In the midst of hype around AI increasing productivity or stealing jobs , there is one role that many women would be more than happy for it to take on: the mental load of managing a family. 

The need for innovation in coping with the mental load of family admin is never more apparent than at the beginning of the school year. The sheer volume of work required to keep our lives in check is utterly overwhelming. It is no wonder parents are burning out.

It is baffling that when it comes to the multitude of apps, emails, WhatsApps and group chats for our home lives, many parents have no help beyond a shared calendar on the fridge.

I even commonly hear that parents just switch off all notifications on WhatsApp and push school emails to a different inbox folder just to try and ease the mental load by not reading it at all.

In my professional life, the prospect of AI to increase our personal productivity, that of our teams, and even our products was intriguing and exciting.

Faced with stark differences between what was available professionally and the lack of options at home, my co-founder and husband, Mike Fraser, and I knew that needed to change.

Technology is creating overwhelm

In my household, Mike and I share the “doing” work of parenting quite evenly, but when it comes to things like Book Week, what’s happening when, and joining all the dots, that’s on me. 

Statistics prove I’m not alone. It is disproportionately women who hold 70% of the household mental load and are burning out from the sheer volume of life admin required to manage kids. Almost 50 per cent say there isn’t enough time to get everything done.

In 2021, the AIFS survey asked 2920 people, “who in your household plans and coordinates activities relating to your children?”. It found almost no instances of the male taking this on – being the one who usually or always does it, while only 1 in 5 households shared the mental load.

Innovating to solve this, even at least partly, is important. It is why CEOs have personal assistants, and why Annabel Crabb’s The Wife Drought is still relevant 10 years after she wrote it.

Starting and then exiting same-day flower delivery business LVLY, and now launching Goldee, the AI assistant for parents, I can say with conviction that the work of managing a family is akin to running a business.

If we can innovate for even small productivity gains in the workplace, we need to do the same to give back time and headspace to the parents who are simply struggling to keep up with technology that was supposed to help them. Parents need personal assistants, too – and that’s where AI presents exciting opportunities.

How AI can give parents back time

Solutions are thin on the ground. A simple internet search on easing the mental load provides vague help such as “practice self-care” (with what free time?) and “physically writing down everything in your head and delegating” (again, with that free time?!).

As AI becomes mainstream, there is a global focus on governance and risks including gender bias within AI, noting that the technology will hold the same bias as its programmers. The kind of products being developed using AI often reflect the dominance of men in the technology space. I believe it is important that the huge gains to be had using AI are also focused on reducing inequalities.

We don’t claim that the AI we’re developing at Goldee will make the mental load completely vanish (sorry!). But AI tools can and should be created so that  any parent can easily take the lead and start forwarding kid-related activities to an AI personal assistant for busy families. This is the kind of innovation that will help  shift the weight and make the invisible load visible.

As with productivity tools in the workplace the hidden volume of work, appointments and organisation, and all those tiny to-dos that normally get carried around in the woman’s head will be extracted and put into an action list, ready for anyone to help with.

Importantly, AI created by women to solve our unique problems means we will have tools to stop us from feeling like it’s easier to just keep doing everything ourselves.

That means more time for doing things we enjoy, more time to connect with our partners (rather than fight over who did what), and more time to spend with our kids rather than on your phone trying to find that piece of info. And that’s an AI-driven future all parents can get on board with.

Goldee is currently in limited release and available to parents with an invite code – parents that would like to be invited can head to Goldee.ai to get their invite.

The post How a new AI assistant for parents can help carry women’s mental load appeared first on Women's Agenda.

Managing ‘screentime’ is another quite complex, often confusing item on the ballooning list of things that women have amongst their ‘to-do’ items along with remembering to check in with friends, top up the toilet paper, keep the pets alive – all the while trying to pursue paid work, meet career aspirations and fulfillment. 

From some commentators, young minds on screens are compared to using illicit drugs in sensational headlines about the negative impacts of screens, leaving parents trying to figure out how to use screens in a healthy way.

