It’s February 2024. In a self-catered residence in Estonia, my male traveling companion asks me what we need from the shop. I answer, “I don’t know, what do we need from the shop? You know as much as I do.” The irony is heavy; we had a conversation only a few hours prior where I had expressed my growing frustration that the onus of organisational responsibility for everything in our friendship invariably falls almost solely on me and women in general.
For this trip, supposedly a birthday present (despite the fact that I ended up paying for both of us), and a much needed getaway, I’ve already spent a full day well in advance putting our itinerary together to maximise our time abroad, in what I call the “unpaid director role”. This denotes women, often thanklessly, doing all the behind the scenes work, the metaphorical stagemaking, curating, props-design, and overseeing, well before one even thinks about rehearsals. To avoid having to do this in Estonia itself, I asked that he share some of the preparation, and day to day logistical organisation when we’re there. But this didn’t happen.
This behind the scenes work often is more commonly known as the hidden mental load, or cognitive labour. And the operative word really is labour, because it is cognitive work akin to project management, which is time consuming, taxing, and sometimes straight up stressful. In the American Sociological Review, Allison Daminger breaks this down into four parts: anticipating, identifying, deciding and monitoring. In practicality, this often looks like women being expected to monitor what’s run out at home and make shopping lists, plan vacations and social events, budget, decide on the children’s Christmas presents, organise most of the Christmas itself, think about what ingredients are needed for dinner, and that’s all before one gets into whether the actual cooking is divided equally.
In professional settings, the mental load manifests in women customarily being expected to manage calendars, lead or serve in employee resource groups and DE&I committees, organise the bulk of meetings and staff away days, do meeting minutes plus things like cards and gifts for employees. A survey commissioned by Samsung of 2,000 UK employees demonstrated these tasks are three times more likely to be asked of you if you are a woman. And even if a woman says no to unrewarded tasks like this, it’s likely that another women will be asked instead.
The cognitive dimension is often overlooked in both research and consideration, to women’s detriment. High cognitive load causes reduced capacity to exercise willpower and make long-term decisions as well as increased anxiety and stress. Effects such as these impede women’s participation in the workforce and other domains, further entrenching the cycle of gender inequality.
Weaponised Incompetence
For our trip to Estonia, the mental load looked like me being automatically expected to do all the mapping, having to work out what time to leave for which activity, and most jarringly, doing all the nudging for my companion to get the one task done he was supposed to do, which was booking our transfers. In the end, the amount of time I spent nudging, or what ends up being insidiously framed as ‘nagging’ in many domestic scenarios, translated to it taking more time than it would’ve taken me to just do it myself. And to top it off, had I not double checked those very same transfers, we would not have made our flights in the first place, because the departure times he booked were wrong.
This aspect of it – women coming to the conclusion that it is easier to simply do these tasks themselves than stress about the punctuality or level of results if their male counterparts take their share of the responsibility – is often a result of weaponised incompetence. This term, first coined by Jared Sandberg in a piece for The Wall Street Journal, describes men strategically pretending that they don’t know how to do a relatively simple task and/or seeming unable to learn to do so (or doing it deliberately badly), which forces the woman in the dynamic to do it instead. As a study on gender inequity in household labour showed, this can be a killer in romantic relationships. Men taking on this childlike role is summarily unattractive, and women being pigeonholed into mothering roles having to badger them to pull their weight is nothing short of deeply unhealthy, plus a definite turn off.
Men Pulling Their Weight Is Not A Favour
In her book Hysterical: Exploding the Myth of Gendered Emotions, Dr Pragya Agarwal outlined the fact that the prevalence of the mental load comes down to a two-pronged problem; antiquated gendered stereotypes deeming women being naturally more empathetic and nurturing, and the lack of the “status shield”, a term coined by Arlie Hochschild in her book, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling, to mean a kind of social protection men have to do less or act outside what is equitable and/or expected of their role. So, women internalise the gendered messages that their roles carry greater scope, but that the unfairness and their discontentment with it should not seem so onerous, hence they suppress their justified exasperation.
Even in heterosexual couples who think that they have achieved an equal division of labour, the more hidden forms of care generally end up falling to the woman. A lot of the time, this falls into two well-worn patterns. One, women end up asking their partners to do their fair share, as if it’s a favour to them, when of course it is effort that benefits the partnership or family unit, or two; the dishes or laundry for example are left, causing an argument and the man says “well you should’ve asked!”, thereby reinforcing this false ‘favour’ implication. It’s not about an equal split of chores, but having an equal sense of impetus and initiative-taking to figure out what needs to be done in the first place, when, how to do it and who does what.
What can we do to move forwards?
A significant part of the responsibility for changing this lies with men. Men need to educate themselves about this imbalance, then actively and consciously work to redress it. Women also need to be clear about expectations and all genders should raise awareness of this phenomenon, as there is a sore lack of understanding and data around it, despite the fact that it is such a deeply entrenched part of our global everyday realities.
You can use The Mental Load List, an editable document people can use to get their personal mental loads out of their heads, and use the conversation guide included at the end to help you redistribute cognitive work more fairly. In practical terms, you can think about your own social spheres, from family occasions, to romantic relationships, to group outings or trips abroad. Ask yourself; is the labour genuinely shared? Or is the woman in the scenario being expected by default to decide what the labour is and being forced to ask to share it out? If this is true, then it’s not a real division of labour. If you find men using phrases like “I don’t know how” or “you’re better at it than me” (e.g. in my scenario: “but you’ve traveled more than me”), recognise that these are nothing more than excuses and they aren’t good enough. Whatever it is that the woman is being expected to do, she had to learn too, and it’s more than probable that the male complainant has access to the same resources to do so. In Estonia, I didn’t have a high-powered app that only well travelled people get access to. I was just using Google maps.
That’s not at all to say that men always shirk their responsibilities in manipulative ways or deliberately dismiss the disproportionately higher amount of work women shoulder, because this phenomenon isn’t that openly recognised; many simply do not even have the language to discuss it. Hence, it is high time we exposed this unpaid-director defaultism for what it is; an unfair female tax that needs to be eradicated with the unified willingness of all parties to improve. Women and society at large deserve much better.
