Sharing the load at home

Cognitive labour as a distinct kind of housework

In a 2019 article in the American Sociological Review, the sociologist Allison Daminger argued that household labour is usually described as physical tasks such as cooking, cleaning and shopping, while the management of those tasks is mentioned only in passing. Using 70 in-depth interviews with members of 35 couples, she proposed that this management is better understood as a separate dimension of housework, which she called cognitive labour. According to the abstract, it involves four parts: anticipating needs, identifying options for meeting them, making decisions, and monitoring progress.^[1]

The study reports that this work is taxing but often invisible, both to the person doing it and to their partner, and that it is a frequent source of conflict for couples. Women in the study did more cognitive labour overall, and more of the anticipation and monitoring in particular. Participation in decision-making, which the author describes as the component most closely linked to power and influence, was roughly equal between men and women. An interview study of this size describes patterns among a small group of people. It does not measure how common those patterns are in a whole population.^[1]

The mental load as a wider concept

A later review by Dean, Churchill and Ruppanner, published in Community, Work & Family, uses the term mental load. The authors synthesise existing literature to argue that the mental load is a combination of cognitive and emotional labour, and that it is this combination that makes the mental work a load. They describe three characteristics: it is invisible, because it is carried out internally even though it produces unpaid physical work; it is boundaryless, because it can be brought into work, leisure and sleep time; and it is enduring, because caring for loved ones is never finished.^[2]

The review is a synthesis of earlier studies rather than a new data set, and its authors say the problem needs better measurement. They recommend that questions about the mental load become standard in health and social surveys, that employers adopt policies allowing better reconciliation of work and life, and that governments treat caregiving as vital infrastructure. The fact that measurement is still being called for is a reminder that figures on the mental load are less settled than figures on hours of paid or unpaid work.^[2]

What time-use surveys show about unpaid care

The International Labour Organization drew on time-use survey data from 64 countries, representing 66.9 per cent of the world's working-age population, in a 2018 report on care work. It estimated that 16.4 billion hours are spent every day on unpaid care work, and that women perform 76.2 per cent of the total hours. Women spent on average 4 hours and 25 minutes a day on unpaid care work, against 1 hour and 23 minutes for men, which the report describes as 3.2 times more. It states that in no country in the world do men and women provide an equal share.^[3]

The report adds that women spent more time than men on unpaid care in every region, ranging from 1.7 times more in the Americas to 4.7 times in the Arab States. When paid work and unpaid care are added together, the average working day was longer for women, at 7 hours 28 minutes, than for men, at 6 hours 44 minutes. These are averages across countries and years, so they say little about a given household. The ILO treats paid domestic workers as part of the paid care workforce, separate from unpaid carers, so the unpaid figures above do not describe work done by employed helpers.^[3]

Shared calendars and family coordination

Research on technology in family life has looked at how households actually coordinate. Neustaedter, Brush and Greenberg report findings from studies of 44 families' calendaring routines, published in 2009 in ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction. They describe a typology of calendars used by three kinds of family, called monocentric, pericentric and polycentric, which vary in the level of family involvement in the calendaring process. They also describe the content of family calendars and the ways families extend them through annotations and augmentations.^[4]

The abstract frames its conclusions as implications for design, not as measured outcomes, and the study was published more than fifteen years ago, so family technology has changed since. None of the sources read for this page tests whether adopting a shared calendar or task tool changes who anticipates needs, who decides, or who monitors progress. That question remains open in the evidence reviewed here, and claims that a particular tool rebalances household work should be treated with caution.^[4][1]

Limits of the evidence

The sources differ in what they measure. The ILO figures count hours of unpaid care work from time-use surveys, Daminger's study examines the thinking that organises household tasks through interviews, and the mental load review adds emotional labour as a further element. These measures overlap but are not interchangeable, and a household could appear equal on one and unequal on another.^[1][2][3]

None of the studies cited here set out to describe households in the Gulf that employ domestic help, where some physical and organising work may be done by a paid employee. The ILO notes that domestic workers form part of the care workforce, and the UAE rules that apply to their employment are covered on a separate page in this section. Readers should treat the findings as background on how household work is divided in general, not as a description of any specific home.^[3]

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