Is mental load the missing piece to solving…?

Part one in our three part discussion about mental load and motherhood

Molly Dickens, PhD

and

Haley Swenson

Sep 13, 2024

What happens when the plates drop? (adapted from art by: dane_mark for iStock)

Mental load, gender, motherhood, and stress.

We (Haley and Molly) are on a quest to examine the overlap of these elements as we take a closer look at parental mental load from multiple angles.

On the most basic level, we want to explore how we got here, what it looks like in our lives, and how we fix it and/or the issues that it causes:

This is an obvious oversimplification of a very complex issue.

There are so many directions this topic could go in along this spectrum and this exploration feels like an immense undertaking.

But we have to start somewhere. So we’re starting with a conversation broken into three pieces:

Mental load as a missing piece for… (see below!)
The case of modern American parenthood
Can we talk about solutions? (and stress?)

For Molly, the quest starts in the middle, the “how does this show up?” stage, and works towards the end of the spectrum. All through the lens of stress – what is it about mental load that relates to stress on parents (mostly mothers) and impacts our health and wellbeing; how can we look to solutions that decrease mental load as health solutions?

For Haley, the quest starts at the beginning “how did we get here?” with an eye on how historical context impacts everything along the spectrum, in order to better understand the conditions necessary to create a fairer, happier dynamic. That’s part of her larger ongoing project around both the changing ideas and changing realities around what it means to be a “happy family.”

Below is the start of the conversation – a bit of pleasantries, some background and definitions, and then we get right into it.

(Permission to skip ahead!)

Haley:

Thanks so much for agreeing to have this conversation with me about mental load and stress and the overlap between these two areas of study!

Molly:

Yes, I’m excited to have this conversation! Thank YOU for agreeing to it too. It was a mutual request!

Haley:

Why don’t you go first and talk a little bit about who you are and how you came to this work and the questions we're gonna be talking about.

Molly:

To start, my research background is in stress physiology, so stress has become a key lens that I peer through when I look at the issues in the world. As a theme, stress has followed me through a pretty convoluted career path.

After being a research scientist for years, I jumped off the academic track, joined a maternal health company and worked in that space for a while, set loose in the world of pregnancy and perinatal care and maternal health at a moment in time when it felt like the world was waking up to the maternal health crisis. This role also gave me an opportunity to see and dig into the gaps that exist in women's health research and how those gaps affect innovation, clinical decisions, policy, and pretty much everything that could benefit women during this stage of life.

“at some point, a thought lodged in my head – ‘so many of the societal issues facing women and mothers relate to stress and women's health and maternal health and… why isn't anybody talking about it in that context?’” — Molly

After that, I co-founded and ran a nonprofit focused on gender equity and motherhood-related barriers. We launched right before COVID lockdowns and working in this space as women were getting crushed under the weight of pandemic motherhood drew together this incredible collaborative network of folks working in similar spaces. Being immersed in that world with incredible, brilliant experts identifying and solving these big problems in big ways was such a valuable learning experience. And I got to meet people like you!

Overall, my brain gravitates towards big picture and big impact (for better or worse!) and, at some point, a thought lodged in my head – “so many of the societal issues facing women and mothers relate to stress and women's health and maternal health and… why isn't anybody talking about it in that context?” followed by the realization of “is anyone pulling all these pieces together?… Do I need to do that?” And that's where the Maternal Stress Project came from.

Honestly, the project started with this idea of just roughly mapping it all. But once I mapped it, I realized that I had a hypothesis on my hands and needed to examine it more closely to evolve it into a thesis1.

“We know that stress affects health. It's pretty widely accepted. Yet, we don't talk about it in a way that allows for real opportunities to decrease the stress load for the humans that are most affected by it.” — Molly

A lot of the Maternal Stress Project now is this hypothesis-testing: I have the stressor map, this visual that I consider in draft form, and now I have questions to explore – what are the stressors that are specific to being a woman in America – of being a caregiver, a parent, a mother, a pregnant person? How are all these stressors connected in a way that impacts our health downstream? How can big and small solutions work — in our bodies – to change our health outcomes?

