Hey, guys.
It's Chelsea from The Financial Diet.
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And it's time to buckle up [BLEEP]
because I'm about to go on a rant again.
And today, I am sort of inspired to do a bit of a rant
both because of a topic that I touched on lightly
via social video/TikTok/Instagram
reel, which started a bit of a discourse, as you can see here.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
OK, we use the term normalization a lot
on the internet, and often for things
I just honestly don't even think deserve it.
But one thing we are absolutely normalizing for women on social
media-- and trust me, I am a 30-something woman,
and [BLEEP] like this is absolutely all over my feeds--
is content that shows women in heterosexual marriages
basically taking on 100% of the domestic labor
and having to essentially raise their husband
as an additional child.
[END PLAYBACK]
But also because of an interview that I recently
did while out filming The Financial Confessions in Los
Angeles with author Eve Rodsky who wrote a book
and created a game called Fair Play that's
all about correcting the very imbalanced domestic labor
sharing in heterosexual marriages, especially once
kids are in the mix.
Because I think there's obviously
two parts of this equation.
There are the actual cultural and social phenomena
that are taking place in households across the country,
and then there's also the sort of objectification of that
and the normalization of it on social media.
But before we dive into the nitty gritty,
I want to contextualize who Eve Rodsky is, what her book is,
which you'll obviously hear a ton more about in the interview
I did with her, as well as what brought us
to this cultural moment where the results
of this domestic imbalance are in many ways
worse than they've ever been, but at least the conversation
about it is more on everyone's minds.
So as it pertains to Eve, as she put it--
and again, she goes into more detail in our interview--
but she had a pretty specific inciting incident
that led her to write the book.
"I had done the grocery shopping.
I was running all these errands on the way to pick up one
of my sons, doing contract work at stoplights,
and my husband sent me a text that said,
'I'm surprised you didn't get the blueberries.'
I pulled the car over and I cried.
It was such a punch in the gut.
I used to be able to manage employee teams,
and now I can't even manage a grocery list.
More importantly, how had I become the default
for every childcare and household task for my family?
It wasn't supposed to be that way.
I had vowed from an early age that it wouldn't be that way.
I'm a Harvard-trained attorney.
I'm literally trained to use my voice.
And I kept thinking that if this was happening to me,
it was happening to every woman I know."
And she pretty quickly found out in doing the research
for her book that that is true.
The long and short of it is that while it's always
been on women to shoulder the majority of domestic labor,
again, especially when children enter the picture,
there has been a revolution over the past 50 years
to bring women into the workplace.
And I think there are a lot of reasons for that,
both historical and economic.
I mean, if nothing else, having effectively twice the people
in the labor market as there were before is a great way
to depress wages.
But while we had this revolution to bring women
into the workplace to the extent that now most women have
to work to some extent, we did not
have a simultaneous revolution of bringing men
into the household in a way that they weren't before.
So now the modern woman is saddled
with having to be full-time parent and full-time employee,
which is pretty unprecedented in human history.
And it should not be shocking, has led
to a bunch of terrible results.
As one article put it, "While all workers
are likely to experience time conflicts,
working mothers are especially hard hit
because in addition to their paid labor,
they take on the majority of unpaid household and care work.
Most workers in the United States,
including most working mothers, are employed full time,
and most mothers are either breadwinners or co-breadwinners
and their families.
But in addition to their paid employment,
most working mothers come home to a second shift
of unpaid work that includes household labor and childcare."
And it's not shocking that the COVID-19 pandemic
basically cast all of that into super sharp relief
and made it so that a lot of these dynamics, which
people knew on some internal level
were happening all around them, were extremely visible
on a day-to-day basis, especially when suddenly
both partners were working from home.
"COVID-19 transformed home life, turning kitchen tables
into home offices and classrooms and putting a spotlight
on the countless household tasks typically performed by women.
Brigid Schulte said the pandemic has
laid bare the grotesque inequality that
exists within many families.
There's been a lot of invisible labor
that women have done that people, particularly men even
in the same household, haven't been aware of
or haven't paid attention to."
And I should say right here that the division of labor
amongst same-gendered couples, which are increasingly
a large part of who makes up average households,
does typically fall differently.
It's not as imbalanced, largely because there
aren't super anchored gender norms
that we're sort of subconsciously
using to assume who should be doing what.
These things kind of have to be figured out
from zero, which in many cases turns out to be a positive.
But because of the overwhelmingly gendered nature
of this problem and how much that gender imbalance is
getting normalized through social media,
I want to specifically focus on heterosexual couples
here because as a woman who is 33, married,
but not planning to have children,
but surrounded by a lot of women who are having children,
most of whom are staying in the workforce to some extent,
I can tell you that even anecdotally,
I am at the age where it is completely normalized
that women are entering this dynamic.