As the first generation of parents having to contend with this added layer of digital monitoring and mentoring, the job can often fall on mums: especially single mothers (the dominant form of single parenting households in Australia) and those with a second partner at home, with the stats from the Australian Bureau of Statistics finding that women engaged in unpaid care activities already spend an average 4 hours 31 minutes a day on care a day, compared with 3 hours 12 minutes for men.

The screen issues can creep up suddenly, with parents often unprepared and unsupported when it comes to digital wellbeing and literacy strategies for both themselves and their children.

Who is writing the rules on screen time?

Screen-based media use is both a blessing and a guilt-inducing curse for parents, and yep – it’s mothers who are often primarily responsible for creating and implementing their own rulebooks around digital devices.

These plans are regularly based on an adhoc combination of information – gathered from call-outs in Facebook Mums groups, encountering ‘advice’ (ironically) on social media platforms, and from government health directives (which often lack the practical microskills and ready-to-use strategies needed).

Distilling and critically appraising this information, alongside acknowledging and honouring our own sense of ‘what’s best’ for our children and family, can be a significant task. Women can find themselves having to put in more work around building their skills around media literacy, and learning how to tame their own technology habits to model healthy ones to youngsters.

There is no single agreed upon playbook for managing screen use – partly because the use of screens is such a multimodal and multifaceted activity very specific to individuals and families, and partly because this complexity makes it hard to study well. Again, this can leave parents (and so often mothers) with an additional unpaid duty, far more complicated than arranging school holiday activities or helping out with the P&C: that of managing the issues that arise out of children’s media habits. 

These can range from selecting quality age-appropriate content and supervising online activities to deploying software to help avoid exposure to unsuitable material. There there is the feat of transitioning kids off screens when they’ve had their ‘dose’ and the emotional labour of bargaining and negotiating for different games and devices (pro-tip: outsource the due diligence to your kids).

There is no ‘right’ way

We are currently in the process of having to create the recipe for screen time use. Just like with making the best pizza dough or pancakes, we have to wade through the options to get it ‘right’ for our families – even though there is no ‘right’ way, only what works in the most part for you.

The simplistic time-based limits (which were created out of sedentary guidelines) have been virtually impossible to abide by for years as screens show up in the crevices of our lives, colonising everywhere from social spaces to shopping malls. Setting time-based limits is an easy and measurable place to start, but a singular focus on time spent belies the complexity of the screenome – an individual’s use of and experiences with screens that, over time, shape their psychological and social life on devices.

It’s not just how long our kids are using screens, but what they’re using screens for and the content they’re interacting with.

Parents deserve more support and guidance, otherwise they’re driving their family’s digital use in the dark.

Our ‘digital village’ starts with co-parenting and co-caring and extends to our community and collective-  where we create agreements that don’t simply dictate tech-use contracts but that also give young people a voice to co-design their own digital wellbeing plans. Investing collectively in building these skills helps share the mental load, provides insight into how mum’s think and solve problems (role modelled) and builds connection simultaneously.

Start early, talk often

The multifaceted task of managing screen time requires having more collaborative and explicit conversations about screen activities and habits.

Given that many children’s digital footprint starts with a sonogram before they arrive earthside, and on average they will have nearly 1000 photos of them shared online by the time they are 5, it’s never too early to start learning principles of digital wellbeing.

Children are accessing technology earlier and earlier. Starting young with developing these skills and principles sets parents and children up on a journey together for lifelong digital literacy. I would argue that waiting until kids are at school or worse, officially old enough to join Instagram to build the skills and put the guardrails in place is leaving it disastrously late.

It’s not just toddlers using tablets we’re concerned about, it’s our own both incidental and purposeful use that is sometimes referred to like passive smoking for screentime (as if you didn’t have enough to worry about). Kids observe and mimic us, and their nervous systems wire up in parallel to ours, so having the skills and resources to support our own digital wellbeing is a protective factor for our kids.

Ditching the guilt

‘Mothers guilt’ is real and in the context of devices, has been found to increase alongside screen use for recreation.  Ditching guilt is about looking realistically and compassionately at what we are *really* trying to do with limited resources and those stubborn 24 hours in a day.

