Speaker 1: Hello Sunshine, Hey fam Today on the bright Side.
Speaker 2: If you've ever had a disagreement with your spouse about
Speaker 2: who does more around the house, this is the episode
Speaker 2: for you. We're joined by New York Times best selling
Speaker 2: author Eve Rodsky, and she's out with brand new research
Speaker 2: revealing the facts about cognitive labor in the household and
Speaker 2: how you can have more effective conversations to find the
Speaker 2: equilibrium you need. It's Wednesday, September eighteenth. I'm Simone Boyce.
Speaker 3: I'm Danielle Robe and this is the bright Side from
Speaker 3: Hello Sunshine, a daily show where we come together to
Speaker 3: share women's stories, laugh, learn and brighten your day.
Speaker 2: Today's Wellness Wednesday is presented by Coliguard.
Speaker 4: Listen.
Speaker 2: I know I can speak for all of us when
Speaker 2: I say we've all been in situations where the work
Speaker 2: of running a household has felt a bit unbalanced. I
Speaker 2: don't care whether you're married, whether you're living with a boyfriend, girlfriend,
Speaker 2: even siblings and roommates. You know, conversations about sharing household
Speaker 2: duties can get so tricky to navigate. Well, today we're
Speaker 2: getting into all of it, and we've got the best
Speaker 2: voice on this topic in the house with us today.
Speaker 2: Eve Rodsky is an organizational management expert and the New
Speaker 2: York Times bestselling author of fair Play, as well as
Speaker 2: Find Your Unicorn Space Reclaim Your Creative Life in a
Speaker 2: Too Busy World. I've loved both of her books and
Speaker 2: they've been so helpful for me in my own life
Speaker 2: as a mom and a wife. And Eve is also
Speaker 2: part of the Hello Sunshine fan so you know we
Speaker 2: love that.
Speaker 1: Yes she is.
Speaker 3: I don't say this often, but Eve's book changed my life,
Speaker 3: and we'll get into that a little bit later. But
Speaker 3: in terms of equality on the home front, here's the thing.
Speaker 3: Gloria Steinem has always said that women will not be
Speaker 3: equal until men do equal work at home. And to me,
Speaker 3: that's what Eve's book, her first book, fair Play, is
Speaker 3: all about. It's geared toward women who are taking on
Speaker 3: the brunt of domestic work, feeling overlooked, overwhelmed, possibly resentful
Speaker 3: at their partner. And I think, just like all of
Speaker 3: the best books and movements, it starts with one person
Speaker 3: saying I've had enough, and that's how Eves started. Because
Speaker 3: women do two thirds of what it takes to run
Speaker 3: a home and a family, and that was pre pandemic.
Speaker 3: So I know how this shows up in my life.
Speaker 3: I'm not married or partnered, and when I read her book,
Speaker 3: I had a lot of anxiety about eventually being partnered because.
Speaker 1: I saw my mom do so much.
Speaker 3: She worked full time, and she did almost all of
Speaker 3: the household tasks, and she worked out, and she took
Speaker 3: care of us, and she was a friend and a wife,
Speaker 3: and I never understood how she did it all, and
Speaker 3: I didn't want to do it all.
Speaker 1: I don't have the same energy she has.
Speaker 3: And so I picked up Eve's book for the first
Speaker 3: time to try to figure that out, and it really
Speaker 3: helped it ease my anxiety.
Speaker 1: It made me feel like there was a way forward.
Speaker 2: Well, when I think about the landscape of parenting today
Speaker 2: and marriage today, I am really encouraged by the research
Speaker 2: that shows that millennial fathers are more involved than previous
Speaker 2: generations before them. And I really think we have Eve
Speaker 2: and voices like hers to thank for where we are
Speaker 2: right now. And I mean, I can see this showing
Speaker 2: up in my own home. My husband and I try
Speaker 2: to take a pretty egalitarian approach to parenting, childcare, labor
Speaker 2: around the house, and you know, we do try to
Speaker 2: divide things up evenly, and we also each still have
Speaker 2: our chores that we do. I think that we've found
Speaker 2: a system that really works well for us.
Speaker 1: Wait, I want details, Simone.
Speaker 3: What do you mean, like are you in charge of
Speaker 3: dishes and trash or like how do you divide this?
Speaker 4: No, I draw the line at trash.