It's not even questioned.
Women will go home earlier from work.
They will be the ones who know their children's teachers,
their friends' names, who manage the household schedule, who
pack for vacations, who plan for vacations, who just generally
assume director of the household on top of whatever
actual job they're doing.
I have now in the wild heard the term babysitting
thrown around when we're talking about a man
caring for his own children.
And trust me when I say that it is very difficult for me
not to just Wilhelm scream at the top of my lungs
when I hear this.
[YELL] That's not the Wilhelm scream, but that's what I feel.
And I bring in the child aspect of it
because it's important to note that while these gender
imbalances exist in hetero couples
before children come into the picture,
they rapidly skyrocket once that baby arrives.
"Researchers tracked 182 dual-earner heterosexual
couples from before to after the birth of their first child.
Pre-baby, men and women in this study
spent relatively similar amounts of time on household tasks.
Nine months after the baby was born,
women were spending significantly more time
on household tasks as well as all tasks related to childcare.
Men spent more time on paid work both before and after the baby
was born."
And what's very interesting as far as the psychological burden
of this is that both partners in these studies
felt that they were actually doing more domestic labor
than they were, which is totally understandable
when you're dealing with juggling so many pressures
at once and probably not able to super closely track your time.
And in many cases, they're totally sleep-deprived anyway.
But it's interesting to note that men actually
way further overestimated what they
were doing while doing less.
"Pre-baby, both men and women actually spent 14.5 hours
on housework, but estimated that they spent between 21 and 22
hours.
After the baby was born, women spent about 13.5 hours
on housework, but estimated they spent 27 hours.
Men spent about 9.5 hours and estimated
that they spent about 35 hours.
For childcare, women estimated they spent 21.8 hours,
but actually only spend 8.4.
Men estimated they'd spent about 14,
and actually reported spending 7.7."
And I think the fact that both parties are over-reporting
what they do makes total sense given that if there is already
an inherent imbalance, it's easy for those feelings
to have to be channeled into other sentiments.
Exhaustion, resentment, a general sense of unfairness.
And in order for men to justify the fact that they
are objectively doing less on average, to avoid
a huge amount of cognitive dissonance
they probably have to feel like they're doing more than
they are.
But the reason why this video set me off to the extent
that it did and led me to create the TikTok which then became
this video and my interview with Eve Rodsky
is that that normalization, that sort of cutesification
of the fact that a woman has to not only be an employee
and also raise her children, but to some extent raise
and manage her husband as another child
is part of what is leading this dynamic
to be so universal and difficult to escape.
When men perceive that they're doing more than they actually
are, a woman simply wanting to assert 50/50 in the household
is going to come across as asking too much.
And when the idea is that this is just the way men are-- oh,
men don't know how to change a diaper, oh,
men are babysitting when they take care of their own kids,
oh, men are [BLEEP]-ing-ing heroes when they manage to come home
a little bit earlier from work to take care of putting
the kids to bed one time that week--
we are now unintentionally framing the idea that labor
should be divided half and half if both parties are working
full time as being unreasonable, or going way outside the norm,
or asking for something that on some level women don't deserve.
When I was researching this video,
I saw TikTok after meme after relatable tweet
about, for example, how a mom prepares
for vacation versus how a dad prepares for vacation.
The mom was booking the tickets, picking the hotel,
planning the activities, writing up the agenda,
making the packing list for the family,
doing the laundry to pack the bags,
packing the bags themselves, making sure
that they fit within the travel compliance rules,
picking out the outfits for travel day itself,
dealing with rental cars, and the list goes on and on and on.
Whereas the portrayal of the man was
just him throwing two t-shirts into a bag and calling it
a day.
And the comments on these posts are
just literally thousands and thousands and thousands
of women talking about how, oh my god.
So me.
So my husband.
And I'm sorry, but time to go on a murder spree.
I don't know.
[LAUGHS] I'm sorry.
That's obviously facetious and we shouldn't
be murdering these men.
But we should be putting them in jail.
[LAUGHS]
No.
Obviously, we're at a really, really depressing point
in the culture where this is totally normalized and accepted
and treated as humor.
And this would already be bad enough
if the women were full-time mothers because that still
wouldn't be a super fair division of labor
when you both decided to have the kids.
But to know that this is happening
when the majority of women are having to work in the household
is just beyond galling.
And it's important to note that these videos
and memes and TikToks are not exaggerations.
"Women in dual-income families are
more likely to be in charge of creating and maintaining
a family schedule and tend to manage
the social lives of their families more than men.
