“Be home in 10 minutes.” After receiving this text from her husband, she scrambles to drain the pasta and adds the special red sauce her family enjoys; frantically mixes the Caesar salad with a homemade dressing she found on Pinterest and quickly sets the table. The oven’s abrupt beeping alerts her to take the garlic bread out before it burns. As she sits down to rest, her children and husband come through the door. Just like that she is up again to begin serving the meal.
Cooking, cleaning, buying groceries, the list of household chores goes on and on. Women spend twice as many hours completing physical housework compared to their male partners. But one of the most relevant stressors that fails to be addressed by both couples and experts is cognitive labor, or the “project management” role of the household.
Allison Daminger, an Assistant Professor of Sociology, researches the cognitive labor in different-sex romantic relationships and, more recently, same-sex romantic relationships with at least one child through a series of interviews. Her two articles and upcoming book give insight into this under-researched topic.
Someone has to make the decisions in a household. In 80% of the different-sex couples Daminger interviewed, women take on most of the cognitive labor. A four-step process allows decisions to be made effectively. This includes anticipating needs, identifying options for filling them, making decisions and monitoring progress
You notice your sister's birthday is next week and are hosting a party for her. You identify the options of whether you will serve chicken parmesan or shrimp tacos. You make the decision to make chicken parmesan. Lastly, you monitor the progress of the situation. For example, if you asked your husband to buy the ingredients, you may check in with him to see if he went to the grocery store.
Some men argue women lead in this role as a function of their personality. This may not be a function of personality as much as a stereotypical gender norm. Many of the different-sex couples Daminger interviewed considered themselves to be progressive in terms of gender ideals and wanted an equal distribution of housework. In reality, the distribution is unequal, and men have the ability to address it.
“Many of the men who I was told are really reactive or spontaneous hold paid jobs where they’ve got to be really on top of things,” Daminger says. “They're a surgeon. They’re a management consultant. They’re a lawyer. They have these skills in other contexts, and they’re not necessarily being applied at home in the same way.”
Cognitive dissonance occurs when people’s beliefs and behaviors do not align. In this case, egalitarian couples value gender equality in their housework, but their behaviors fail to reflect that. Often, they reframe the situation to ease the conflict between their beliefs and behavior.
People think of someone’s personality as fixed. The brain tells itself that a woman’s type A personality is the reason for her doing most of the cognitive labor. The male partner may ask themselves “why would I be in charge of these decisions if she is the organized one?” They are reframing traditional gender roles to align with their egalitarian views. Men don’t assume all women have this personality trait, but this one woman, aka their wife, does.
“Those couples are taking older gender stereotypes and ideas about women's and men's roles in households, and they are reformulating them and saying not that women are type A, women are better at multitasking. But this woman [their wife] is better at multitasking. This woman is really organized,” Daminger says.
Often referred to as “invisible labor,” cognitive labor often fails to be acknowledged in relationships. Although the mental and physical effects of this workload aren’t thoroughly researched, Daminger believes they could be negative. Without recognition, the job of “project manager” leaves women feeling drained.
Distributing more physical labor to the husband could lighten their partner's load. But Daminger found some couple's redistributions of work had the opposite effect. Some women in the study asked their husbands to take on more physical labor, such as cooking dinner.
“What they found was that they had to keep reminding their partner ‘Wednesday is your night to cook. Did you get the ingredients? You have to be home in time to start cooking.’ So, there was a lot of mental stuff that women were holding even when they tried to reallocate the physical,” Daminger says.
So, what is the solution to this problem?
A large concern for parents is childcare. Daminger expressed this burden normally falls on the woman and adds to their cognitive labor load. Some daycares have limited hours or a long application process which may take months for approval. Policy can assist mothers with the cognitive load of a household.
“Having a more low cost but high quality socially available set of childcare options would reduce cognitive loads in families and especially in women because they are the ones who tend to be arranging that childcare,” Daminger says.
Waiting for legislation to pass can be time-consuming and unrealistic. Some couples don’t have the time for legislation to pass in order to solve their unequal distribution of labor. Daminger recommends that couples decide rather than default. That is, clearly identify all the responsibilities and chores each partner is currently managing and then make a conscious decision about whether and how to reallocate.
Maybe the solution is not splitting household labor equally; maybe it means couples coming to an agreement about what works best for the individual couple.
“I've come to realize what is probably more important is that both partners are on the same page and both partners are satisfied with what's happening,” Daminger says.