Ep #30: The Invisible Workload of Women
episode summary
If you're the one who schedules all of your family's doctor appointments, and knows that school gets out early the third Wednesday of every month, you're doing the invisible workload. If you know which one of your kids likely got too tall for any of last year's pants . . . and you've started looking for fall sales to re-stock, you're doing the invisible workload.
Invisible work is everything we do as women to anticipate our family's needs before they happen. But that's not all. We also research options to fill that need, make the decision about what to do, and then make the solution happen.
This unseen mental labor consumes a ton of time and mental energy. Join me as we talk through the invisible workload of women and what we can do to share the load a bit. And hey – give yourself some kudos for all of that work you do!
Featured on the Show
The Good Life Group Coaching registration
Why Women Do the Household Worrying (NY Times article featuring research by Allison Daminger)
For the full show notes and transcript, head over here.
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CHAPTERS:
1:20 - The Invisible Workload of Women
7:36 - Cognitive Labor
13:16 - What Should We Do About This?
listen to the episode:
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Hey, I'm Michelle Gauthier and you're listening to the Overwhelmed Working Woman podcast. Hey, friends, how's it going? Today, we are going to be talking about the invisible workload of women. If you haven't heard of this concept before, you are about to have your eyes opened to just how much additional work we are doing in our brains. The invisible work that happens for women, that does not seem to happen - research even backs up - for men in heterosexual couples, but more on that in just a minute. If you're listening to this on the day that it comes out, which is October 30th, then I want to tell you that today is the very last day to sign up for group coaching. The signups have already begun by the time I'm recording this, and I cannot tell you how excited I am about the women who have joined so far. This is going to be such an amazing group. We are going to accomplish so many things in our 12 weeks together and I would absolutely love to have you join. So, if you have been thinking about it, today is the day. You can go to the link in the show notes. If you go to my website and go to the Work With Me page, it will also take you to the group coaching signup. So I hope to see you there, but act fast, otherwise you're going to have to wait till the next round. Okay, let's get back to the invisible workload of women. You guys, we have a lot of invisible work. So what invisible workload is - it's not your actual job that you get paid to do, it's not the chores that you do at home that everyone can see, like cooking dinner. It's all of those invisible things that you remember and plan and hold in your mind. So, for example, if you think about having a child who's like kindergarten age (I'm just thinking of that because the bus stop for the elementary school is right outside my window and I see the cute little kindergarteners standing out there), your job is to make the meals, make sure they eat, school drop off and pick up, getting them to bed at bedtime, et cetera. But the invisible workload is when we're talking about keeping track of early out days - that's what they're called at my kids' schools, where I think it's once a month. See? I'm not great. Once a month they get out a couple hours earlier than normal for teacher meetings. It's keeping track of doctor's appointments, orthodontist appointments are a big part of my life right now at the moment with two kids in braces, sports practices, play dates, that one day where you have to wear red to school for something special, field trips where you have to pack a different lunch, like a throwaway sack lunch, science fairs, the choir concert, not just the date when it is, but what time they need to be there and what they need to wear and going and procuring that outfit with a teen who likes to only wear workout clothes, et cetera. Women are the unofficial timekeepers of where everybody in the family needs to be and are also somehow in charge of making sure that nothing falls through the cracks. Think about when something falls through the cracks. For example, my son forgot his lunch the other day. I was on that retreat that I was telling you guys about in Mexico. He called me in Mexico to tell me that he forgot his lunch. If anything falls through the cracks, it comes automatically to us. The question I posed to the women who I was with at the moment was: do you think a dad would ever get a call when a lunch is forgotten? Ponder that. My answer was no. There's no way that my son's dad would know that he forgot his lunch. This is not meant to be a complaint session. You guys know that if you've been listening to this podcast for a while, we are not about complaining. We are about choosing what we're in control of and taking action to make things feel better. So this isn't a complaint session, but it is more of an acknowledgement session, so that when you wonder why am I so exhausted - sometimes, I will feel at the end of the day physically tired and I'll think well, I worked out this morning, and you know I've been, I feel like I stand in the kitchen for hours a day by the time we have dinner and I help people with homework and I load the dishes and all that kind of stuff. But there's like a brain tired that I get and I think that this is one of the causes of it. So the good part about acknowledging it is just understanding why you are maybe more tired than you feel like you should be, and then acknowledging it also gives you the opportunity to think about, do I want to be the person who is in charge of this? I don't think there's a special skill that we have as women that allows us to be better about this, and do you want to be that person in your family's life? Being aware that this invisible workload exists can help you decide the way that you want to ask for help or split chores in your household. So