One study found that women tend to plan their family's
time together-- like outings and vacations--
and to work more during that leisure time--
caring for the children, cooking, et
cetera-- than their male partners."
And while I think that the sort of contentification
of this phenomenon is deeply insidious--
and don't even get me started on the fact that like in the video
I showed and in many of the videos I found,
the children themselves are part of the content, which
as we've discussed in our previous video about child
influencers and child labor is no coincidence.
Content typically performs better
when children are featured in that content, which
is its whole own can of worms.
Even if we weren't just normalizing this
by making it into cute content, we're normalizing it as women
by absorbing the physical consequences of this
and either heavily medicating or heavily self-medicating
ourselves as a result.
"While housework is unpleasant for people of both genders,
women who are overloaded by it actually
experience more depressive symptoms.
This may be due to the emotional burdens rather than
the physical burdens of managing social life and childcare."
But "In fact, as one study found, women and men
who feel responsible for household tasks--
not those who actually spend more time doing them--
have worse cardiovascular health.
And nearly 18% of all women in the United States
used antidepressant medication between 2015 and 2018,
compared to just over 8% of men, according
to data released by the Centers for Disease Control.
Overall, during the decade between 2009 to 2010 and 2017
to 2018, antidepressant use increased to 14% from 11%.
The use increased more for women to 19% from 14% than
for men, up to 9% from 7%."
And that's not even taking into account other types
of medication like benzodiazepines
and other types of anti-anxiety medication,
which are being more heavily used and more heavily used
by women specifically, and in that group
by mothers specifically.
And I want to be very clear that I am not here
to stigmatize pharmaceutical use.
For many people, these drugs can be life-changing
and even life-saving.
It is not to say that it is not your right,
and in fact, in many cases the right choice for people
to use these medications obviously
under the supervision of a doctor or a therapist.
But it should be more worrying to us
that so many people are having to rely on these drugs just
to go about their day-to-day lives.
When we're talking about numbers like that,
it's very indicative that something much more fundamental
is wrong.
And when you look at the idea of putting modern women
under the enormous dual pressure of being full-time mothers
and caregivers and full-time employees-- again,
something that has not really happened
throughout human history, at least not at this scale
and for this duration-- it's basically inevitable
that women would have to medicate in order
to cope with that immense amount of stress.
And the fact that at a certain level,
there just simply aren't enough hours in the day.
And it's also no coincidence that this same kind of content,
the women that it resonates with, the circles that it
really gets a lot of traction in are also
in many cases that famed wine mom audience.
The myth of the wine mom is sometimes a myth.
We do see that the data varies in terms
of who's consuming more alcohol amongst women
and amongst adults in the US.
But what's undeniable is that drinking
as a way of self-medicating and as providing
an escape and a reward for the enormous pressures
that women and especially moms are under is very normalized.
But even though self-medicating through alcohol
to cope with enormous stress is not healthy,
it's also worth noting that even amongst that,
only a certain class of women can even
really afford to be a wine mom.
As one article in The Atlantic put it,
"One of the problems of the 'wine mom' meme
is that it has class insularity.
But there are plenty of other moms
who are, say, working two jobs, who
certainly don't have the money or the time
to take a wine break.
The stresses and challenges that wine moms are
drinking to take a break from--
or, as some might put it, drinking to escape--
aren't unique to those who identify as wine moms.
They're shared by lots of other moms and dads
who may or may not drink wine to wind down.
A lot of those stresses, Jacobson added,
could be alleviated through larger, structural reforms
and the implementation of programs designed to lighten
the burden of parenting.
In the long term, maybe what 'wine moms--' and moms of other
social classes, and non-drinking moms--
need isn't a supersized glass of alcohol,
but social support in the form of affordable child care,
paid-family-leave wages, equitable wages, and of course,
an equitable division of labor at home."
At the end of the day, these videos
like the one I talked about at the beginning
are really just a symptom of the problem.
But I do think the more that we normalize this
and the more we treat it as a joke or something relatable,
the more we're reinforcing the underlying
problem that is causing all these terrible symptoms.
It is just not realistic on a purely logistical level
for a person to be a full-time employee
and a full-time primary parent if they are not
dividing labor equally at home.
It's just not tenable.
And the fact that so many women are not just
expected to do that, but expected
to aspire to it as the image of the woman who
has it all, who manages to do it in a seemingly effortless way,
is incredibly insidious and actively harming
women in terms of health outcomes while also just making
their lives [BLEEP].
It is way too big a problem for any one person
to solve on their own, but the least we can do
is stop treating it like a joke.
As always, guys, thank you for watching,
and don't forget to hit the Subscribe button
and to come back every Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday
for new and awesome videos.
Bye.