Speaker 2: The feminist leaves my body whenever there's a full trash
Speaker 2: can around. So Michael does trash, but I do most
Speaker 2: of the cooking, and then he'll do laundry. And then
Speaker 2: you know, I'll do stuff like organizational tasks around the house,
Speaker 2: or I do a lot of DIY projects, building furniture,
Speaker 2: et cetera.
Speaker 3: Who makes the doctor's appointments and like the all the
Speaker 3: school emails.
Speaker 4: We kind of share that.
Speaker 2: We share that and then to be really transparent, we
Speaker 2: don't have this like perfectly ironed out system. Our way
Speaker 2: of doing things is a lot more intuitive. So if
Speaker 2: I've got free time and I'm able to step up,
Speaker 2: you know, the school pickup and drop off that week,
Speaker 2: I'm going to do that, and I'm gonna let Michael, you.
Speaker 4: Know, rest a little bit.
Speaker 2: If let's say, you know, one of us is really
Speaker 2: tired at night, and we don't have the energy to
Speaker 2: do the bedtime routine.
Speaker 4: Then the other person will step in.
Speaker 2: Brenee Brown has a really great illustration of this, where
Speaker 2: her and her husband will just be truly candid with
Speaker 2: one another and be like, hey, I'm at twenty percent
Speaker 2: right now, if you're if you're anywhere above that, I
Speaker 2: need you to do bed done tonight because you know
Speaker 2: I'm on the verge. So I think we try to
Speaker 2: approach it in that way, just with a lot of grace.
Speaker 2: And I think a big thing too, is like anticipating needs,
Speaker 2: which I can always get better at.
Speaker 3: Well, I'm actually kind of shocked to hear that your
Speaker 3: household has run so egalitarian, because most of my girlfriends
Speaker 3: complain about this, and it's like, no matter how helpful
Speaker 3: or nice their husbands are, they feel like the mental
Speaker 3: load ends up falling on them, and so they'll like,
Speaker 3: you know, the husband pitches in and drives kids or
Speaker 3: does dishes, et cetera. But at the end of the day,
Speaker 3: like my girlfriends are the ones being like, hey, did
Speaker 3: you make the doctor appointments?
Speaker 1: I can cross it off my list, Hey did you
Speaker 1: do this?
Speaker 3: And there's still that like cognitive load really that exists that.
Speaker 1: I just don't know how we release that. That's what
Speaker 1: Eve is here for.
Speaker 2: I also think, though, it's on the women that you're
Speaker 2: speaking about to make the choice to not do everything.
Speaker 2: Like I had to make a decision when my first
Speaker 2: son was like a year and a half probably, and
Speaker 2: let's say I was going out of town for the
Speaker 2: longest time. I would spend a ton of extra time
Speaker 2: prepping meals for when he was gone, just really going
Speaker 2: above and beyond to make sure that Michael's job was
Speaker 2: extremely easy and seamless while I was gone. But then
Speaker 2: I started to realize, wait, I don't know that I
Speaker 2: need to be doing this, Like he's fully capable of
Speaker 2: handling feeding the baby, dressing the baby, making sure that
Speaker 2: the baby has everything it needs. So I do think
Speaker 2: that it is partly on us to say, you know what,
Speaker 2: here's where I'm going to draw my line, here's my boundary,
Speaker 2: and let's have a conversation about where I feel like
Speaker 2: I need more support.
Speaker 3: I'm actually really excited to talk to Eve today because
Speaker 3: she has new research out.
Speaker 4: We love new research.
Speaker 3: Let's bring her in. Eve Radsky, Welcome to the bright Side.
Speaker 1: Hi guys, so good to see you.
Speaker 2: Eve.
Speaker 1: We've been wanting you to come on this show since it.
Speaker 4: Launched, since the beginning.
Speaker 5: Ah well, I've really really enjoyed listening to you and
Speaker 5: your chemistry.
Speaker 4: You.
Speaker 5: My secret is that I and the rest of the
Speaker 5: guests are probably the least important piece of this because
Speaker 5: actually your banter is like my favorite part.
Speaker 4: Oh, Eve, thank you so much.
Speaker 1: That's super sweet.
Speaker 4: That's really nice to hear.
Speaker 2: Okay, well, speaking of banter, we were actually just talking
Speaker 2: about our experience of the division of labor in our
Speaker 2: own lives and what we've observed as both daughters and
Speaker 2: then for me as a wife and a mother, Your books,
Speaker 2: your card game.
Speaker 1: It all started with a pack of blueberries.
Speaker 4: Yes, did what happened with the blueberries?
