This is the transcript of Regina F. Lark’s TEDx Talk titled ‘EMOTIONAL LABOR AND THE MYTH OF “WOMEN’S WORK”’ at TEDxFolsom conference.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
Regina F. Lark – Author
‘A man can work from sun to sun, but a woman’s work is never done.’ This poem is 125 years old. And for me, it brings up questions like, what is women’s work? Why the heck is it never done? And who decided work has a gender?
Say the phrase “men’s work,” did you think vacuuming? But all we have to do is say “women’s work,” and bam, instant global understanding. My client Sylvia put it another way when I asked, “Sylvia, what are you thinking about right now?”
Right now, I’m thinking I have to bake cupcakes with my five-year-old, schedule a play date, pick up my dad’s medications, remember to put ketchup on the grocery list. She never remembers because she doesn’t use it. Take down Christmas, finish a PowerPoint for work, oh yeah, and remember, figure out time to organize our messy house, which doesn’t bother my husband, so it’s all on me.
I’ve worked with many professional, successful cisgender women who tell me they feel like failures at home, unable to fulfill the basic duties that should come naturally to them, you know, like tackling that long, long to-do list we call women’s work. And what permeates women’s work is the mental load of emotional labor. And emotional labor is mostly invisible. It’s the remembering, reminding, planning, noticing, anticipating. All invaluable, right? Invaluable but also invisible.
Now you may be new at living with someone or a mid-career woman with a few years’ experience with kids, extended family members, juggling multiple calendars, trying to do it all. The pain comes when we find that we can’t do all of these things perfectly.
Who can? Or that we just don’t measure up to cultural expectations of what it means to be a woman.
In this moment, I want you to give yourself permission to be curious about why the heck you’re doing so much all the darn time. Because here’s what I’ve discovered. As there’s nothing inherently feminine about a menstrual pad, there’s nothing inherently womanly about women’s work. The work is the work, whether you do it at home or in the paid office.
I passionately want to end the tendency of calling the work of household management women’s work. It’s time to reimagine all of it. The mythology is that women are just better at the work in the home, organically, like it’s part of their DNA or because they have a particular body part that confers such powers on them. I’ll give you that in birthing and nursing a baby, a woman clearly has the edge over a man. But beyond that, the work of homemaking, it’s all up for grabs.
Now sure, there are some men who do this work, but child-free or a house filled with kids, the work of homemaking tends to be a lifelong endeavor for all women, regardless of most anything else.
There are two components to the work of household management: the physical work and the mental load of emotional labor, defined here as the invisible, unnoticed, unwritten, and unwaged work women do in the home and in the paid workplace. It’s the thinking about what’s coming up, what needs to happen, how to look into the future to anticipate, birthdays, school permission slips, family meals, holiday dinners, do we have enough toilet paper, you’re out of ketchup again?
Now granted, these little tasks, each one, are easy to do. Taken as a whole, they’re supremely important to the functioning of a well-ordered home and to family happiness. Emotional labor is why the work is never done. At home, it requires loving, caring actions with invisible mental load dimensions and zillions of concrete tasks.
Back to Sylvia. One day she said, “Regina, from the outside, my life looks amazing, really well put together. But at the end of the day, I feel so bad about myself. I look around at my messy house and I just can’t do it all. My husband, my kids, they make fun of me. I am a lousy housekeeper. I can’t keep up with the laundry. And I don’t know why it’s my job to always remember to get the ketchup. I don’t even use it.”
So I turned to her and said, “Sylvia, listen, just because you have a vagina doesn’t mean it’s all your job.” Betty Friedan, the author of the 1964 best-selling book, “The Feminine Mystique,” might have called Sylvia’s lament, “The Problem With No Name.” But after listening to Sylvia and so many others, I am convinced that the 21st-century problem with no name has a name, and the name is emotional labor.
So what do we do about this? What if we stopped labeling, judging, and resenting ourselves? What if we replaced that narrative with a new one? How would we do this?
