I'll give

you an American greeting.

The other thing about the mental load is it has three different distinct characteristics.

So this is something we wrote in that book.

It's invisible.

And what that means is you can do it totally internal in your body.

You might right now be thinking about your own mental load as we're here.

true.

Like for our viewers, Fair Play by Eve Rodsky.

Yeah.

Thank you.

So basically, Eve Rodsky wrote this great book called Fair Play, and she in addition to that, she has these cards, right? And, and the cards are basically capturing all this work you might do around what I think is life organization, right? Making sure...

There'll be some crossover, I have no doubt about that, but, like, who's doing what in the house and who wants to.

One of the things-- so life organization is, like, the tasks that are necessary to keep everything functioning.

It's probably the most typical way in which you would perceive the mental load, and this is the one where when we often think about task allocation, this is kind of it, right? Eve Rodsky has the Fair Play cards and the Fair Play method, where you can go in and actually take the cards and reallocate them.

Yeah.

Let's just start with how are you defining the mental load?

Okay.

So I think we got the definition of the mental load a little bit wrong.

And fortunately for you, I'm a researcher.

So I'll give you the definition that I think is a little bit more accurate.

In the paper that I wrote with Liz Dean and Brendan Churchill at the University of Melbourne, which was published in 2021, we basically argued that the mental load is emotional thinking work necessary to keep your work, life, and family running.

Yeah.

How do you help men understand, like, this is what you need to say to your wife, and this is what the process looks like when you go through that transition process?

What's happening there?

Yeah, it's interesting.

So I have a study with Janine Baxter at UQ and Paco Perales with the HILDA data, right, using Australian data.

And one of the things that we found was that that transition into parenting time pressure for both mothers and fathers.

And then when they have that second kid, it doubles again.

And the gap is wider for mothers than dads.

So everyone's time pressure goes up.

worries.

What's happening there?

Yeah, it's interesting.

So I have a study with Janine Baxter at UQ and Paco Perales with the HILDA data, right, using Australian data.

And one of the things that we found was that that transition into pair is time pressure for both mothers and fathers.

And then when they have that second kid, it doubles again.

And the gap is wider for mothers than dads.

So everyone's time pressure goes up.

No worries.

It's called the Lighten Lab Assessment, and we've put a link in the show notes if you wanna give it a go.

My goal for this is that we all start to think about our mental loads much like we think about our blood pressure or our steps or our sleep scores.

What I want you to start understanding is your baseline.

What does it look like, and what, where, where is it shifting and where is it going? Are you actually feeling like it's working you towards your goals? Are you feeling like you're burnt out? Are you feeling exhausted? Because the goal isn't to get rid of the mental load.

Like, you can't, but sometimes, like, our mental load can be positive, right? It's like, where is your mental load going? Where is it going across these categories? When it goes to them, is it crediting you, is it bringing you joy, or is it debiting you? Are you giving your mental load to people that don't deserve it? 'Cause I'm sorry, a lot of people don't deserve our energy, but we give it to them all the time, right? I am asking you to start to be strategic, much like you are about your money, and start to think about where you wanna go and how to spend and align your mental load energy in that direction.

[upbeat music]

Yeah.

"It comes back 18 times bigger," right? What I'm asking in the book is for us to get a little bit more strategic.

Yeah

...

I've spent 20 years looking at, you know, the division of household labor, women in AI, and one of the things that I consistently found was, like, hey, women are doing more of the housework and the childcare on average.

Men have stepped into more care as well, so we have a paper showing that actually men are doing more now than ever before.

Generationally, they're taking on more of the primary care, they're taking on more of the housework, and women are, are also doing the same amount as previous generations.

And so the question for me was like, I keep looking at this thing where I see that women are have more power, they have more economic power, they have more education.

Men are interested in being primary carers, primary sharers, and they're doing more work, and yet everyone still feels exhausted.

Mm-hmm.

[laughs]

Everyone's like, "You teach, right?" It's like, "No, I'm always researching." Um, um, okay, and I'm gonna circle back to guilt 'cause this comes through late, in one of the later chapters, so y'all don't worry.

We'll come back to the guilt piece too.

Um, okay, so I, I'm a, I'm a researcher.

I've been looking at these issues for over 20 to 25 years, and I've, I've s- published over, I don't know, 80 academic articles on a range of topics about gender.

But one of the things that I kept coming back to was, like, we, we know that women are stepping into more paid employment.

We know women are stepping into more education.

[laughs]

Tell me more.

Okay.

Hi, everyone.

Good morning.

Um, so let's talk about how we often think about the mental load.

We often think about the mental load as kinda like this list-making thing that maybe just mothers hold.

But what we've shown across our research is the mental load is much bigger than this.

Mm.

Right.

In the US, cross-nationally, what does it look like, who gets a fair shake? And one of the things that I keep being told when I talk about this research is like, "You know, the thing is is just women can see the mess." Like we got told, I hear this all the time, right? Women can just see mess better than men.

They can find the keys.

They can see that their kid's hair is disheveled.

They just have like some evolutionary process where they just see mess better.