We know that stress affects health. It's pretty widely accepted. Yet, we don't talk about it in a way that allows for real opportunities to decrease the stress load for the humans that are most affected by it.

I want to change that.

Haley:

That’s super helpful.

Molly:

What about your story?

Haley:

There are so many different versions of the story that I could tell about how I came to this particular area of interest.

One I often start with is I grew up Mormon, in a very Mormon environment, which is extremely conservative and explicitly patriarchal. So when I was growing up, the idea that men and women were different and that they played different roles was explicit.

That difference was the text, it was the subtext, it really defined by formative years.

I looked around me and I didn’t see this model of gender as working for most people, certainly not for my family. I took that patriarchal way of thinking with me to college with a critical eye – “Let's take a look at this. I don't believe it. I don't buy it. Where did these ideas come from?”

Of course, I learned very quickly that Mormons weren't the only people who have these ideas. That realization got me interested in Women's Studies. I took a Women's Studies class in my first semester in college, and it just opened up so many doors for me in terms of thinking about why the world works the way that it does and why so many people around me have the experiences that they had.

“my main focus ultimately came down to ‘how do you change this?’ and that drew me to ask questions about power, about politics, about economics.” — Haley

That led me to a PhD in Gender Studies. I started out interested in culture and literature, but by the time I got to grad school, I started asking questions that really fit more on the social science side of things. I'm still interested in storytelling and cultural narratives, but my main focus ultimately came down to “how do you change this?” and that drew me to ask questions about power, about politics and economics. I also started thinking about the larger structures that set the stage for culture and interpersonal issues and religion and all of that.

My dissertation came out of the Great Recession. I started studying the differences between men and women who were experiencing long term unemployment (this was 2014) so I was talking with people who were down on their luck, who were trying to find a way forward for their families.

“Men would talk about their time use as only becoming valuable when they got back to paid work…Women felt like they had an opportunity to make up for lost time… That made me consider the way that men and women approached their caregiving roles differently and how that perpetuated these inequalities in the job market.” — Haley

We talked a lot about how they spent their time, and that is where unpaid labor and women's role in caregiving really stood out for me.

Men would talk about their time use as only becoming valuable insofar as it got them back to paid work. They would often treat their unemployment as a full time job to find the next job. And sometimes, interestingly, they’d talk about that as a kind of caregiving—as a way they cared for their families. Earning was central to their caregiving.

Women were on the job market too, but, for them, there werecompeting pressures for their time. I kept hearing the phrase “silver lining” in my interviews with mothers – the “silver lining” to their unemployment was that they got to spend more time with their kids, got to focus on cleaning the garage, got to reorganize the house and teach their kids about the job market. Women felt like they had an opportunity to make up for lost time.

That made me consider the way that men and women approached their caregiving roles differently and how that perpetuated these inequalities in the job market. But it was clearly a much bigger story about the weight of responsibilities they were carrying around in their heads. I don't even think I was familiar with the term mental load yet. I was really mostly looking at the differences between paid labor and unpaid labor at that point, but not the peculiarities of thinking labor.

“the mental load – what people are carrying around in their heads – seems like a missing puzzle piece.” — Haley

My interest in mental load came down to not being satisfied by the answers that are currently out there. I realized the different gendered divisions of paid and unpaid labor weren’t enough to explain all kinds of gender gaps. For example, why does something like the pay gap still exist in the way it does? I don't think any of the current operating explanations out there – differences in men's and women's decision making, the idea of gender socialization (how men and women are socialized differently from childhood and that puts them on different life courses), or simply different job preferences – fully capture an answer to that question.

To me, the mental load – what people are carrying around in their heads – seems like a missing puzzle piece.

