
And I suspect many people have in fact chosen lawnmowing
as a chore because it's like, Hey, on the weekend,
I gotta get outside. I got it. Sorry, I can't
help with everything inside the house right now, I gotta
get out and mow the lawn.
Speaker 2 (21:58):
It's exactly right. But don't tell my husband that.
Speaker 1 (22:01):
Don't tell your husband that. Yeah, exactly exactly. So I
always asked my guests, what is something you've done recently
to take a day from great to awesome.
Speaker 2 (22:10):
Well, I am in the stage of promoting my book,
and that is something that does not come naturally to
me as a rather introverted academic type. I much prefer
to quietly do my writing and then hope that people
find it. But what I have been doing is really
reaching out to my network and saying, hey, I've got
(22:31):
this coming out, you might be interested in it. And
it's been so nice to hear from people who I
haven't connected with. I feel a little bit weird about
reaching out to them, but almost one hundred percent of
the time people are kind and excited and glad that
I thought of them. And so it's been a really
good reminder for me that if I believe that work
(22:52):
is the work that I'm doing is important, sharing it
with others is you know, not just a benefit to me,
hopefully it's it's enjoyable for them to reconnect with me.
So that's been something that I've been trying to build
into my work each day.
Speaker 1 (23:07):
Yeah, Well, it's always fun to reconnect with people and
to share good news. What's something you are looking forward to?
Speaker 2 (23:13):
Oh, I am really looking forward to. Uh. Next week
is my book Clunch event in here in Madison, Wisconsin,
and so there's going to be some celebrations at my
favorite bookstore in town, and I think that that will
be you know, a little nerve wracking, but also a
lot of fun. So that's on the horizon for next week.
Speaker 1 (23:32):
Oh, that's very exciting. Well, anything in a bookstore is
a big win in my book, as it were, So Allison,
where can people find you?
Speaker 2 (23:41):
The best way to find me is at my website,
Alisondamager dot com. It has links to my research to
buy the book where I'll be speaking this fall. You
can also sign up for my newsletter, The Damager Dispatch,
either via my website or at Alisondamager dot substack dot com.
And there I write about intersection of gender and family life.
Speaker 1 (24:03):
Absolutely all right, well please check that out. So Allison,
thank you so much for joining us. Thank you to
everyone for listening. If you have feedback about this or
any other episode, you can always reach me at Laura
at Laura vandercam dot com. In the meantime, this is Laura.
Thanks for listening, and here's to making the most of
our time. Thanks for listening to Before Breakfast. If you've
(24:31):
got questions, ideas, or feedback, you can reach me at
Laura at Laura vandercam dot com. Before Breakfast is a
production of iHeartMedia. For more podcasts from iHeartMedia, please visit
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
(24:53):
your favorite shows
Speaker 2 (25:00):
And
Before Breakfast News
Host
Laura Vanderkam
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