As Eve Rodsky’s Fair Play framework and quest for chore equity suggests, getting aligned on values and being able to not just ask for, but demand support and co-piloting devices (where this is possible) is a powerful way to feel seen and understood in relationships and community.

Screen time is often a saviour, they can be a staple of modern lives for a good proportion of the population. Feeling like you’re in the ‘screen time sin bin’ is misplaced energy. Instead, feeling empowered to incorporate screens into family life in informed and intentional ways helps with meaningful skills to build digital competencies that your kids will need for their digitally immersed future.

We’re all doing our best in a hyper-connected, on-demand world where the ‘off switch’ has malfunctioned and the wifi is considered essential. Gathering energy, collaborating and proactively planning for our screen habits is a job worth doing.

Jocelyn Brewer’s Screens in Early Childhood program starts on 24 October.

The post Managing screen time is adding to the mental load of mums appeared first on Women's Agenda.

A significant body of research has looked at how heterosexual couples divide housework, so we decided to look more closely at the housework experiences of people in same-gender couples.

Our study, published today in the journal PLOS One, involved interviews with 16 same-gender couples with no children. Specifically, we wanted to know how these couples handled division of “cognitive labour”, also known as the “mental load”.

That’s the often-invisible “project-manager” work of running a household – things like organising bills, scheduling appointments, remembering birthdays and anniversaries, keeping track of house maintenance, writing the grocery list, keeping stock of the fridge and planning meals.

In heterosexual couples, the burden of the mental load falls primarily on women. Uneven division of household labour can affect mental and physical health and drive resentment.

Many people assume labour is evenly split in same-gender couples. Our study found, however, that same-gender couples divided the cognitive labour according to each other’s strengths, preferences and changing needs.

In other words, the couples did not necessarily aim for the split to be 50/50, but rather for it to be “fair”.

What we did and what we found

The 16 couples in our study were in a same-gender relationship and living together. They did not have children living with them and were aged between 19-47. We interviewed these couples over eight months via Zoom. Four of our interviewees were men, ten were women and two were non-binary. All interviewees identified as being in a same-gender couple at the time of the study. Unlike most other studies, we chose to speak to the interviewees as a couple so they could tell their story together.

What was stark was the performance and allocation of cognitive labour shifted between each person depending on their individual circumstances.

We found the cognitive labour workload wasn’t shared 50/50 all the time (and sometimes not at all). Instead, this labour was divided according to needs that arose within the household and what was considered to be fair and just.

Couples talked about cognitive load shifting between them because of things like study commitments, changes at work, chronic illness and health. Couples also predicted their management of cognitive labour would likely shift through the course of their lives.

The way these couples viewed and performed cognitive labour was influenced by a few different factors.

These included the way they’d seen their own parents manage it, past relationships they had been in and also the way they valued fairness, justice and the uniqueness of their relationship.

Our results show that couples divided the cognitive labour according to each other’s strengths, preferences and changing needs. As one interviewee put it:

That was one of the first things that I was, like, “this is an awesome part of being queer and creating your house.” And so for me, I’ve just thought, it doesn’t have to be, there’s a person who always does these things and a person who does these things and those lists better be the same length.

No ‘queer utopia’

Some couples said this did not mean they were living in a “queer utopia”. During interviews, couples talked about reaching a threshold and feeling stressed by the cognitive labour they were taking on.

There were some couples who had not considered cognitive labour their partner was taking on for their household until it was discussed in the interview (such as keeping Google calendars for social events or making plans to prepare their house for changes in seasons).

But many found ways of dealing with it. Couples talked about communicating their needs and their changing capacity to take on this labour on a regular basis.

They also acknowledged no one person should always be responsible for certain tasks. Cognitive labour in the home was something couples made a point of negotiating on a regular basis. Many saw the ability to be dynamic in how they performed housework as a strength. One participant said:

I think part of my philosophy of household division of labour, sharing the emotional and cognitive load, goes back to my perspective on what a queer household is. And a 50/50 division of labour, I don’t know; we can create whatever we want the house to be.

Our research offers fresh insight into how we can look at and understand housework inequity. A 50/50 split in cognitive labour may not work for everyone or be the goal couples strive for.