the other day - my son takes medicine and it's for ADHD, so it's not the kind of medicine that you can get like a 90 day supply of. You have to get it every 30 days. So there's a job every month around getting his medication and it helps him so much at school so he absolutely needs to have it. He feels much better when he has it. So last month I remembered, like I do in the middle of every month, that I needed to request the medication from the doctor. So I went to the website, put in the request. Right now there's a shortage on the medication, so you can't necessarily get it from the same pharmacy every time. So before I put in the request I have to call the pharmacy and make sure that they have it. So I called around to a couple of pharmacies. I found a pharmacy that had it, went back to the website, put in the request, because you have to put it in for the specific pharmacy. If you prescribe it at a pharmacy where they don't have it, you can't just transfer it. It has to be called into the specific one, at least in the state where I live. So I put that in. Then you have to cross your fingers that the doctor addresses it quickly or the staff addresses it quickly and that they call in the prescription while they still have the medication. So then a couple hours later I call the pharmacy to confirm that they do indeed have the medicine and that it was filled for my son and ask when it will be ready. So then at that point I text my ex-husband, my son's dad, and say, okay, his medicine's ready, you can pick it up tonight, whatever. It's good to go. And then the next morning I texted him and said, hey, did you get the medicine? Were you able to pick it up last night? And he said no, but I'll be sure and do it tonight. So I was like, all right, I need to double check tomorrow that he got the medicine. So when you look at that, the chore of picking up the medicine was done by my ex-husband and I'm grateful for that. I'm glad that he did that part of it. But the vast majority of the actual getting of the medicine to the medicine drawer in my house was really done by me, because I'm the one who knows when it's going to run out and I'm the one who knows that it's not at all the pharmacies and I'm the one who knows that just because the doctor called it in doesn't mean they still have it by the time she calls it in, etc. So what that really made me realize when I looked at what is the workload here, and what is the invisible workload, it helped me to see that the invisible workload was really the biggest part of the job. So if I'm really asking for help in that area, what I want to say is, can you be in charge of the medicine? That means on the - I don't know why I always do on the 17th - on the 17th of the month, you have to start calling around to the pharmacies, do the request, blah, blah, blah, all that stuff. I wasn't asking for help on that and I don't know that I necessarily will, but it helps me to acknowledge it just to see how much work it actually is. I decided to do some research on this topic because I obviously knew about the concept in general and I know that it's something that feels heavy on me sometimes and it's something that I work with my clients on is knowing about this invisible workload. But I was thinking someone must study this. So I looked it up and I found this researcher, Allison Daminger, who I have since requested to be a guest on the podcast. Hopefully she'll come and join us and tell us all the things she knows. She got her PhD at Harvard and she studied what she calls cognitive labor, which is this exactly what we're talking about the invisible workload and she breaks it down to different pieces of the workload. So the first step she talks about is anticipating, so realizing when we need to start thinking about something. So the example that she used in the article, which I thought was brilliant, is summer camp for kids. So, anticipate is realizing when you need to start thinking about options for the summer before they fill up. Did I just give you the thought? Oh my gosh, yes, I need to look into that. I always do that around Thanksgiving or Christmas. Start to think about what my kids are going to do in the summer. Then the next part is to identify. Identify is like looking into camps and seeing which ones will suit the needs of your kid or look interesting. Then the next step is deciding, so choosing which camp and then monitoring. The fourth step is making sure the kids are signed up, their medical forms are sent in, you know what time and day they're supposed to get there, you get the big packing list and get all the stuff. So there's really a whole lot that goes into something like getting your kid to summer camp. And so, in this research that she did, she talked to couples and again, like I mentioned at the very beginning of this podcast, we're talking about heterosexual couples. We don't know if there are two women in a relationship or two men. I don't know how this breaks up, but for this particular study it was just talking about heterosexual couples. She said that women are most likely to do the anticipate, so thinking about that someone's going to need to go to summer camp and the monitoring, where you get them all packed up, know when they need to be there, fill out the medical forms, all those things. A nd that men and women, jointly or together, tend to do the identifies, where you pick the camp and decide. So identifying is like when you're looking at all the options for camp and then deciding is when you actually decide on which one they're going to go to. So I thought that was interesting because it's like women are coming up with the idea and anticipating the needs and often doing the research. Then they share some of the research of what they find and together a couple will decide (in some relationships, obviously, not all of them, but in this group she looked at) and then monitoring is the part where you make it happen, like the nitty-gritty stuff. So women are disproportionately likely to take the lead in anticipating upcoming needs and monitoring outcomes. That makes so much sense to me. That just feels so right