Is your husband picking up what you're putting down?

I would be remiss if I didn’t start by reminding you that this is the last week to preorder What’s On Her Mind!1 Fill out this form by end-of-day on September 8th, and you’ll also get a free six-month subscription to this very publication.

While WOHM isn’t officially out until next week, the festivities have begun. I’m fresh off a fabulous launch party at my favorite Madison bookstore,2 with more to come next week in Milwaukee and Chicago. I’d love to see you there!

If you a) hang out a bunch on Substack, and/or b) read a lot about care work and mental load, you’ve probably seen the viral post of the summer:

In it, therapist Diana Fox Tilson describes her upbringing as the child of a single father who didn’t give a sh%# about picking up the mental load his ex-wife dropped when she left their family. Tilson paints a dismal picture of life in their household for her and her siblings:

We never visited the doctor or dentist. My hair and nails were unkempt. I wore my brother’s hand-me-downs because no one was buying us clothing, and our clothes were dirty because no one was doing laundry…We never ate homecooked meals and lived on fast food and school lunches. No one threw us birthday parties, or facilitated our social life so we could attend other kids’ birthday parties. Birthday presents were generally an afterthought, purchased on the day-of. Same with Christmas presents, which were purchased in a frantic rush on Christmas Eve.

It goes on from there. Tilson leverages this presumably painful story from her childhood to make a broader argument: if men aren’t carrying their fair share of the household’s cognitive labor, it’s not because women aren’t giving them the space to “step up.” As the sole adult in the home, her father certainly had plenty of space!

Rather, Tilson argues, men aren’t stepping up to carry the mental load because a) they haven’t been socialized to care about these issues, and b) they’ll face little to no pushback or consequences for not doing this work. Tilson recommends that her readers “quit gaslighting ourselves and reject the myth that our husbands would step in to fill the void if we just stepped back to give them more room.”

Since I keep getting asked about my thoughts on Tilson’s piece, I figure it’s time I share them here. Here’s the headline: Most of Tilson’s experiences line up extremely well with what I’ve seen in my research. I have some minor quibbles and would add a bit of additional nuance, but I think her diagnosis of the problem is spot-on.

Early in the post, Tilson describes hearing that men don’t do more at home because their wives/female partners discourage them from doing so. “Maternal gatekeeping” is the academic term of art for this phenomenon, coined (as far as I can tell) in the late 90s but still an active research area 25 years later. Contemporary scholars tend to subset the overall gatekeeping concept into two categories: gate-opening maternal behaviors that encourage father participation in childrearing, versus gate-closing maternal behaviors that discourage father participation.3

Do I think that some women say and do things that make their male co-parent less inclined to participate in childcare? Absolutely. In fact, a number of my interviewees described doing some classic gate-closing behaviors, like redoing tasks their partner already did or taking over a task from him midway through.

My quibbles are not with the phenomenon itself, but with how it’s framed, and particularly about what happens when it passes from sober academic journals to frenzied social media feeds.

When researchers talk about maternal gatekeeping, they’re careful to frame it as an outcome of cultural norms re: gender, rather than as inexplicable bad behavior on women’s part. In other words, they acknowledge gatekeeping as a symptom of a much bigger “disease”—and we all know what happens when we treat symptoms rather than underlying problems.

But I suspect most people who read about maternal gatekeeping don’t immediately situate it in its broader social context. Instead, they think, ‘Geez, women can be so controlling,’ or perhaps, ‘Ugh, if only I were more chill.’ Tilson describes her own reaction to learning about gatekeeping this way:

On some level, I absorbed the message that it must be my fault that I carry the mental load for our household because I’m just so efficient and overbearing and exacting about taking care of everything that there’s no room for my husband to step up.

Again, I don’t think the researchers studying these phenomena intend to blame women for household inequality or to suggest that gatekeeping is the only/most important factor limiting men’s involvement. But as Tilson points out, it’s really, really hard to not go directly from ‘maternal gatekeeping inhibits father involvement’ to ‘women are the problem.’

