It's no secret that women tend to shoulder the brunt of household chores, even when both couples go to work. In the U.S., women in heterosexual marriages who earn the same as their husbands still tend to spend more than twice as long doing housework as their husbands, according to research from Pew Research Center.
To their credit, men are increasingly taking on more responsibilities around the house, with roughly half of U.S. couples saying that they share this domestic labor 50:50. However, while the physical execution of these tasks might be shared more equally between couples, the mental burden still falls primarily on women, and it's impacting their mental health.
In a study published in the journal Archives of Women's Mental Health, researchers from the University of Southern California analyzed data from 322 mothers in heterosexual relationships with young children to determine the extent of these gender disparities, and how they might be affecting women's health.
"Although the division of unpaid household labor has been studied as a driver of global gender inequity, the cognitive dimension of household labor—planning, anticipating, and delegating household tasks—has received less empirical investigation," the researchers wrote.
The women were asked to assess the division of both cognitive and physical household labor across 30 common domestic tasks, including cooking cleaning, laundry, grocery shopping, transportation and coordinating medical appointments and extra-curricular activities.
While the physical burden of these tasks was somewhat evenly split between men and women, mothers disproportionately took on the cognitive burden of remembering, anticipating and delegating these tasks.
On average, mothers reported taking on roughly 73 percent of all cognitive household labor, while their partners' took on 27 percent. The disparity was smaller, but still significant, for physical labor, where women took on about 64 percent of all physical household labor compared with their partners' 36 percent.
The researchers also found that mothers who took on a larger share of these cognitive household tasks reported higher levels of depression, stress, relationship dissatisfaction, and burnout. Indeed, cognitive labor disparities had a more profound affect on women's psychological wellbeing than differences in their physical labor load.
"The particularly deleterious effects of cognitive labor may be due, in part, to its invisibility: while it is easy to see which partner is chopping vegetables for dinner, the labor of planning a weekly rotation of meals may go unrecognized by other family members, or even by oneself," the researchers write.
There was, however, one chore where fathers were significantly more likely to take on both the planning and execution of the task: taking out the garbage.
Of course, this study was based on a relatively small sample size of subjective data. Even so, it is one of the first studies to investigate both the cognitive and physical dimensions of domestic tasks within the same household and marks an important step in the quantification of "invisible" cognitive labor, and its consequences for women's health.
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References
Aviv, E., Waizman, Y., Kim, E., Liu, J., Rodsky, E., & Saxbe, D. (2024). Cognitive household labor: Gender disparities and consequences for maternal mental health and wellbeing. Archives of Women's Mental Health. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00737-024-01490-w
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