Speaker 5: Thank you for letting me go back, because it does
Speaker 5: feel like a before and after moment in sort of
Speaker 5: the arc of my life. But my husband Seth sent
Speaker 5: me a text that's just said, I'm surprised you didn't
Speaker 5: get blueberries. Let's picture the scene of what the context
Speaker 5: was when I got this. I'm surprised you didn't get
Speaker 5: Blueberry's text. I had a newborn baby at home and
Speaker 5: a toddler and a toddler transition program say that five
Speaker 5: times vast, and I was racing to get that toddler
Speaker 5: when I got that text. Also, I had a breast
Speaker 5: pump and a diaper bag in the passenger seat in
Speaker 5: my car. I gifts for a newborn baby in the
Speaker 5: backseat of my car. I had a client contract in
Speaker 5: my lap because I'd started my own law firm, because
Speaker 5: I had just recently been forced out of the corporate
Speaker 5: workforce by requesting a place of breastfeed and being told
Speaker 5: that I would have to breastfeed in a supply closet
Speaker 5: and bring my own battery pack if I wanted to
Speaker 5: do so.
Speaker 4: So I left.
Speaker 5: Now I say it was forced out so the context
Speaker 5: of being abandoned by my job and then feeling so
Speaker 5: isolated and alone when this world of tasks which I
Speaker 5: now call I call myself sort of the she fault,
Speaker 5: not just the default, for all the unpaid domestic labor
Speaker 5: that we do for our families to care for them,
Speaker 5: like return the gifts in the backseat for the newborn
Speaker 5: baby and feed up the newborn and try to maintain
Speaker 5: a career. I pulled over, and I was late to
Speaker 5: pick up Zach that day. Because I just started sobbing.
Speaker 5: I started sobbing on the side of the road, thinking
Speaker 5: to myself, you know, how had I become basically the
Speaker 5: fulfiller of his smoothie needs? That's how I felt, and
Speaker 5: every other domestic tasks I said for our family. And
Speaker 5: so I think what I realize Simon and Danielle was
Speaker 5: that I was living a statistic that I didn't even
Speaker 5: know at the time, which was that women in partnerships
Speaker 5: with men shoulder two thirds or more of what it
Speaker 5: takes to run a home and family. And that statistic
Speaker 5: gets worse as women make more money. So we know
Speaker 5: it's a gender issue and not a monetary issue. And
Speaker 5: I guess if I wish my feeling for back then
Speaker 5: is if I had known that, I feel like that day.
Speaker 1: Would have gone a lot differently.
Speaker 5: And so I never really wanted women to feel that
Speaker 5: type of isolation and blame and shame.
Speaker 1: That I felt that day.
Speaker 5: Wow, And it turned out that the thing that was
Speaker 5: happening to me that day and the side of the
Speaker 5: road had a name we called the second shift invisible work.
Speaker 5: There's all these different terms for you know, sociologists who've
Speaker 5: called this out, and I give them a big, you know,
Speaker 5: shout out for recognizing that this has been an issue
Speaker 5: for women since basically in the Industrial Revolution. And so
Speaker 5: for me it was an idea of how could I
Speaker 5: look at the home the way I did my work,
Speaker 5: which was that the home was an organization. And so
Speaker 5: if you look at it that way, that the home
Speaker 5: is an organization, your most important organization. I know for
Speaker 5: both of you that if I came into your office
Speaker 5: and you hired me, and I said, Hey, Simon, what
Speaker 5: should I be doing today, I'm just going to wait
Speaker 5: here to tell me what to do. Hey Danielle, it's
Speaker 5: day two. Thank you for hiring me. So what should
Speaker 5: I be doing today? I'm just going to wait here
Speaker 5: till you tell me what to do. Right, I probably
Speaker 5: wouldn't be here on day three for both of you,
Speaker 5: and so I just didn't understand how we laugh at that.
Speaker 1: Right, we have.
Speaker 5: Literally zero expectations of what's going to happen in our homes.
Speaker 5: And so once I wrote that on a post it
Speaker 5: that the home is an organization, I'm an expert in
Speaker 5: organizational management, so I figured, how great is this? All
Speaker 5: you have to do is connect what we've learned for
Speaker 5: fifty years, put it in a book, in a card game,
Speaker 5: and then the problem is solved. And I don't think
Speaker 5: I realized how complicated it was going to be until
Speaker 5: I've launched fair Play into the world.
