{"id":2530,"date":"2024-12-16T11:20:57","date_gmt":"2024-12-16T11:20:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/iprblog\/?p=2530"},"modified":"2024-12-16T11:20:57","modified_gmt":"2024-12-16T11:20:57","slug":"do-mothers-do-more-of-the-mental-load-gender-divisions-in-daily-and-episodic-cognitive-household-work","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/iprblog\/2024\/12\/16\/do-mothers-do-more-of-the-mental-load-gender-divisions-in-daily-and-episodic-cognitive-household-work\/","title":{"rendered":"Do Mothers Do More of the \u201cMental Load\u201d? Gender Divisions in Daily and Episodic Cognitive Household Work"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dr. Ana Catalano Weeks<\/a> is a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in the Department of Politics, Languages & International Studies at the University of Bath. Her research focuses on the causes and consequences of women\u2019s inclusion in political life.<\/em><\/p>\n

Tis the season\u2026 to talk about the \u201cmental load!\u201d If you are feeling overwhelmed trying to juggle all of the holiday admin needed to create magical memories, you\u2019ve come to the right place. In our recent study<\/a>, we investigated patterns of cognitive household labor \u2013 the mental work of anticipating, identifying, and monitoring household needs \u2013 among a sample of 3,000 U.S. parents. Ours is the first quantitative study of different dimensions of cognitive household labor on a large sample selected to be representative of the US population of parents with regards to age, race\/ethnicity, gender, and education.<\/p>\n

Here are four key takeaways:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Yes, mothers carry more of the mental load. Overall, mothers report being mostly responsible for 71% of the 21 mental load tasks we asked about. This is 60 percent more than fathers\u2019 reported mental load (45%).<\/li>\n
  2. There are important differences in the types of mental load that mothers and fathers do. In our study, we argue and find that performing mental load tasks can be a form of \u201cdoing gender\u201d in the family \u2013 that is, a way of upholding traditional societal expectations about how men and women should act. Mothers perform the vast majority of daily mental load tasks related to cleaning, scheduling, childcare, social relationships and food: mothers report being responsible for 79% of these tasks, a figure which is more than double fathers\u2019 37%. Fathers, conversely, perform the majority of episodic mental load work related to finances and home maintenance (65%) although mothers also report doing a majority of this work (53%). This means this episodic mental work is likely being duplicated within families.\n

    \"\"<\/a>
    Figure:<\/strong> Gender Differences in Daily and Episodic Domestic Cognitive Labor among US Parents (Density Plots). Note:<\/em> The plots show the distribution of responses from mothers (blue) and fathers (red). Vertical lines show means for mothers and fathers.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/li>\n
  3. Further, we find that both mothers and fathers tend to overestimate their contribution to household mental load, and fathers much more so than mothers. We measured this by analysing participants\u2019 responses to a question asking them to estimate the total share of mental load in their household they personally do, in contrast to responses on specific tasks. Fathers are also more likely to view this work as shared, compared to mothers. This suggests that there is a disconnect between partners in heterosexual, dual-parent households, where men might not be seeing the (invisible) work of their partners.<\/li>\n
  4. These findings about two different \u2013 daily and episodic \u2013 patterns of mental load look very different among single parents. For single parents, we find that both mothers and fathers are doing it all. When a second parent is absent, fathers especially do far more mental load work compared to the partnered counterparts.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    How can we increase gender equality in this often hidden type of household work? A first step is raising awareness about it, because this work goes on in our heads and is thus often invisible. We hope our study sparks conversations about how to make this work more visible and share it fairly. This matters because cognitive overload may cause stress, unhappiness, marital strain.<\/p>\n

    The gender divide in the mental load also has implications for women\u2019s presence in public life, such as the workplace or even as political leaders. For example, a recent study <\/a>by Gallup shows that working mothers are twice as likely to consider reducing their hours or leaving their jobs due to parental responsibilities, compared to working fathers\u00a0 \u2013 and the mental load is very much part of this. Going forward, the challenge for governments and employers who care about attracting the top talent is how to create policies that are supportive of both mothers and fathers sharing the unpaid work at home.<\/p>\n

    All articles posted on this blog give the views of the author(s), and not the position of the IPR, nor of the University of Bath.<\/em><\/p>\n

     <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Dr. Ana Catalano Weeks is a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in the Department of Politics, Languages & International Studies at the University of Bath. Her research focuses on the causes and consequences of women\u2019s inclusion in political life. Tis the...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1742,"featured_media":2532,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[128,108,116,129,131],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2530","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-labour-market","category-culture-and-policy","category-evidence-and-policymaking","category-uk-politics","category-welfare-and-social-security"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/iprblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/115\/2024\/12\/Blog-Images-5.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/iprblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2530","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/iprblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/iprblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/iprblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1742"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/iprblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2530"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/iprblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2530\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/iprblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2532"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/iprblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2530"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/iprblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2530"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/iprblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2530"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}