I have been agonizing over how to reply to an email for the last 48 hours.
It’s not about a medical issue, a work deadline, some horrible news, a kids back-to-school assignment that requires digging up the dreaded tag-maker or logging into some Byzantine online portal, all of which are represented in full force in my inbox. Just a completely nondescript suggestion, from a colleague of a friend from university who is eager to talk about a project he is working on and whom I am eager to meet.
“Do you want to try a happy hour gathering next week?”
I mean: yes. I’d love to. Me, a martini, some non-expandable pants, all out in the evening? Valhalla.
But then my brain short-circuits, because my happy hour for the past six years (which, yes, is happy, but also chaotic) involves scraping baba ganoush from my baby’s hair, stuffing salmon into my three-year-old’s mouth years as she sits under the table methodically hitting the floor and listening to the appropriately military soundtrack of Strauss’s Radetzky March, courtesy of my first grader practicing piano.
So instead of saying Of course, I’ve spent the last few days doing mental calisthenics, including but not limited to considering whether my husband’s upcoming week of work travel allows me a compensatory week of responsibilities other than bedtime and bath time; if it’s time to rip off the Band-Aid and start saying yes to noncritical social events; whether non-critical social events can lead to critical and important job developments; whether that time could be better spent sorting secondhand baby clothes into piles that take into account the size and seasonal preferences of various younger cousins; or if my mom’s schedule might allow her to come in and be an extra set of hands. And you wonder why I’m awake in the middle of the night, so tense that it’s all I can do to keep from rushing out of bed to make breakfast in the moonlight, just to check one thing off my list.
“Time is a health resource,” Jennifer Ervin told me over Zoom. “There is this double burden for so many women: having a paid job and then once that job is over, huge amounts of unpaid work in the mornings and evenings.”
Ervin is the principal investigator of a study coming out of the University of Melbourne, published in The Lancet earlier this month, titled “Gender differences in the association between unpaid work and mental health in employed adults: a systematic review.” “, which is believed to be the first of its kind to examine the intersection of gender in the three domains (work, home, and mental health) that make up the bulk of my daily concerns.
After reviewing 14 studies, some of which examined housework time, others childcare, and others unpaid work, Ervin’s report concludes that “inequalities in the division of unpaid labor expose women at a higher risk of poorer mental health than men,” as a result of “both so-called role conflict and role overload, which trigger stress-related pathways and thus may affect psychological well-being.”
The more you are in a hurry, the more pressed for time, the more tasks you are juggling simultaneously, the more likely you are to become stressed. A to study referenced by Ervin found that “the rush is linked to being a woman, being a single mother, disability, lack of control and work-family conflicts”. The rush is linked to being a woman. Sigh.
“Unpaid work” as a concept has been studied in the sociological literature for quite some time, usually through the lens of gender equity and parity, or participation in the workplace. The 2018 American Time Use Survey found that women between the ages of 25 and 34 spend eight hours a day on unpaid work, compared to 3.9 hours for men. (For ages 35 to 44, that goes up to 5.2 for men and 8.8 for women.) But only recently, Ervin told me, have researchers begun to examine it as a social determinant of health.
covid contributed to increased anxiety and stress worldwide, and the American Psychological Association pronounced a “national health crisis that could have serious health and social consequences for years to come” in the United States. How are the mental fragments in my brain affected by the constant, slightly deranged chatter of my to-do list, and how do I complete it most efficiently?
I know that when I fill out permission slips, make sure we have the milk, schedule doctor’s appointments, and do the laundry, that’s all “unpaid work.” But the term’s confusing designation makes it, borrowing from that famous supreme court case, a bit like porn: you know it when you see it. While my coverage of an email reply isn’t necessarily the same as doing laundry, it’s not entirely different either. It’s as much a consequence of that unpaid work as it is a form of it, Ervin told me, which is one of the challenges of studying the subject.
“Mental burden, whether or not it falls under the umbrella of unpaid work, and many people would agree that it does, is very difficult to capture,” he said. “How can you measure what’s going on in someone’s brain? When you’re on a Zoom and you get a call from your kids’ school and you think about what you need to do later that night?
One of the more nuanced points of the study was that “women bear the greatest mental burden of housework; therefore, an unpaid hour is considered more dense and impactful for women than for men, and therefore might not be directly comparable.” It’s partly for the reason, the researchers posit, that unpaid work is less likely to result in poorer mental health for men, which, in turn, could be due to the kinds of tasks men often take on. While I appreciate the researchers’ suggestion that “outdoor or maintenance” tasks might fall into this less time-sensitive and possibly more enjoyable group of unpaid work, my husband, a technician, is just as likely to take a rake or screwdriver like it. it is spontaneously beginning to pray to Chaucer from memory. But I accept his point. And this constant, invisible mental burden, perniciously seeping into most of my waking and sleeping hours, is something that Ervin herself struggles with in her own home, where she and her husband are raising to two daughters.
“I have a husband who is particularly egalitarian in his views, but that doesn’t necessarily translate to day-to-day life,” she said, delivering what could be the headline of almost every conversation I have with friends. “And it’s really hard to turn the dial at the individual household level.” How, she wondered, could I force my husband to join me in the trenches of Obsessively labeling the preschooler’s change of clothes for school until that task was completed?
She strongly believes that the better the parental leave policies of a given country, the more impactful and positive the ripple effects will be, as if a parent is caring for a child from a young age, it sets the stage for more care later on. Norway, a country that allocates a whopping 49 weeks of parental leave to families, with 15 weeks given specifically to each parent in a “use it or lose it” model, is one to emulate, though Ervin isn’t particularly optimistic that the rest of the world will catch up soon. In part, that’s why she felt it was key to research and publish the study.
“Fifty percent of the population says, ‘Okay, this is not news to anyone.,’she snorted. “It’s people’s lived experience, absolutely, but showing it at a population level is important.” Only then could the other 50% of the population come together to actively rethink workplace flexibility, paternity leave, and other family-friendly policies.
After a few more days of dithering and hesitating, I said yes to that Happy Hour meeting. It will be at 4:00 pm, and could include a coffee instead of a martini, and I’ll be back in time to watch my own family’s happy hour half. But I am looking forward to it.
And we keep stumbling.