Speaker 1: How so.
Speaker 5: Well, I think the biggest reason is because unpaid labor,
Speaker 5: domestic labor, is actually tied up in patriarchal notions of
Speaker 5: what women should be doing. And we've been trying to
Speaker 5: put women back into the home. Really, men have been
Speaker 5: trying to put women back into the home in every
Speaker 5: country since the beginning of time.
Speaker 1: I mean, to be honest, that's what religion is.
Speaker 2: Honestly, I get it, Like I get why they're threatened
Speaker 2: by us.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I get it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we're amazing and we're powerful and strong, and so
Speaker 2: like I got it safer for us to be in
Speaker 2: the kitchen and not out here and messing stuff up.
Speaker 4: For you, that's right.
Speaker 5: And so we see this rhetoric, right, lack of access
Speaker 5: to birth control and other things that make it harder
Speaker 5: for women to compete. So I don't think I understood
Speaker 5: that fair Play would be the torch bearer of that
Speaker 5: piece of the patriarchy. And I think the hardest part
Speaker 5: Danielle was that we have to come to a reckoning
Speaker 5: about all of us and how we've been conditioned before
Speaker 5: we can even go to the beautiful tools of fair play.
Speaker 5: The bottom line reckoning is that in a patriarchal society,
Speaker 5: women's time is viewed as infinite like sand, and men's
Speaker 5: time is viewed as finite like diamonds. And there's some
Speaker 5: listeners out there that don't believe me. Just watch what
Speaker 5: happens when women enter a male profession. What happens is
Speaker 5: that the salaries automatically come down. What happens when health systems,
Speaker 5: even in twenty twenty four, have brochures that say things
Speaker 5: like breastfeeding is free even though it's eighteen hundred hours
Speaker 5: of a women's time. So what happens when you've conditioned
Speaker 5: women to believe that there are time's infinite, women start
Speaker 5: to say things that are complicit in their own oppression.
Speaker 1: That was the most revolutionary part of the book for me.
Speaker 3: I didn't realize how much of this I had internalized,
Speaker 3: and it's messed up.
Speaker 5: And this is why this is relevant to people. Even
Speaker 5: if you're not in caregiving relationships at the moment, or
Speaker 5: you don't have children, because we all, whether it's in
Speaker 5: our workplace, whether we're the eldest daughter, we've been conditioned
Speaker 5: to believe our time is infinite. So here's a spoiler alert.
Speaker 5: We can't find time. We're not Albert Einstein. We can't
Speaker 5: fuck with the space time continuum. When we start to
Speaker 5: say things like that, well, I'll just do it. It's
Speaker 5: easier for me to do it. I'll find the time.
Speaker 5: What happens is that we continue to be in a
Speaker 5: place where we devalue our own time. That's why it's
Speaker 5: a movement. Because to even get people to the tools
Speaker 5: which work, and we'll talk about that the studies that
Speaker 5: we've done to show that fair play works, we need
Speaker 5: to look at ourselves first and say, how are we
Speaker 5: going to protect our own time and really truly believe,
Speaker 5: without guilt and shame that our time is diamonds.
Speaker 4: This is huge.
Speaker 2: I told Danielle this earlier that I had to make
Speaker 2: a shift in how I handled going out of town
Speaker 2: and in trusting my husband with the kids. When I
Speaker 2: was earlier on in my motherhood journey, I would pull.
Speaker 4: Out all the stops.
Speaker 2: I'd be puring the baby food, it in the silicone
Speaker 2: mold in the freezer. I'd be labeling stuff, I'd be
Speaker 2: picking out outfits everything. I'd run myself ragged just so
Speaker 2: that I could make his job easier. And then I realized,
Speaker 2: like you're saying, I had to look at myself and say,
Speaker 2: how is my behavior facilitating this like lack of equality
Speaker 2: in my home? And once I stopped handholding him, he
Speaker 2: got it. He's fine, He's fully capable.
Speaker 5: First of all, thank you for having that realization. It
Speaker 5: still makes me tear up because it's a painful realization
Speaker 5: to realize that we are, you know, people, actors in
Speaker 5: a system that may not benefit us.
Speaker 1: I think it's incredibly painful.
Speaker 5: And again, I think it leads us down these wrong paths,
Speaker 5: right having like conversations about what's better to be a
Speaker 5: working mom as at oh mom, what's better to do this?