Also, there are some, let’s call them curious gender assumptions built into the gatekeeping models. I had a bit of an aha moment reading a common questionnaire researchers use to diagnose maternal gatekeeping. Imagine posing these questions to a mother:

• How often does your baby’s father invite you to help [with the baby]?

• How often does your baby’s father encourage you to spend time alone with your baby?

• How often does your baby’s father arrange activities for you and your child to do together?

It’s funny, right? The idea that a father might need to go out of his way to make sure his wife feels included in childcare, or to do cognitive labor to facilitate mother-child interactions, sounds a little silly.

And for me that’s really the crux of it. Is it pragmatic, and likely quite productive, to ask what women can do to get their male partners more involved in raising their children? Yes.

But those conversations need to more clearly acknowledge the built-in gender asymmetries: we do not, for the most part, see it as men’s job to manage women’s household involvement. The fact that we do seem to see managing men’s involvement as part of women’s job should raise some bigger questions.4

The second major thing I think Tilson gets right comes toward the end of the piece, when she talks about her dynamic with her husband. In her telling, he does “far more household labor than the average Xennial man,” but very little of the mental work. Early in their parenting journey, Tilson chalked this discrepancy up to personality:

I’m an overachieving, type A perfectionist who is, I’ll be honest, a little uptight. My husband is the more chaotic fun one, the guy you want at your party but probably wouldn’t trust to renew the car registration on time.

Eventually, she changed her mind about this explanation:

Over time, it became clear that these personality traits were not our individual quirks as much as the result of a larger cultural pattern in which men in hetero couples are the fun-loving, freewheeling ones, while women keep the ship afloat.

Yes! This! I don’t want to spoil my book too much (my publisher tells me I’m supposed to hold some content back…), but the heart of What’s On Her Mind is about exactly this. The main explanation couples gave me for their unequal distribution of the mental load was their individual personalities. But, like Tilson, I believe a “larger cultural pattern” is actually at work, and I devote a decent chunk of the book to trying to unpack that larger pattern.

I promised to do a bit of quibbling with the post, so let me end with that. Tilson is pessimistic about the possibility of changing these dynamics. It’s right there in her title: “Your husband won’t pick up the mental load if you put it down.” Toward the end, she says she’s given up on redistributing cognitive labor in her own relationship and instead focuses on distributing physical labor more equitably.5

I don’t know how to say this without coming across as #NotAllMen, so I’ll just come out with it: There are men partnered with women who carry 50% or more of their household’s mental load.

They are the minority, for sure. (In my sample, it’s 1 in 5, but I suspect this is an overestimate of the figure in the general population.) Tilson’s experience is much more the norm.

And let me be really clear: Just because some men do carry the mental load does not mean that if your partner doesn’t, you have somehow failed!!!

Still, I think it’s important to acknowledge these “unicorns,” in part because they provide important counterfactual evidence to pernicious myths about women being inherently more organized, or mental load inequalities being totally intractable so why bother.

I also think there’s a lot to be gained from studying these nontraditional men and couples. What demographic factors, belief systems, life circumstances, etc. pushed them onto their unusual trajectory? I raise some possibilities in the book, but I will be the first to admit that we need a lot more research. (Because they’re so rare, it’s hard to get a big enough sample size to come to clear conclusions.)

What I hope comes out of this research are ideas for collective solutions to the problem of mental load inequality. I’m much more optimistic about those than I am about the power of individual couples to buck dominant norms.

Let’s go back to Tilson’s diagnosis of the problem: (most) men aren’t stepping up to carry the mental load because a) they haven’t been socialized to care about these issues, and b) they’ll face little to no pushback or consequences for not doing this work.

I agree with her there. So what can we do? We’re going to need to change the way we raise the next generation of children. And we’re going to need to stop holding adult men and women to different standards for participation in household life. Until we cease to see it as women’s job to manage the home—and to manage their partner’s involvement in it!—we are unlikely to get very far.