In Families, Women Still Do Most of the Cognitive Work
How can we reduce gender inequities in household labor?
Posted August 19, 2025 | Reviewed by Abigail Fagan
This post is a review of What’s On Her Mind: The Mental Workload of Family Life. By Allison Daminger. Princeton University Press. 256 pp. $29.95.
In 2018, a comic entitled “You Should Have Asked” depicted a harried mom whose male partner is seeking instructions before pitching in on household and childcare tasks. “The mental load,” the artist wrote, “is almost completely borne by women. It’s permanent and exhausting work. And it’s invisible.”
In What’s On Her Mind , Allison Daminger, a professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, draws on extensive interviews with 76 different gender and 18 LGBTQ+ couples to provide an informative analysis of the near-constant “background job” of cognitive (non-physical) labor in families. Daminger demonstrates that although many Americans endorse gender equality, a substantial majority of women do most of the cognitive (and more than their fair share of the physical) work. She explains why and suggests how a more balanced allocation of responsibilities might be achieved.
Studies of housework tend to focus on concrete tasks, including cooking and cleaning, that are relatively easy to measure in minutes and hours. By contrast, Daminger emphasizes, cognitive labor involves “anticipating issues, identifying options, making decisions and monitoring results.” When a man takes on chores, his spouse often tells him what to pack in their child’s lunch box or reminds him to buy a birthday card for Aunt Susie. Often invisible, difficult or impossible to schedule, and never really done, mental work can be a lot more stressful than physical labor.
Daminger acknowledges that whether one or both partners worked outside the home and/or significant income differences between them influenced the distribution of cognitive work. That said, solo breadwinners or men with higher earnings almost always took on much less cognitive work; only a minority of women in similar circumstances did so.
“Deeply ingrained notions about gender,” Daminger demonstrates, continue to have a profound impact on family-related work: “When we add mind-use to the more prevalent time-use metrics, gender gaps start to look more like chasms.” Even among couples committed to a more egalitarian approach, women contended with widely held expectations that mothers are responsible for their children more than fathers, and men feel out of place in “ parenting spaces.”
Nonetheless, most of Daminger’s respondents denied that gender caused the inequalities in cognitive and physical practices. But they also found repudiating the role of gender psychologically unsatisfying. Intent on minimizing cognitive dissonance and maintaining a sense of agency, they attributed their allocations to what sociologists call “personal essentialism,” i.e., innate and value-neutral interests, preferences, and skills. Some respondents, it’s worth noting, still explained the attributes as male or female qualities.
More often than not, Daminger writes, the shift from gender essentialism to personal essentialism moves “gender inequality underground, where it is harder to recognize and combat.”
What’s On Her Mind concludes with recommendations for addressing cognitive labor inequality in families. Reimagination, she recognizes, is an uphill battle, especially at a time in which the federal government is unlikely to enact polices to reduce economic inequality, increase flexibility in where and when employees work, and provide high-quality, affordable childcare.
That said, Daminger suggests that organizations and individuals have important roles to play. They can begin by recognizing that problems exist; avoiding reinforcement of gender stereotypes; and initiating conversations among more diverse audiences instead of branding, trivializing and ultimately ignoring them because they are women’s issues. They can learn a lot from LGBTQ+ couples’ approaches to cognitive household labor. They can reduce disparities in cognitive labor by understanding that interests, knowledge, skills, and “parenting capital” are grounded as much or more in nurture than nature. And, as psychologist Carol Dweck has recommended, by developing cultural support for a “ growth mindset ” that views traits more as a function of time, practice and commitment than innate capacity. After all, Daminger emphasizes, men frequently attribute success in their occupations to skills they assert they lack at home; and some women who thrive in the business world “display a curious incapacity” to handle family finances.
Daminger expects reallocation of familial cognitive labor to be, at best, “slow and occasionally painful.” But well worth doing, “if we’re serious about creating a world in which one’s gender is a poor predictor of both mind-use and time-use.”
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Glenn C. Altschuler, Ph.D. , is the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Emeritus Professor of American Studies at Cornell University.
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This article is part of the Bringwise Psychology Journal — daily insights on human behavior, mental health, and personal growth.