By Claire Waring.
Feeling the weight of holding everything together for your family while advancing your career? You’re not alone. Mental load is the elephant in the gender inequality room and it’s high time we did something about it.
I’ve had to jump a number of hurdles in my 20+ year career in advertising. Like so many of us, discrimination, harassment, pay inequality, unpaid maternity leave have all been thrown my way. But one of the biggest hurdles of my career, one that I and most women like me, still struggle with on a daily basis, is mental load.
The mental load is a term for the unpaid, invisible labour involved in managing a family household. In heterosexual households of Australia, this role belongs almost exclusively to women (1). It’s not the physical tasks but rather the overseeing of those tasks – holding all the family knowledge, constantly anticipating everyone’s needs and keeping ALL the balls in the air at all times.
The term was first coined in 2017 in a comic by Emma, a French computer science engineer that went viral. Called “The Mental Load: A Feminist Comic” it struck a major chord, deftly describing the thing that had been causing so much internal rage and frustration. Mothers are expected to be the keepers of all things. The cognitive and emotional labour that makes up this mental load is constant, underrecognised, unpaid and perpetuating gender inequality.
"This mental load is SPOT ON. My husband is a great man and takes care of his children, but my frustration comes at always being the manager.” – Today Show viewer
The once-invisible labour was brought to the forefront, sparking widespread discussions. Articles, news reports, first-hand testimonies and research shed light on the fact that the burden of mental load is not merely a problem between men and women. It is perpetuated by societal norms deeply embedded in the workplace. It starts at maternity leave and continues from there. Women are seen as experts of home management, regardless of their employment and personal circumstances. What’s worse, the more a woman earns, the more responsibility she will carry at home, which seems completely counterintuitive (2).
The mental load media storm confirmed what every mum, me included, already knew. The juggle is real.
For years we've heard about the gender gap in the context of the workforce, but data has confirmed it’s even more prevalent in the home. We think of the office as the equality battleground, but it’s emerging that the home is the final frontier in closing the gender gap, and mental load is the elephant in the room. It limits our opportunities, steals our time, affects our health, and holds us back in our careers.
It affects me in a myriad of ways - firstly, just getting a clear head to think creatively can be challenging. Mad Men of old days walked into work without any thought of managing a kid’s schedule, able to focus exclusively on that brief or client relationship. This just isn’t true of most women with families today. I have an incredible partner who is very hands on, but the mental load is on me, and it takes effort to compartmentalise that when I step into the office.
But the dropped balls are the toughest. These range from “yay, kids! Cornflakes for dinner again” right through to missed parent teacher interviews, meeting conflicts with school assemblies and birthday party present fails. Honestly, is there anything worse than that feeling in the pit of your stomach when you’ve let your child down? That heartbreaking moment when those big eyes look up at you and fill with tears as they say “it’s okay”. Talking to friends, I know I’m not alone.
So we’ve identified and named this invisible problem that causes many of us so much frustration and pain. The world has been talking about this since 2017. How are we progressing? We aren’t.
Gender equality went backward during Covid-19 as decades of progress on the work and home front were reversed. Talk of mental load during the pandemic evaporated. In Australia, women were more likely to lose their jobs, more likely to do a lot more unpaid work, and less likely to get government support than support than men (3). In a small silver lining, Covid gave us remote working and made the very private issue of the division of domestic labour a public concern.
As of 2023, we’ve recovered to pre-pandemic gender gap levels with the weight of invisible labour as persistent as ever. Even in the most forward-thinking households, where couples split chores pretty evenly, it tends to be women who shoulder the majority of the mental workload — and that has a significant impact. The Skimm’s State of Women Report paints a bleak picture of what we’re up against, revealing that 73% of millennial women feel overwhelmed by the responsibilities of parenthood (4).
"Women are recognising that they still hold the mental burden of the household even if others share in the physical work, and that mental burden takes a toll." – Lucia Ciciolla, Ph.D., psychologist at Oklahoma State University
Where to from here?
