Why is this such an important area of study?
I started studying the mental load in part because I felt like there was this thing that we weren’t capturing. So I’ve studied gender, work, family, housework and domestic divisions for decades. And even though we kept seeing that men were doing more at home – we kept seeing this movement towards progress – there was this thing that just wasn’t working, this thing that we weren’t capturing, that we weren’t measuring. That thing is the mental load. What I was determined to do was give us a clear understanding of what it is.
Just how drained were the women you spoke to?
I developed a mental load burnout scale where I actually asked women, do you find it difficult to access energy to respond to life’s emergencies? Do you find your mental load “spending” makes you tired at the end of the day? Do you find you’re overtaxed?
One of the things that came through was that fathers had capacity and weren’t running a deficit but almost every single mother I talked to was. They were holding enough energy in their “mental load account” to respond to an emergency if something went wrong but when I asked: “do you have enough energy to respond to an opportunity in your life” they said no.
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