In all of my work, but especially with Work Life Everything, I am trying to tackle these questions and see if we can come up with some answers2. I want real answers about why some people operate with the world on their shoulders and others don’t to complement the work being done on the tech side of things, on the policy side of gender equality advocacy. I want to give people a new language and better tools for understanding and then changing their interpersonal lives.

To me, I'm trying to come full circle here in some ways, from the cultural and religious questions I started asking that came out of my Mormon upbringing through my interest in economic structures and patterns of inequality. I'm trying to weave it all together, which sounds a lot like what you're doing too! I’ve increasingly seen the mental load as an important opening for that.

Molly:

Common goals!

One of the things you point out – and you pointed out as it relates to the pay gap, but I think it needs to be applied even more broadly – is the concept that mental load is a missing puzzle piece.

To me, when looking at the stress map, I keep coming back to a similar concept – mental load is a missing puzzle piece relating to health, relating to gender differences in the stress load. Maybe it feels “missing” because it is invisible and it hasn't been extensively quantified in the context of stress? There are researchers who are starting to do that work, but that’s only very recent.

“If a woman's brain carries 75% of a mental load that has nothing to do with work, how much less freedom does she have in the ways she thinks and operates in the workplace?

In many ways, as women, we’re operating in the working world with our hands behind our back… and we’re still pulling it off! Imagine what we could do if we freed our hands!” — Molly

Overall, I feel like everyone is just waking up to the concept of mental load. It just makes so much sense when you do wake up to it. When you start to see it, you see it everywhere.

I definitely see how it subtly applies to the gender pay gap, for example. If a woman's brain carries 75% of a mental load that has nothing to do with work (compared to a brain only carrying 25% of that mental load), how much less freedom does she have in the ways she thinks and operates in the workplace?

In many ways, as women, we’re operating in the working world with our hands behind our back… and we’re still pulling it off! Imagine what we could do if we freed our hands!

Haley:

I think that's 1,000% it.

What I think is so compelling about the idea of the mental load, and what captures individual women’s attention when I talk about it, is that moment of recognition. When you consider the difference between how I operate in the world every day and what I carry as compared to what my male partner/my brother/my father are carrying. That turns on the light of the here-and-now when it comes to gender. You see gendered differences not as something that happened when you were kids, but something that is playing out every single day as you look at the world and think about your role in it.

Molly:

Before we go too deep, let’s get into some working definitions around mental load.

Take this one, Haley!

Haley:

One of my co-founders at Work Life Everything is Leah Ruppaner, who is a professor at the University of Melbourne. She's fantastic. And she's one of the people actually studying how we can quantify, capture, and measure mental load so that we can compare it across different people.

“Mental load is all of it. That’s an important point because, in the human experience, we don't usually break the experience apart… We're feeling emotions about the problems that we're solving.” — Haley

The definition that we use comes from research that she did with two other colleagues, Liz Dean and Brendan Churchill. They define mental load as a combination of emotional and cognitive labor that a person engages in on a daily basis to take care of themselves and the people that care for.

Let’s break that down into the important parts:

We have that combination of emotional and cognitive. You probably hear a lot of different phrases floated around: unpaid labor, invisible labor, cognitive labor, emotional labor, mental labor. All of those words are helpful and mental load is trying to package them up. Mental load is all of it. That’s an important point because, In the human experience, we don't usually break the experience apart. We won’t say: “that's a cognitive one and that's an emotional one”. We're feeling emotions about the problems that we're solving.

Here’s an example: This afternoon, I'm going to tour a daycare center that may be a potential fit for my 15 month old. The level of work involved in just getting us here to the point of touring a place? Talk about mental load! It is cognitive – I have to schedule it, I have to figure out the timing, make sure it works with my wife's schedule, and we had to figure out child care to visit a child care center! I have to problem-solve, but I also have a ton of emotions about this experience – what am I looking for? Am I going to ask the right questions? Is my son going to like it? Am I going to like the teachers? How am I going to feel about the physical environment? And then add in the pressure that I really want this one to be the right fit because I am so exhausted by this search process and I want to be done.