At the current rate, it will take Australia 189 years to achieve gender equality. To accelerate this, we need more women in leadership; leadership requires career progression, and that is simply much harder for women bearing all the mental load of a family. This is certainly the case in the marketing and communications industry. Advertising is about thinking, solving problems, and breaking through barriers – and that’s more challenging without clear headspace.Women still want to reach the top; it’s just much harder to do when they’re juggling so many different tasks at home.
“Women have been forced to confront several realities: that society (and often their male partners) ultimately view them as default, unpaid caretakers, regardless of their professional achievements, earnings, or identities outside of family roles; that their health, mental and physical, is not anyone’s priority; and that any equity women gain can be reversed. In other words, women are on their own.” – The Skimm, State of Women Report, 2023
The irony is that most men want to help and are much more involved than the generation before – they’re ready and willing to be part of an equal home dynamic but they don’t know how. And neither do most of us women. We’re all battling deeply ingrained gender stereotypes, and we know we need help with this.
The first step is conversation – making the load visible in your home. Most advice is to then divide and conquer between partners and there are techniques and analog tools out there, like Eve Rodsky’s Fair Play, that are very helpful. But as I waded through the issue, while managing the umpteenth sports registration and after training pickups conflicting with zoom meetings, it struck me… where is the tech to help us manage this? Annabel Crabb was right when she wrote about the The Wife Drought but there isn’t a WiFi drought! So why aren’t we solving some of this with tech? Surely AI can help shift the load?
Unless there’s a drastic shift, women working and doing the bulk of unpaid labour at home is likely to continue – as are the negative effects on their mental health and wellbeing. – Jennifer Ervin and Dr Tania King, University of Melbourne
Despite searching I’ve found nothing that really helps manage the load. Plenty of calendar based organisers but that hasn’t put a dent in it. Perhaps this gap could be attributed to gender-biased innovation. The vast majority of tech founders are male, and naturally, they tend to focus on solving problems that primarily affect men.
I came to a stark realisation that help isn’t coming. Women have to solve this. And so with my amazing, also overloaded sister, we’re working on it.
Together, a creative and a former suit turned tech founder, we are crafting a solution to help lighten the mental load. Rest assured, our approach doesn't exclude or absolve men; instead, we aim to leverage technology to lighten the load for everyone. Our goal is to enable equal opportunities, allowing us all to get on with doing other things
The technology we're developing is called Gether, currently in the prototyping stage. Our aim is to share a beta version later this year. The journey of creating utility that will genuinely benefit women has already been incredibly rewarding. We recently conducted a survey of mums worldwide, with school-aged kids, and an impressive 84% of them were interested in a digital solution to ease their mental load management. The anecdotal responses we received, filled with encouragement, heartbreak and hope were beyond anything we’d imagined. The demand is real and promising.
It's important to recognise that this is just one of the many challenges women face, and for women of colour and the LGBTQ+ community there is a broader landscape of inequality that needs attention.
Gether isn’t the only solution to easing your mental load, nor is it a silver bullet, but we firmly believe that women collaborating to develop and support tech innovations can lead to significant positive change. Together, we can move the needle forward and make the juggle a little easier for us all.
For more info and to watch Gether unfold, visit our website gether.life or follow on socials @gether.life
References
(1) Australian Institute of Family Studies, 2021. 78 per cent of households in the sample responded that the mental load was “always or usually” carried by the mother.
(2) The Pew Research Center USA: Social Trends Report, 2023.
(3) The Grattan Institute, Women’s work: The impact of the COVID crisis on Australian women, 2021.
(4) The Skimm & The Harris Poll USA, State of Women Report, 2023.
Comic artwork: “The Mental Load: A Feminist Comic” by Emma, 2017.
About Claire Waring
Claire is a tech-optimist with over twenty years’ international experience leading creative teams and championing powerful experiences. She’s held Executive Creative Director roles for R/GA, Publicis.Sapient and leadership roles with TBWA and Saatchi & Saatchi. Claire believes magic is made at the intersection of human insight, imagination and tech. She’s obsessed with interactive behaviour, immersive experiences and creating innovations that establish meaningful connections between people and brands. Her work has been recognised at Cannes Lions, Spikes Asia, Adfest, OneShow, Effies and more. Claire is based in Sydney with her partner, two kiddos, misbehaving cavoodle and a slight obsession with cheese.
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