Well, first, we want to understand the requirements needed to perform the work of household management, which includes the physical work and the mental load of emotional labor. You know, everything that women and some men do in the home to keep those around them comfortable and happy.
To get all the work done in the paid workplace requires a nearly identical skill set to getting all the work done at home. Simply put, it requires access to your executive functions, the part of the brain located in the prefrontal cortex. Our brain’s executive functions are what got us here on time today, allows us to manage our emotions, gives us the ability to plan, process, and prioritize.
Consequently, the very same skills required to have a successful business are also required to run a successful home. So when it comes to the work of the home, it looks like we’ve been referencing the wrong body parts. And yet, the cultural expectation is that the work of the home will fall to women. And it is because of the historical myth that women are better at this work. Women are socialized to do this work.
Which I think starts when we teach our daughters how to play house, so that when a woman partners with someone else, she is in fact better at the work. And since men aren’t socialized the way women are, the distribution of labor starts out and remains unequal. We’ve known for decades that so-called men’s work is weekly or monthly, and well-defined and over when it’s over. Sometimes, in fact, it’s done.
So-called women’s work, I know what you’re going to say, is never done. The physical work, the mental load, the emotional labor is never, ever done. By now, you may be asking, I hope you’re asking, how do we raise the bar to create greater household equity within our own four walls? We will raise the bar when we make the invisible visible and then become champions of radical delegation.
Think of and list all the invisible components for every darn thing you do at home in order to reach the goal. Like, for example, getting it together to bake cupcakes with a five-year-old. Making the invisible visible is an invaluable tool and serves as a platform for household equity. As lists of tasks unfold and the invisible becomes more obvious, I encourage the next step and become a champion of the art and practice of radical delegation.
Coined by thought leader Judith Kolberg, radical delegation is the new way forward. Delegation, as we understand it, says the work is given over to the person best suited to the task. Well, since women are traditionally raised to do all the household labor, it is neither fair nor equitable that the bulk of the household labor fall to them. Radical delegation is delegating the work to be done because it has to be done.
It’s a function of the brain, not of the person. It’s not based on who’s better at it. It’s based on the fact that it needs to be done whether you’re great at it or not. The sooner we realize this and do something to change it, the sooner women will be relieved of their guilt, frustration, anxiety, and shame. It works for a diverse range of households, whether straight or queer.
Households with one, two, or more adults can become more equitable. Because here’s the thing, households, regardless of gender makeup, are successfully negotiating these tasks. They have to talk about the division of labor. The work is the work and not divided by gender. Research also shows that single men can change a roll of toilet paper, single women can change the oil in their car, and single people, that’s right, they’ll remember when it’s time to buy the ketchup.
If a man can work from son to son, emotional labor explains why the work is never done. But here’s the thing, the work of emotional labor doesn’t require a skirt or lipstick or a bra. It’s just work. And when we make the invisible work of emotional labor very visible, glaring in fact, put a big red bow around it and call it what it is, work, then we have a shot at sharing the work more equitably at home and in true partnership with the other adult in the room.
I reimagine a world in which men possess a sense of agency and have access to their own ability in the home and with emotional labor and the household work and the whole caring economy, long the domain of women, it’s a paradigm that we need to disrupt. Then I can imagine the kind of cultures this could create, cultures that don’t have one and two marriages ending in divorce, that see more intact families, more corporate parity due to enhanced safety nets.
Because when we can bring in gender equity at home, we’ll be able to recognize it in the paid workplace. In the words of Eve Rodsky, thought leader and bestselling author of the 2019 book, Fair Play. We need to invite men into their full power in the home so we can unleash women into their full power in the world. The work of the home is simply work that must be done, nothing more, nothing less.
What makes one better or worse at it is a matter of function, not gender. When you leave here today, how do you plan to disrupt the narrative in your own home? I know you want to. And when you do, I wish you courage and the mental and moral strength to venture, persevere, and withstand fear and uncertainty. I wish you equity and I wish you love. Thank you very much.