Speaker 5: Or that we just go down these paths that actually
Speaker 5: don't serve us. And so I think if we can
Speaker 5: always just come back to this core notion that we're
Speaker 5: human and that our time as diamonds, it really does
Speaker 5: change everything. But that's why I need you, Danielle and
Speaker 5: Simone and platforms like this to be talking openly and
Speaker 5: honestly about how hard these issues are, because otherwise women
Speaker 5: internalize quote unquote their failures for not being able to
Speaker 5: do it all as internal individualistic problem, when ultimately the
Speaker 5: fair play movement is understanding that, yes, we can change
Speaker 5: things in our home, and I can give you.
Speaker 1: Those tools to do that, and you'll be a cultural
Speaker 1: warrior if you do.
Speaker 5: But also what we're doing is we're going to have
Speaker 5: to also go out there and fight people and the
Speaker 5: policies that want us to stay in the home.
Speaker 4: It's time for a quick break, but don't go anywhere.
Speaker 2: We'll be right back with Ev Rodsky. And we're back
Speaker 2: with New York Times bestselling author Eve Rodsky. We have
Speaker 2: seen over the course of the past couple of years
Speaker 2: this culture were emerging on social media that pits working
Speaker 2: mothers against tradwives. And I'm really interested to hear your
Speaker 2: take on the resurgence of tradwives in this whole movement.
Speaker 2: And I want to do this delicately because I never
Speaker 2: want to add to that animosity that exists between those
Speaker 2: two groups. I want all of us to embrace our
Speaker 2: choices as mothers and wives and support each other in
Speaker 2: those choices. But I also am curious, like, do you
Speaker 2: feel like the tradwife movement is antithetical to the work
Speaker 2: that you're doing and have done over the past five years.
Speaker 5: Okay, so ultimately fair plays. We've now interviewed tens of
Speaker 5: thousands of people for our data. But what we found
Speaker 5: in the beginning, when I was really digging deep into
Speaker 5: making this more than just an observation about blueberries and
Speaker 5: into what's actually happening to me, was that there were
Speaker 5: a couple of different personality types. There was the intentional traditionalist.
Speaker 5: So what an intentional traditionalist is what I would describe
Speaker 5: as a trad wife or a trad relationship. Those are
Speaker 5: people who are often governed by some version of God
Speaker 5: who tells them you're the helpmate, He's the leader. It's
Speaker 5: often relationships between men and women that you don't see
Speaker 5: a lot of a talk and discourse about, like say
Speaker 5: polyamorous relationships or LGBTQIA couples. We found over time that
Speaker 5: those relationships are actually more stable than the relationships for
Speaker 5: the accidental traditionalists. So I was an accidental traditionalist. I
Speaker 5: was somebody who told Elizabeth Warren And at Harvard Law
Speaker 5: School when she was a professor there before she was
Speaker 5: a senator that I was going to be simone president
Speaker 5: of the United States and a senator from New York
Speaker 5: and a Ni City dancer all at the same time.
Speaker 5: I genuinely said that that was the enthusiasm that I said,
Speaker 5: that's what I was going to do with my law degree.
Speaker 5: So that was me at twenty four. I was smashing
Speaker 5: all these glass ceilings right one after one. And if
Speaker 5: you cut to my life ten years later, what you
Speaker 5: saw that, as I described, the only thing I was
Speaker 5: really smashing, you know, was like peace from my toddler,
Speaker 5: Zach understand, you know, trying to say what happened to
Speaker 5: my career? Who did I marry? This is not the
Speaker 5: life that I thought I would have. I'm a parent,
Speaker 5: I'm a partner, I'm a professional and repeat, but I
Speaker 5: don't even know who I am anymore. I wear my
Speaker 5: kids fucking initials around my neck. I wear Zach on
Speaker 5: my neck like I'm Eve, Like I don't even know
Speaker 5: how to even put on my own jewelry with my
Speaker 5: name on it. But we see over time that those
Speaker 5: are the relationships that are at least stable, where women
Speaker 5: do not get what they expected, where they say to me,
Speaker 5: I had a very feminist husband who supported my career,
Speaker 5: and then he's texting me that I'm the fulfiller of
Speaker 5: his smoothie needs, so seth and my relationship is considered
Speaker 5: the most unstable. When a woman will say I'm an
Speaker 5: accidental traditionalist and I gave up my career unintentionally because
Speaker 5: day care was too expensive or because my partner's career
Speaker 5: we had to move, those women end up reporting in
Speaker 5: our studies the most unhappiness. And then there's the people
Speaker 5: who are trying that, the collaborators who really do care,
Speaker 5: and who men who believe, Look, your time is diamonds,
Speaker 5: and I care about that. I'm just sorry. I thought
Speaker 5: asking you for a list was the way you wanted
Speaker 5: me to help. But now I know I can do
Speaker 5: it on my own, which is similar to how you
Speaker 5: reflected your partnership.