So when Sabino and I were wandering around Melbourne, Australia, and we were talking about, he said, "What are, you know, what's the thing that you really wanna study about this? What's the thing that keeps coming up?" And I said, "I wanna study this nonsense that keeps getting told to us, and then I also wanna know if it's not that women just can see mess more than men, what is it?" Because what I think is happening is when you're stress cleaning, it's because you think that someone's gonna punish you, you think that someone's gonna judge you.

So what we did is we designed this study where we had two rooms.

Mm.

Yeah.

Yes and.

Um, absolutely.

So some of the mental load, right, is coming internally.

Some of it is useful.

This is one of the things I ask you...

Well, I guess it's the main thing I ask you to do in the book, right? Is to start to get crystal clear on where is your mental load going, what are you spending it on, when you're thinking about things.

Sorry, sorry, sorry.

Have you found that men and women perceive the fairness of household labor differently?

Okay.

So one...

We've done interviews, so everything I'm doing is coming from empirics.

So we've done interviews across the US and Australia to look at what parents are doing, and we've collected a range of surveys.

We've talked to...

This is coming from thousands and thousands of data points, right? The short answer is that women are carrying a different and heavier mental load than our dads.

Mm-hmm.

God bless her.

[laughs] So this is what's going on.

We have, like, this legacy.

It's like, it's like we're still in this expectation that there's this public/private split, that, you know, your public life is separate from your private life, that you have a caregiver at home, that we're supposed to be totally unencumbered workers, that we're supposed to be, like, 100% devoted to our work, and we're supposed to never have any distraction, and then 100% devoted to our families and have no distraction.

And the world just isn't this way.

We...

The world doesn't operate this way.

[laughs]

Mm-hmm.

That then the other partner's like, "I get that because I know that feeling." And so one of the things I ask is for those who are in heterosexual relationships to start from a position of curiosity because you actually don't know what you don't know, because you don't move through the world in the same way, right? And so if you come in when...

You know, one of the best articles I wrote that has the most reach was one where we showed that actually women are judged more harshly for the state of their room, whether their room is clean or not, and they're seen as less competent, capable, and human, less likable.

And so when women say like, "Well, actually, I think if someone shows up at my house as a mess, they're gonna like really judge me for being a bad person," well, we have the research to back that up, but if you're not living in that world, you can't see it and you can't feel it.

And so we have much to learn from those who are, you know, changing, swapping out tasks that aren't assigned just based on socialization and gender.

And one of the questions, last thing I'll say, one of the questions we asked w- for many, for every single interviewee was like, "How did you allocate the mental load?" And many would say, "What? Like, we talked about who would pick up the kids.

We talked about who would, you know, do the dishes or take time off.

How do you have that conversation? How do you, how do you start that conversation?

Mm-hmm.

That then the other partner's like, "I get that because I know that feeling." And so one of the things I ask is for those who are in heterosexual relationships to start from a position of curiosity, 'cause you actually don't know what you don't know, 'cause you don't move through the world in the same way, right? And so if you come in when...

You know, one of the best articles I wrote that has the most reach was one where we show that actually women are judged more harshly for the state of their room, whether their room is clean or not, and they're seen as less competent, capable, and human, less likable.

And so when women say, like, "Well, actually, I think if someone shows up at my house as a mess, they're gonna, like, really judge me for being a bad person," well, we have the research to back that up, but if you're not living in that world, you can't see it and you can't feel it.And so we have much to learn from those who are, you know, changing, swapping out tasks that aren't assigned just based on socialization and gender.

And one of the questions, last thing I'll say, one of the questions we asked w- for many, for every single interviewee, was, like, "How did you allocate the mental load?" And many would say, "What? Like, we talked about who would pick up the kids, we talked about who would, you know, do the dishes or take time off, but we never talked about the mental load." And one of the challenges is we don't even have the language, until this book, to fully articulate it.

So my hope is we start to have conversations exactly like Roska said, like, here's where we start out, and we start to see a shift so that people do more of what they love, less of what they don't, and have a clear reallocation, renegotiation, delegation, and drop some of it so we can all live a little bit lighter.

How do you have that conversation? How do you, how do you start that conversation?

Okay, this has been asked of me, like, eight million times, which is clearly people are struggling with this, and we heard this through the interviews, so thank you very much for the question.

[laughs]

This is 100% a reverse gaslight.

Um, get ready.

There's two things that are happening.

One is that, yes, your partner is probably telling you you're holding your standards too high, and the answer in my book will help you unpack it.

Sometimes they're right.

Sometimes you are.

Mm-hmm.

trait.Leah, why does this all seem to matter so much more to women than to men? You know, are we all just overthinking? Are our standards just too high?

That's a really excellent question, so I, I, I thank you for asking that.

'Cause one of the things I could hear across all my research, across the data that I was collecting is women felt really guilty.

They felt guilty and awful if they weren't 110% there for their family, they weren't doing absolutely everything.

And then they felt incredibly guilty when they took time to rest and recover.

Part of the reason why this is something that is being experienced by mothers and women in particular, and this is sometimes, I, I write in the book, it's, it's not that men are heartless, it's just they're not living in the same social world you're living in.

So it doesn't feel as heavy for them because it's not as heavy for them.

Assumptions like that one stem from some pervasive cultural myths that Lia says do everybody a disservice.