What’s on Her Mind

"Women spend nearly twice as much time on housework and childcare as their male counterparts. But more shocking than that calculation is the reality that that is in fact an underestimate of the true gender gap. Bear with me here; this is best illustrated with an example. Jon and Amy are a proudly egalitarian couple. Both work full-time and they've made it a priority to share the load at home: Jon cooks and Amy cleans; Amy drops the kids off at school and Jon picks them up. But while Jon and Amy appear to spend similar amounts of their time on childcare and housework, their domestic responsibilities occupy different amounts of their mind. Jon prepares dinner, but Amy decides what he should make and ensures that the necessary ingredients are on hand. Jon and Amy share responsibility for transporting their kids, but it's Amy who organizes the extracurricular activities and manages the schedules and finds a back-up driver when scheduling conflicts arise. In this book, Allison Daminger introduces readers to the idea of cognitive labor, a form of work akin to project management and demonstrates that this invisible burden falls disproportionately on women. In the pages of both glossy magazines and sober academic journals, household contributions are primarily measured in minutes and documented through time-use diaries. But Daminger argues that we must consider mind-use alongside time-use; the work of constantly anticipating children's needs, for example, cannot be adequately captured on a time diary. Yet such cognitive labor is a ubiquitous feature of family life, and it represents a burden disproportionately borne by women in different-gender couples-even when those couples aspire to equality. What's On Her Mind provides new language and conceptual tools for readers who may be struggling to understand why they and their partner have wildly divergent experiences of parenting and household life. Yet the book moves beyond mere description to show how cognitive labor inequality emerges in the first place and what forces sustain it"--