Speaker 4: A little bit earlier.
Speaker 1: That's how I'll look at it from the data.
Speaker 5: The data is that a lot of it's about expectations,
Speaker 5: and a lot of what happens with the traadwise is
Speaker 5: that it looked so nice on social media to be
Speaker 5: able to focus on the home.
Speaker 1: And what I.
Speaker 5: See from these women is that they tell me later on,
Speaker 5: especially when as they get older, that the scariest thing
Speaker 5: for them was how much they lost control, because they
Speaker 5: lost control of any sort of monetary power in their relationship,
Speaker 5: and it can get abusive. So, you know, if you
Speaker 5: take this back to sort of fair play, why it
Speaker 5: felt so subversive for a lot of people was how
Speaker 5: SEF describe. People will say to him, well, how did
Speaker 5: you get to a fair division of labor in your home?
Speaker 5: And he just says to these other men, we'll just
Speaker 5: have you know, your wife write a book about you
Speaker 5: and betray you in a terrible light. It's very hard
Speaker 5: to talk realistically about your relationship, even if you're not
Speaker 5: in a tread wife situation. So even the women who
Speaker 5: I felt were really into fair play, and men too,
Speaker 5: we're always like, I'm using fair play, but I didn't
Speaker 5: really need it.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 5: My husband's wonderful, he's a great guy, you know, but
Speaker 5: we needed a little tweak. I mean, over and over
Speaker 5: again for ten years, and so I would say, tell
Speaker 5: me about your experience with fair play, but I don't
Speaker 5: need to hear how great your husband has.
Speaker 1: Just tell me your experience.
Speaker 5: So I think the shame of talking about any realistic thing.
Speaker 5: We've been able to normalize it in many different ways.
Speaker 5: We normalize it and work for women. We've normalized it
Speaker 5: with periods, we're doing with menopause. But actually the one
Speaker 5: area where I don't think we do it very well
Speaker 5: is actually talking realistically about the labor in our homes
Speaker 5: and so when you don't acknowledge the reality of what
Speaker 5: life is like to actually care for children and TLDR.
Speaker 5: It's fucking hard, so fucking hard take care of a parent,
Speaker 5: a child, a dog. Caretaking is meaningful, but incredibly incredibly difficult.
Speaker 5: The more we get away from that and show these
Speaker 5: people frollicking in fields, the more harm we're doing to women.
Speaker 3: It's time for another short break, but we'll be right
Speaker 3: back with more from Eve Rodsky.
Speaker 1: And we're back with Eve Rodsky.
Speaker 3: Your work pairs qualitative and quantitative research together, which I love.
Speaker 3: And in one of your recent studies you decided to
Speaker 3: go beyond informal surveys and to measure quantitative.
Speaker 5: Yay, Yes, I'm a nerd. This is my favorite thing
Speaker 5: in the world.
Speaker 2: I know.
Speaker 3: I can tell well, there's this graph that stuck out
Speaker 3: to me, and it lists the gender division. Of the
Speaker 3: thirty tasks that you studied, what were the top tasks
Speaker 3: for women versus men?
Speaker 5: Okay, it's very exciting what happened. So I'll just back
Speaker 5: up and say what fair play is. If people are
Speaker 5: still like, what are you actually talking about? What I'm
Speaker 5: talking about is that I designed a system for the
Speaker 5: home based on organizational management. What if we treated our
Speaker 5: homes as the most important organization. If you do that,
Speaker 5: you would use organizational management principles, which basically state you
Speaker 5: don't manage what you don't measure. So my first task
Speaker 5: after the blueberry is like, what was the first thing
Speaker 5: I did? I created this should I do? Spreadsheet that
Speaker 5: sort of went viral before we had social media. It
Speaker 5: was like early Facebook back then, because this was like
Speaker 5: what twenty eleven, we just were getting iPads.
Speaker 1: I love that you called it that.