because there are many decisions, even as a divorced person who's co-parenting, there are many decisions that I don't feel like I should make for my kids, but I always seem to present my ex-husband with the option so that we can talk about the options. I'm definitely the one who anticipates the needs and I'm wondering if you're the same way. Are you a fan of the show Sex in the City? It is my all-time, ultimate, most favorite show in the whole world. I've watched the whole thing through several times, and so I also love this new one. They did a reboot. If you hadn't seen that, it's called And Just Like That. In that Charlotte goes back to work. Her kids are both in high school and she goes back to work she's been a stay-at-home mom for a long time. Her whole family is going through this big change as she's going back to work. One night she's just had it and can't take it and goes out to happy hour I think she closed a big deal. She's an art dealer and she closed a big deal. She goes out to happy hour with a bunch of her much younger coworkers and ends up drinking a ton of tequila. The next morning she wakes up, she's completely hungover and her husband, Harry, who's usually adorable - if you watch the show you know how cute he is - he says like, I just can't do it all. Then she reads him the riot act. Basically, I'm literally going to read you what she says, because this, I felt this so deeply in my soul. I was like, yes, that is exactly it, it's one of the things that made me want to write this podcast. So she says to him, "You are not doing it all. I know, because you made a few breakfasts and you ran a few errands, that it feels like you are, but in fact you are doing the bare minimum of what I and other women have been asked to, no expected to do around the house for years and years and years. And now I'm asking no, I'm expecting you to help me with part of it, not all of it, because I love my work and I'm good at it. I want to keep doing what I'm doing, so I need your help and support, not your words of help and support. And I thought this was so good because they have a really happy, loving, cooperative relationship. And when he had to start doing some of the things that she had previously done, he felt like he was doing everything and she felt like he was doing nothing because she was anticipating all the needs and telling him what needed to happen. And her kids were still calling her all day long while she's at work trying to have a job now. And I just thought the whole thing was so relatable and that she just really spoke to what almost all of us, as working women, go through from time to time. So what should we do about this? I think there are a couple of things that we can do. The first is just to listen to this podcast and realize that the invisible workload of women exists and acknowledge how much you are probably doing this. For me, it feels gratifying to know that when I am so tired, like in the brain tired, that this is probably why. It's just helpful for me to know that. The other thing is, think about the roles of the people who are living under the same roof as you - your kids and your husband or whoever lives in your household - and think about if you want to split this up. It seems like if we take just an average everyday chore like cooking dinner, there's the cooking of the dinner, like the actual thing, and then there is the invisible workload that goes prior to and after that. So, for example, when I'm planning my meals for the week, first of all, just planning meals for the week is invisible workload, just thinking about, okay, what do we have going on? I know for sure on Tuesday and Thursday we can't have dinner together as a family because there's practice and I'm going to have to take this one there and this one's going to be home later, et cetera. So there's that piece of it. Then there's the planning of the actual meals. So kid number one loves ravioli, kid number two doesn't, but I could serve it as a side and then I could grill chicken because they both like chicken, and then blah, blah, blah. You know, trying to anticipate each individual person's needs and hope that at least you know they'll eat something healthy, if not the whole thing. And then there's making the list and then ordering the groceries, unpacking them, maybe doing a little bit of meal prep and then eventually, the making the dinner. So the making the dinner part is definitely important, but there's so much that goes before it. So, thinking about those roles in your family, if you're the person who's the anticipator all the time, which I definitely am, can you ask someone else to be the doer? So if you plan the meals and order the groceries, can someone else cook them? Or even if you do all that and cook them, can someone else do the dishes? Or my daughter, she's actually turning 13 today, she is great about meal planning and ordering groceries and she kind of likes to do that. So can I make her in charge of being the anticipator for the week? Think about what we want to eat, think about what everybody will eat. She'd probably think that was fun, honestly. So think about not just the chores, the making of the dinner, but what invisible workload goes before and after that, and then ask for help where you need it. Okay, friends, as always, pat yourself on the back. We are doing so much as women, and the point of this podcast, the bigger podcast and this particular episode, is just to remind you of that and to just ask you to question, "is this what I really want? Is there a change that I want to make? If there is a change that I want to make, what is it and what's one small step I could take in that direction?" All right, if you are considering group coaching, today is the day. Go and register right this second, if you really think you want to do it, which I would love to have you do. Otherwise, I will see you guys next week. Have a great week. Thank you for listening to the Overwhelmed Working Woman podcast. If you want to learn more about my work, head over to my website at MichelleGauthier.com. See you next week.
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