3 Tips for Women Facing an Unequal Mental Load

In 2018, French cartoonist Emma published a now-famous comic strip titled, “You Should’ve Asked.” In it, a young woman visits a colleague for dinner and watches as the female colleague struggles to cook and feed her children while the colleague’s husband sits and chats with their guest. The situation grows chaotic as the colleague frantically attempts to accomplish her tasks, all while her husband sits unaware and undisturbed until dinner boils onto the floor. When his wife confronts him in annoyance, he replies in exasperation that she should have asked for help, he would have been happy to give it!

The comic brought much-needed attention to the concept of mental load. Mental load, the comic explains, is “always having to remember.” Said another way, it’s the invisible mental effort and energy women expend to keep their households running regardless of employment status.

Just a year prior, in 2017, the Modern Family Index (MFI) found evidence to suggest that not only is mental load a very real problem, but it lands particularly heavily on working mothers. A staggering 86 percent of the female respondents indicated they were solely responsible for household and family management tasks with 72 percent feeling it was their job to manage their children’s schedules in addition to their own paid employment. Surprisingly, the situation was even bleaker for breadwinning mothers. According to the MFI, breadwinning mothers were three times more likely to manage their children’s lives and needs than breadwinning fathers. Even compared with other working mothers, a breadwinning mother was more likely to be responsible for work needed around the house, family events, and finances.

Here’s the part where I, a psychologist in private practice and mother to two adorable little girls who think I can’t cook, admit that these findings hit a little close to home. The many times I’ve used these examples and findings to normalize my client’s experiences or as supporting evidence in lectures, I’ve noticed it’s usually met with mixed emotions. And some of those come from me. It’s a profound relief to find words and data that match our experiences, but inevitably I’ve observed—and felt—a sense of hopelessness regarding how to fix it.

The message is easy enough to understand on an intellectual level: women are doing more than their fair share of work so, therefore, they should stop. Right? Some chores need to be dispensed with while others are prioritized, and some high-quality confrontation needs to happen between the over-burdened partner and the free-loading partner. But if understanding something on an intellectual level was sufficient, I’d be a great cook and none of us would struggle to right the ship of equitable household labor. What I’ve found in my practice and in my own life is that even with a willing partner, a partner who sees and understands that things need to change, habits and patterns that have been in place for a long time are notoriously resistant to good intentions. Here are some things I’ve learned to address to better combat the inequality of mental load:

1. Become a Scientist of Your Schedule

The truth hurts: Human beings are notoriously poor at discriminating relevant data from feeling and highly suggestible when it comes to making estimates (Kahneman, 2011; Buehler, Peetz, & Griffin, 2010). In gauging housework specifically, men tend to inflate how much they’ve done (Pew Research Center, 2015) and, as you might expect, their contributions impact women’s sense of satisfaction far more than the reverse (Foster & Stratton 2017; Noor, 1997).

I strongly encourage clients to not rely on a vague sense of when things “feel” fair and unfair and instead actually write it all out. Write out your schedule hour by hour in a given week, see where your time is going. List out all the chores that fall to you and have your spouse do the same before deciding who needs to take over what. It’s hard to fix where a partnership is going wrong if you don’t actually know where it’s going wrong.

As an aside, emerging data suggest that the ongoing global pandemic has both parents feeling the strain (MFI, 2021), but pre-existing gender imbalance means that disproportionately high costs are still resting heavily on women’s shoulders (McKinsey & Company, 2020). Just because everyone is hurting doesn’t mean you need to keep silent about your workload.

2. Face the Costs of the Mental Load

A surprising observation I made when working with clients in my practice is that they often diminished the costs of unequal mental load. To them, it felt self-indulgent to only improve things for themselves and hey, was it really that big a deal that they were tired when everybody is tired? The answer is yes, yes it is a big deal. Multi-tasking, interruptions, and distractions all diminish efficiency and accuracy (Thomas et al., 2017, Owens et al., 2017). The human brain can only accomplish so much and when you’re spread thin, the quality of what you’re producing suffers (Paas et al. 2003).

To say that working moms are the only ones hurt by unfair labor division is simply false. Reducing mental load by recruiting other family members to step up isn’t a special treat you can give yourself, it’s necessary to protect the quality of the work that means the most.

3. Set Expectations with Yourself

By that I mean expect pushback. It’s been demonstrated more than once that human beings like to do the least amount of work they can get away with, physically and emotionally (Scheffer et al., 2021). Spouses and children usually don’t high-five women for having better boundaries when it means they can no longer get away with housework murder. Expect it. It’s going to be a bumpy ride and people will complain. That’s not your problem, what is your problem is when you think sitting around and looking overworked will prompt everyone to feel so much compassion for you that they’ll change a decades-old, socialization-fed dynamic in a heartbeat. Even loving, solicitous partners will have to check their household privilege more than they realize. If we want things to change, we have to learn to be comfortable with other people’s discomfort.

To sum it all up, the mental load is a complex problem that’s difficult to comprehend in a general sense, much less the nuanced presentations of it in our own lives. It’s going to take some trial and error when you’re ready to push for a more equitable division of labor. But just remember: your time, effort, and energy are all as valuable as you are.