Speaker 5: Yeah, And so the should I do spreadsheet was an
Speaker 5: Excel sheet that had ninety eight tabs on the bottom
Speaker 5: of it and about two thousand items total of invisible
Speaker 5: work because you know, you can do a subtab, so
Speaker 5: it would be like medical and healthy living, and then
Speaker 5: you'd have like brushing your teeth under the subtab of it,
Speaker 5: and what that did for me was actually one of
Speaker 5: the most important things. It was the first time in
Speaker 5: my life, actually since I had kids, that I didn't
Speaker 5: feel alone because when I had started the spreadsheet and
Speaker 5: started to tell women about the spreadsheet, they started to
Speaker 5: give me more should I do, and so.
Speaker 1: It became like, oh, yeah, I forgot I do that. Yes.
Speaker 5: It was like the most wonderful communal exercise that I
Speaker 5: ever did in my life.
Speaker 1: It was over nine months.
Speaker 5: Anywhere I went, I'd have this like small moleskin and
Speaker 5: a pen in my pocket because if I'd be on
Speaker 5: the costco line, I'd ask women like what unpaid labor
Speaker 5: they do?
Speaker 1: What invisible work they do?
Speaker 5: And it kept on growing, like I'll give you an example,
Speaker 5: like again under Medical and Healthy Living that tab I
Speaker 5: was telling you. One woman said to me, you know, Eve,
Speaker 5: I noticed you put the application of sunscreen to your
Speaker 5: kids on there, and you wrote two minutes, But what
Speaker 5: about the thirty minutes for the chase. I was like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 5: thirty minutes for the chase, right, okay, So I added, oh,
Speaker 5: it's actually thirty two minutes to get sunscreen out here,
Speaker 5: fucking child, or it would be like, oh, I see
Speaker 5: that you have a tab called extracurricular nonsports for your children.
Speaker 5: I see all these things like arts and crafts, but
Speaker 5: where's girl Scout cookies? Ordering in sales? So from that,
Speaker 5: should I do spreadsheet? Ultimately what evolved was a fair
Speaker 5: play system. So this should I do spreadsheet involved into
Speaker 5: one hundred cards. Okay, so why I bring this up
Speaker 5: for the study? We couldn't ask people about all hundred
Speaker 5: tasks and a quantitative study because they'd probably like walk
Speaker 5: out the door by the time we sort of grab them.
Speaker 5: So we asked them about thirty and the thirty we
Speaker 5: decided to choose were the ones that women were reporting
Speaker 5: that women do tasks like they can't do it their
Speaker 5: own timetable.
Speaker 1: So men will, for example, mow the.
Speaker 5: Lawn or repair a garage door, but women are the
Speaker 5: ones picking up a child from school if they're sick.
Speaker 5: So if something interrupts your life, women do it. Some
Speaker 5: men could do on their own timetable they were handling.
Speaker 5: So we decided to look at the thirty tasks that
Speaker 5: we call daily grinds, things that have to be done
Speaker 5: at a certain time aka picking up your child from school.
Speaker 5: You can't feel like it at seven pm, so you know,
Speaker 5: you have to pick up your kids at a certain time.
Speaker 5: You have to take them to a dentist visit every
Speaker 5: six months, you have to someone's sick, Someone has to
Speaker 5: interrupt their job to come caretake for somebody. So those
Speaker 5: types of things were very gender specific. So we decided
Speaker 5: to look at those and I think what was so
Speaker 5: surprising to us was that what wasn't surprising, right, is
Speaker 5: that women's shoulder every single one of these tasks, these
Speaker 5: daily grind tasks, except for garbage.
Speaker 1: But this is the sad part. It was actually shared
Speaker 1: for garbage.
Speaker 5: It wasn't even like a full male task because women
Speaker 5: would still be the one nudging them to put the
Speaker 5: garbage liner back in the garbage. So that was a
Speaker 5: little depressing. But I think this is the core finding
Speaker 5: that I want to explain to you guys, because this
Speaker 5: gets to the fun part of where this is. And
Speaker 5: you're the first to hear about it, by the way,
Speaker 5: so I'm so excited to take it sort of off embargo.
Speaker 5: We did it with USC with amazing in their Department
Speaker 5: of psychology, and what we were able to find was
Speaker 5: that there was a certain fair play concept that was
Speaker 5: missing from most other studies, So that fair play concept
Speaker 5: we call the life changing magic of mustard. So what
Speaker 5: that means is early on in the should I do
Speaker 5: spreadsheet life, I started to ask women because I wasn't
Speaker 5: getting the right data and should I do spreadsheet land?
