It's Time to Change How We Talk About Domestic Work

Photo by Digital Buggu

The scope of family and household work has ballooned over the past fifty years. Meanwhile, our perception of this work—as evidenced by the language we still use to describe it—remains largely unchanged. This disconnect is an underappreciated barrier preventing opposite-sex, dual-earner parents from achieving a more balanced division of labor at home.

Domestic work has significantly expanded over the past half century

The public conversation about domestic gender inequity is considered to have ignited in 1969 with the publication of Pat Mainardi’s essay, “The Politics of Housework.” Back then, parents’ domestic duties fell neatly into two categories: (1) childcare, and (2) household chores. 

Fast forward 55 years from that seminal piece and these two categories are now slices within a significantly expanded pie. Beyond childcare and chores, modern parents now commonly shoulder responsibilities related to:

Elder Care Image by Icons8	A staggering 54% of people ages 40 - 49 (including both Gen Xers and Millennials) belong to the Sandwich Generation, and are actively juggling the emotional, financial, and health-related needs of aging parents in addition to those of their children.
Kid(s) Activity Image by Icons8	From summer camps to youth sports to after-school enrichment programs, recent decades have seen kids’ activities balloon in volume, expense, time requirements, and logistical demands.
In-Home Childcare	A growing number of dual-earner parents must allocate time each week to overseeing in-home childcare providers such as nannies, au pairs, fixed babysitters, or some combination thereof. And that doesn’t account for the time required to recruit, hire, and train a replacement when it’s time to transition to a new in-home care provider.
School Engagement Image by Icons8	Schools today demand more from parents than ever before, with an influx of communications, additional child care needs due to increased holidays and administrative days, and growing requests for resources and support,.
Pet Care Image by Icons8	With 70% of US households owning a pet, families are grappling with steadily rising costs related to food, daily care, healthcare, and other pet-related requirements that pinch both time and money.
Home & Property Management	The US homeownership rate was pegged at 66% in 2022. And one prominent home resources website lists 167 possible service categories across the interior and exterior of a home. With so many categories potentially in need of maintenance, overseeing home-related service providers has become a continuous, time-intensive responsibility for today’s parents.

This list is by no means exhaustive. Additionally, a factor increasing the scope and complexity of domestic work is how parents often find themselves juggling multiple categories simultaneously, each of which can require extensive research and communications, as well as the management of scheduling, logistics, documents, contacts, and expenses (as illustrated below). 

More than 50 years later, the work has evolved but out language has not

This broad expansion in domestic categories, and the corresponding diversity of work each category can generate has transformed the modern household into a multifaceted, round-the-clock operation. But you wouldn’t know this from how we describe domestic work today. Outside of childcare, the notion that domestic labor remains a collection of traditional household chores is firmly rooted in nearly every contemporary study and article written on the topic.

The one exception is that, within the past forty or so years, we’ve coined a series of terms to describe the mentally (and emotionally) taxing burden that comes with being overwhelmingly saddled with this unpaid work, such as “mental load,” “invisible work,” “invisible labor,” “the hidden load,” “worry work,” “cognitive labor,” “emotional labor,” and “invisible load,” (among others). However, lacking a more comprehensive alternative, these terms have collectively morphed into catch-alls for the numerous duties that fall outside of chores and childcare.

Our continued misperception of domestic work exacerbates domestic gender inequity

It’s important to note that the problem isn’t with any of these individual terms. In fact, these terms and the research behind them have enabled us to better comprehend, validate, and verbalize the detrimental impact that domestic gender inequity has had on women, and on society as a whole. 

The problem is in our failure to recognize how much domestic work has sprawled over the past few decades. And when we couple this failure with our subconscious bias that the work is inherently feminine and menial, it’s no surprise that we’ve developed a grave misperception about the quantity and diversity of work required to manage a family today.  

Furthermore, our collective misperception has resulted in three significant consequences:

1. Underestimation of the work: we have highly likely underestimated the amount of work being performed, along with the time required to do it, and thus the severity of the gender-based workload differential. I say highly likely because we still don’t have detailed analysis of domestic workloads between couples. The best we have is data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which compiles aggregate survey responses from independent men and women about the time they spend doing domestic tasks.

2. Inadequate terminology to describe the work: we are not effectively communicating the strategic and operational aspects of domestic work. Lacking better alternatives, we’ve been leaning on terms like “mental load” to convey the non-tactical portion, as discussed earlier. However, the mental burden of the workload is a consequence or symptom of the issue, not a comprehensive description of the work itself. 

3. Perpetuated gender association: due to the lack of updated terminology, we continue to describe and understand domestic work in a way that directly associates it with traditionally feminine roles. This is especially detrimental given the gender progress we’ve made in both the professional world and in broader society over the past half century. 

Taken together, these issues have prevented us from raising awareness of the full scope of today’s work. This lack of awareness is particularly evident among men, who, on average, maintain limited insight into the full extent of the work that their partners are managing. And given our inability to improve awareness, the fact that we’ve only made modest progress towards improving gender-based domestic labor parity over the past few decades is entirely predictable.

It’s time to update our language

Language frames behavior. If we want to inspire new behaviors that help parents improve the division of labor in their homes, it’s time to update the way we describe domestic work. To do this, we’ll need to keep two important objectives in mind:

1. We must untether domestic work from its deeply rooted gender association

2. We must reflect the broadened nature of domestic work as a way to drive better awareness

One way to achieve the first objective is to redirect the focus of the work from “domestic” or “household” and towards “Family.” This subtle shift establishes a better connection between the work and the most important people in our lives, placing them at the forefront. 

Additionally, the strength with which men have embraced the role of “dad” can be seen as easily in empirical data as throughout social media. Framing the work as a direct contribution to their family’s well-being would help us to counter the tired notion of the work as a means to “help” their wives.

Regarding the second objective, it’s way past time for traditional household chores to be superseded by a more accurate description of what the modern household has become: a multifaceted operation to be managed. 

“Family Operations” and, or “Family Management” > Childcare and Chores

By starting with Family, and then embracing “operation,” or “management,” we arrive at “Family Operations” or “Family Management.” Each of these terms instantly elevates the nature of the work by creating space for the multiple categories requiring oversight, while also better representing that each of these categories comes with various management requirements. 

To pressure test these new terms, we can look at three different categories of domestic work not listed above and see where they most naturally fit: (1) Family Budgeting, (2) Family Holiday & Event Planning, and (3) Family Travel. In each case, evaluating the category within the context of a broader Family Operation, or as part of Family Management work, makes more sense than placing them underneath an umbrella of “childcare & chores + mental load.”

Improving domestic gender equity requires a new vocabulary 

Domestic work is a very different beast than it was in 1969, so why are we still talking about it the same way? To improve parent partnerships, and domestic gender equity in the process, it is crucial to have a clear understanding of the actual work involved. Childcare and traditional household chores will always play a role, but today’s parents are also managing a complex Family Operation involving a widening range of family- and household-related mental and physical duties. Only after our language accurately reflects this reality can we increase awareness of the work, and create solutions that help parents manage their families and households with greater efficiency, and better partnership. Failure to do so will see us pass down the same broken gender dynamics to our children that were well within our power to solve.