Just how "invisible" is invisible labor?

A LOT of exciting gender inequality research crosses my desk every week. Writing about it here is one of the best ways I’ve found to A) make sure I actually read it, and B) make sure I commit the core findings to memory.1 If this sort of thing is also interesting/useful to you, give it a heart to let me know (and help others find it)!

First up, Abigail Ocobock on “Cognitive Labor, Power, and Patriarchal Bargains: Not-so-invisible Barriers to Gendered Change.” Ocobock interviewed 81 mothers and fathers raising school-aged children about their division of housework and childcare, among other topics. Her core argument is that cognitive labor is far from invisible to the women performing the bulk of it for their families. Nor is this labor invisible to their husbands, who were more willfully ignorant than innocently oblivious of the work their female partner was doing.

Cognitive labor is not, Ocobock argues, inherently invisible. Instead, it’s obscured by gendered power dynamics (i.e., men have the privilege to opt out) and upheld by women’s willingness to strike “patriarchal bargains” (i.e., “accepting inequality and trading power for gains in other areas of life”).

Ocobock is critical of my own and others’ research for perpetuating what she sees as a misconception of mental work as invisible rather than ignored or suppressed. I think our ideas are less contradictory than Ocobock suggests, though that’s a subject for another day. Still, there are differences in our findings.

My hunch is that those differences primarily reflect big shifts in the public conversation about household labor over the last few years.

Ocobock conducted her interviews in 2020, at the height of the pandemic lockdowns. Meanwhile, roughly half of the interviews I conducted (with different-gender couples; LGBTQ couples came later) for What’s on Her Mind took place in 2017; the other half took place in late 2019 through early (pre-Covid) 2020.

Though I haven’t (yet!) studied this systematically, I cannot stress enough how different things feel now than they did back when I started out. Here’s a stylized version of the transition:

A typical cocktail party interaction in 2017:

Me: So, yeah, I’m interested in the work of planning and making decisions for your family.

Random person: Oh, you mean emotional labor?

Me: Er, no, that’s actually pretty different…

Fast-forward to a typical cocktail party interaction in 2025:

Me: So, yeah, I wrote a book about the mental work of running a household and raising children.

Random person: Oh, the mental load! It’s all over my Instagram feed. My mom-friends and I talk about this ALL the time. Can I tell you an uncomfortable story about my spouse?

Me: Er, sure, I’m all ears…

I’m exaggerating a bit—plus I actually really enjoy hearing uncomfortable stories about spouses—but not that much. Things started to stir in the summer of 2017 when the French artist Emma’s piece “The Mental Load: A Feminist Comic” went viral, followed a few months later by Gemma Hartley’s also-viral article “Women Aren’t Nags—We’re Just Fed Up.” Two or three of my interviewees mentioned having seen these pieces, but the vast majority were unfamiliar with the concept of mental load.

Fast-forward to the Covid days, and those one-off viral hits swelled into something much bigger. The change was propelled by domestic situations that had hummed along at suboptimal-but-tolerable levels pre-pandemic but, when everything shut down, morphed into holy-shit-I’ve-reached-my-breaking-point. Media (social and mainstream alike) picked up on and amplified this energy. I don’t think it’s coincidence that my own work started getting a lot more attention outside academic circles around this time. (Okay, I also had extra time and energy on my hands and channeled some of that into proactively communicating with non-academic audiences…)

I stand by my findings (relative to physical labor, cognitive labor is a lot harder to see, and that’s particularly true of the kinds of cognitive labor that are most feminized, like anticipating needs). But it’s also extremely plausible to me that the relative invisibility I observed pre-Covid had meaningfully eroded by the time Ocobock was conducting her research.

I’m less certain about how far concepts like cognitive labor and mental load have entered most men’s media diets. I’m often shocked by how different my husband’s internet is from mine. Still, the era of plausible deniability for limited involvement in cognitive labor (‘I had no idea it was a thing!’) is waning. And that’s probably for the best.

Below the paywall, another recent article that caught my eye:

Do women who earn more than their husband do less cognitive labor?