Speaker 5: When I'd ask women who pick up the kids from school,
Speaker 5: like women married to men, the chiming in would be
Speaker 5: we both do, or like who gets groceries?
Speaker 1: We both do? And I was like, what is this
Speaker 1: Pollyannish like life for everybody?
Speaker 5: When you're telling me you want to divorce your partner,
Speaker 5: but now you're telling me you both do everything like
Speaker 5: It was so confusing to get to the right data set.
Speaker 5: And this actually happened in LGBTQIA couples too, a lot
Speaker 5: of this both we're both doing everything. So to get
Speaker 5: to the actual finding, I started to ask a question
Speaker 5: that changed my life and actually was thank god captured
Speaker 5: in the research and the question was how does mustard
Speaker 5: get in your refrigerator? We found were again women married
Speaker 5: to men were the ones saying that they were the
Speaker 5: ones noticing that their second son, Johnny, likes yellow mustard
Speaker 5: with his protein. Otherwise you won't need it now In
Speaker 5: the organizational management world, we call that conception. People get
Speaker 5: paid big bucks to conceive of things. Then we noticed
Speaker 5: that women were reporting they were the ones monitoring that
Speaker 5: mustard for when it ran low, and they were also
Speaker 5: the ones getting stakeholder buying from their families for what
Speaker 5: they needed on the grocery list. So we were able
Speaker 5: to break out another organizational phase called planning. And then
Speaker 5: the reason why people were saying both ding ding ding
Speaker 5: was because the partner was going to the store to
Speaker 5: pick up the yellow mustard, but he was bringing home
Speaker 5: spicy djon every fucking time. And so then what happened
Speaker 5: was these women were then according to me, well, Eve,
Speaker 5: you want me to trust my partner with my living will,
Speaker 5: this dude can't even bring home the right type of mustard.
Speaker 5: So what we were realizing is that when you break
Speaker 5: up the conception, planning, and execution, that's actually leading to
Speaker 5: an erosion of the organizational foundations, which are accountability and trust,
Speaker 5: and that's become the core concept of fair play. So
Speaker 5: that's what I was trying to test. Is it true
Speaker 5: that women hold and shoulder they cp of the e
Speaker 5: And sadly or happily, it tracked exactly what we found
Speaker 5: ten years ago. Women shoulder the cognitive labor, the conception
Speaker 5: and planning for every single task that we measured, except for,
Speaker 5: like I said, maybe garbage in the home. And that
Speaker 5: is why I believe we are incredibly exhausted because we
Speaker 5: do this as eldest daughters.
Speaker 1: You don't have to have kids to do this. We
Speaker 1: do this in the workplace.
Speaker 5: We are shouldering the cognitive labor for these emotional tasks,
Speaker 5: for these physical tasks for our kids, and it's too much.
Speaker 5: That's why this mental load that may have been a
Speaker 5: little bit easier in the past is now unsustainable because
Speaker 5: you're not just getting the one form that says bring
Speaker 5: your kids to school for back to School Day. You're
Speaker 5: getting a seventeen different apps with one hundred different forms
Speaker 5: and a million different things and logging in here and
Speaker 5: checking in here. And that's just for one of the cards,
Speaker 5: which is transporting your kids to school. There's ninety nine
Speaker 5: other cards that you have to contend with. Life has
Speaker 5: just gotten too overwhelming and women are shouldering too much
Speaker 5: cognitive labor.
Speaker 4: The schools need to chill out with the inmail house.
Speaker 1: Yeah, any school administrators listening.
Speaker 4: One email a day is plenty.
Speaker 1: It's too much, just too much.
Speaker 4: Eve, thank you so much for coming on the bright side.
Speaker 1: Oh thank you for your vulnerability and for letting me turn.
Speaker 3: The tables and let you answer questions, and for bringing
Speaker 3: all that heart.
Speaker 1: Thank you, big hugs.
Speaker 3: Eve Rodsky is the New York Times best selling author
Speaker 3: of fair Play and Find Your Unicorn Space.
Speaker 2: That's it for today's show. Tomorrow, we're joined by Hollywood
Speaker 2: legend halle Berry. She joins us to talk about her
Speaker 2: new horror film Never Let Go, how her menopause symptoms
Speaker 2: got misdiagnosed as herpies, and how she feels about all
Speaker 2: those halle Berry shout outs in popular music.
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Speaker 2: See you tomorrow, folks, Keep looking on the bright side.