The mental load is all of that. It is the feelings and the logistics all in one.

“We all have it. We all, as people, carry around a mental load. But, when you start working all the factors into it, you can quickly see how gender makes it a much heavier load on women, on mothers.” — Haley

The other part of mental load that is really important to consider is how this work is not just about you and your well being. It's about those that you care for as well.

I really like this definition because it doesn't immediately say this is the thing that a woman does.

We all have it. We all, as people, carry around a mental load. But, when you start working all the factors of intersectionality and life circumstance into it, you can quickly see how gender makes it a much heavier load on women, on mothers. Women, who have been trained in emotion management since they were born, for example, feel more responsible for a lot of problems or potential problems arising everyday. And what a different experience to walk through the world with all of that on your mind, rather than something as clear and discrete as “I need a job to earn money for my family.”

Molly:

That's such an important piece here!

It reminds me of a conversation I had with

Kate Mangino

about this too. She's deep in the space of gender equity and literally wrote the book on equal partnership. We were talking about the separation between cognitive and emotional labor and the instinct to say “of course, women will pick up the emotional labor, they're softer, they're more empathetic, they're blah, blah, blah, blah, insert gender stereotype here”.

You have to stop yourself and get back to the sociological roots to recognize that this gendering is not biological, it is societal. And yes, maybe the female brain is primed to carry more on an emotional level and carry more emotional burden, but it is not because of a second X chromosome or estrogen levels, it is more related to how socialized gender expectations leave their mark.

“You have to stop yourself and get back to the sociological roots to recognize that gendering is not biological, it is societal.” — Molly

That's another thing to bring into this – yes, this is work. It's hard to carry the emotional load. Of course men don't want to carry that load. Does anyone? But when men choose to not carry it, women pick it up.

I hate to go there, but this seems reflective of a patriarchal structure that puts the “not fun stuff” onto women. (“not fun stuff” = my very technical way of describing this issue.)

Haley:

That's right.

To anybody who's reading this skeptically right now and saying “Wait, really? Are you sure it's not biological?” – Yes, there's much more evidence that this is about gender, socialization, upbringing, culture, patriarchy than it is about biology.

I think one of the other ways to show evidence of that is history. We have not had this model – where motherhood is a completely different, elevated, giant thing when compared to fatherhood – for very long in our history. Your moms and grandmas and even great grandmas experienced that. But it hasn’t been that way forever! Historians can point to particular moments when society and powerful institutions became invested in elevating motherhood in particular.

“If it were biological, we would have seen human beings operating in these ways for a very long time, and we haven’t. It’s recent!” — Haley

Stephanie Coontz was a really big part of my PhD reading. She traces the roots of the American family back through the colonial period when the family and economic productivity were housed under the same roof. Dad wasn't absent from that; parents worked together. It's not to say that different tasks weren’t gendered, but the idea that motherhood was something separate from the economy or only related to the more intimate aspects whereas fatherhood was all about breadwinning, that's quite recent on the historical trajectory.

And here’s the thing, if it were merely biological, we would have seen human beings operating in these ways for a very long time, and we haven’t. It’s recent!

Another area I really want to explore is getting a better, firmer historical understanding of how the mental load got so massive. We can probably trace patriarchal family roots, this division between private and public sphere, back to the industrial revolution. But I don't think the mental load has been what it is today for that long. I would wager it's been about a few decades that this has happened. I'm really interested in developing that idea further.

Think about modern parenting and what goes into it:

There are questions about child care that did not exist on the same scale until women's explosion of participation in paid work over the last 50 years. Also, the modern expectations of parenting – that children are going to be educated, literate, clean, emotionally intelligent, the list goes on and on.

