There are activities that are so invisible that they may even be invisible to the person who performs them. This is the case for the cognitive dimension of housework, one of the most successful sociological concepts of recent times. The aim of this article is to present the concept, to unmask it, and to suggest some alternatives to prevent excessive inequality in the mental workload from having negative consequences for households and paid work.
The mental burden of organising everything that needs to be done
Arlie Hochschild, in his book The Second Shift, published in 1989, realised that even in the most egalitarian couples, in the strict sense of the distribution of tasks, one of the two was the computer, the CPU at home. A simple question, “What’s the cooking today?”, helped her to understand that, although the tasks are equally distributed – you do this, I do that – there is a meta-task that is omnipresent, and paradoxically invisible: the mental organisation of everything that has to be done. Today we’ll have that or the other for dinner, tomorrow our son has piano lessons and must not forget the book, or next week we must take my father to the neurologist. These are tasks that, although they do not require action, they do require a cognitive effort, a mental effort. In this article on what is co-responsibility we deal with this topic in depth.
Much more recently, Alison Daminger, a young Harvard doctoral student, has gone a step further, and based on a qualitative study with heterosexual couples, has further refined the concept suggested by Hochschild. This concept is that of the cognitive dimension of housework and is divided into four broad dimensions:
- Anticipating needs
- Identifying alternatives
- Decision making
- Monitoring process.
We could go on with many examples. Our daughter is about to celebrate her birthday, and we have to prepare a party for her or edit a video with messages, or my mother seems to be losing her faculties, and we have to do something about it. These are mental activities necessary to project future physical actions. However, these mental tasks and this cognitive dimension of work have four main characteristics:
- They are omnipresent, so they’re constantly performed.
- They are invisible, so invisible that they become invisible to those who perform them and to their environment.
- They generate fatigue and conflict, although sometimes also enrichment and joy.
- They are carried out to a much greater extent by women than by men.
The mental burden remains a female burden
Going into much more detail among the couples in the study, Daminger observed that certain patterns emerged across the four broad dimensions (Daminger, 2019). For example, of the four dimensions (anticipate, identify alternatives, decide, monitor), women virtually always performed dimensions 1 and 4 (anticipate and monitor) on their own, while dimension 2 (identify alternatives) was done both individually and jointly, and dimension 3 (decide) was virtually always carried out consensually.