“I don't think the mental load has been what it is today for that long. I would wager it's been about a few decades that this has happened.” — Haley

The expectations we have on parents have grown. If, historically, these expectations align with the role of the mother, we have to consider how the level of work has just ballooned in the last few decades. That's part of the reason we're talking about the mental load now.

Molly:

How does this level of work or the expectations of motherhood compare to other countries?

“We're missing key structures that add so much more labor — cognitive and emotional — onto parents. And when that labor falls to parents, it disproportionately falls to mothers.” — Molly

I was just listening to an interview with Dr.

Jess Calarco

, who wrote the brilliant book Holding It Together, and she was discussing the lack of social safety nets and how the US just is over dependent on women to fill in all of the gaps that exist in this country. Thinking about it from a mental load perspective – with our childcare system fractured and failing and our piecemeal paid leave policies (at best) – we're missing key structures that add so much more labor, cognitive and emotional, onto parents. And when it falls to parents, it disproportionately falls to mothers.

Do you think that if we compare other countries with better social safety net structure we would see a difference in the gendered mental load?

Haley:

Totally.

First of all, we don't have the study yet that would log an index of mental load country by country, but I don't think it's super far off. Part of the research that Leah is doing will help us get there. But I think we can make some pretty educated guesses about what's going on.

Let's think about childcare, for example, and the experience of trying to find childcare. That's a mental load I've been carrying since the earliest days of my pregnancy, if not before. Even when we were thinking about a baby we were considering: how much is it going to cost? how are we going to afford it? will we want to do an in home provider? what are we going to feel good about? can we have a parent who helps us?

Think about that experience versus, say, if I lived in a Nordic country where there's a guaranteed spot for my kid. Where there are price caps on how much it costs or it's free. There are simple answers to those huge questions that I had weighing on my brain starting early on, because of policy.

“Let's think about childcare, for example, and the experience of trying to find childcare. That's a mental load I've been carrying since the earliest days of my pregnancy, if not before.” — Haley

I think the policy regime of a particular country plays a huge role. That doesn’t mean culture doesn’t matter. They’re closely related. Of course, the different cultures of different countries can allow for more maternal centered policy – e.g. Nordic countries have put the experience of parents on their policy agenda – but there is a pretty strong relationship between policy and outcomes. I don't think we have to make a lot of leaps to assume that there are country by country differences in maternal mental load.

I was reading through your New York Times piece about child care and the stress that it causes, and I looked through some of the comments. Some of them were helpful, but some of them were, “maybe you shouldn't have had children if you didn't plan for this.” Which made me think, “Can only people who make $300- $400K have children?”

The U.S. has a completely different orientation than a country that is saying: people are going to have children — we need them to have children in order to continue our nation and our economy — what do we want that experience to look like?

So how can we re-orient around parenting in the U.S.? How can we design our policies, our systems, etc, our institutions to make that better?

I'm not trying to say things are going to be perfect if you just have these few policies. There is always going to be a mental load associated with parenting. But it's a start to have better support.

Molly:

I think that’s an important point. And it's in contrast to everybody getting worried about the declining birth rates.

Hey negative NYT commenters – You want babies to take care of the aging population, young workers to replace the aging workforce, but you’re expecting full parental self-sacrifice because having kids is a “choice”?

Nope. You can’t have both.

Support the parents and then we can talk about having more kids!

Next up — The case of modern American parenthood

Is modern parenting really that much harder (and more stressful) now than for generations past?

The Surgeon General seems to think so:

“Many parents also struggle with a modern practice of time-intensive parenting and contemporary expectations around childhood achievement that tells them if they are not doing more and more for their children in the escalating race for success, they will fail as parents.” – from the The U.S. Surgeon General's Advisory on the Mental Health & Well-Being of Parents

Even though the Advisory on parenting stress and parental mental health did not ever mention the phrase emotional labor and somehow skipped over naming mental load, that paragraph quoted above about “modern practice of time-intensive parenting and contemporary expectations” smacks of the emotional component weighing down the cognitive labor of parenting in America today.