Instead, our data shows it’s possible to see cognitive labour as something that is negotiated and shifts dependent on the needs, strengths and preferences of the couple.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The post We asked same-gender couples how they share the ‘mental load’ at home. The results might surprise you appeared first on Women's Agenda.

Quiet quitting became a thing on social media in 2022 and describes putting in no more time, effort, or enthusiasm at work than absolutely necessary.

With my inner resentment growing and my enthusiasm and resilience wilting, I decided to pull back from a role I had been doing for 20 years.  A role I confidently performed with super-efficiency often prioritising delivery over wellbeing.   

I Quietly Quit at home.  

A little different from workers Quiet quitting at work, where employers and managers are not given a heads-up productivity will be dropping, I did notify my family change was coming.  At 3am one Saturday morning, I quickly wrote and hit send on a text message to my husband and our young adults (aged 16 and 18) Subject: Message from Mum – please read. 

Dear Family,

Please let me know you have read this message and I am available to discuss with you together or individually. 

I am not getting much enjoyment in being the manager of the house, being responsible for the unpaid work at home. These tasks include 

• Shopping 
• Cooking 
• Cleaning 
• Laundry 
• Walking Liza 4 – 5 times a week picking up poop, feeding and making sure she has clean water 
• Financial management and budgeting  
• Managing medical appointments
• Driving and being available to drop off and pick up 
• Packing and unpacking dishwasher

These activities are on top of my Full-Time paid work (about 40 -50 hours a week plus 4 – 5 hours travel time) plus the work I do with the University and in my private practice.

My work is very satisfying and rewarding. The unpaid work done at home is not. This work is completed without thanks, with criticism, little support and pushback when assistance and input is requested.

This work is done in an environment where frequently respect is not shown, including:

• not saying hello when greeted in the morning or walking into the house 
• being ignored
• name calling
• watching of screens and airpods shutting off communication
• not keeping personal areas (bedrooms) to standard expected
• not making eye contact when spoken too
• dismissive responses to questions
• minimal support with setting standards
• little support in calling out bad behaviour in a productive and respectful way

I love you all dearly – but I am tired of this. 

As I re-gather my energy, there are things in the unpaid list I won’t be doing as much of. For example, your laundry, picking up groceries during the week, stopping work to drive and pick up. 

Please respond to this message notifying you have read and understood. 

I am always open to finding new ways to work together and am available to talk these through. 

Love Mum / Jo

What changed?

I did.  I pulled back from going the extra mile.  I was less available.  I stopped rushing or cutting short something important to me to get back for someone else. As a result, I felt less stretched and more at ease.   

Tips for Quiet quitting at Home.   

1. Step up: Take responsibility for making the changes needed for you. Expecting others to do the heavy lifting especially when it is going to result in more effort for them is not going to give you the change you are looking for. 
2. Trade Off: Change decision making requires trading off one experience or opportunity to get a different outcome, when Quiet quitting at home expect to trade off efficiency in the short term for longer term harmony 
3. Say yes: This strategy is an interesting one, as for many people who are managing multiple responsibilities in their personal and professional life, getting comfortable with saying no is usually encouraged.  Say yes, to opportunities for fun or a personal or professional challenge and make yourself less available at home. 
4. Fill your happiness cup daily: At the beginning of each day, take a moment to ask yourself what can I do today that will make me feel happy? Try to choose events or experiences that do not require investments of money or time. Things like; throw a coin into the guitar case of the local busker, take a bunch of flowers to work, bake a cake and share at morning tea, put together a ‘happy’ playlist and play on the way to work, eat lunch in the sunshine. 
5. Shift time: Time shifting is more than making every moment count in your day. It involves making intentional choices about what you are doing or planning to do and when is the best time to do it. Be conscious of when it is best to do something and stop working around others.  

The post Tired, and fed up, I quietly quit at home appeared first on Women's Agenda.

Each of these loads is a full-time job, requiring resources and access to support networks — but they’re currently jobs that are simply being done by millions of women across the country whilst in lockdown. They’re working the tripple from their own homes and with no physical access to the village that may typically support them during out-of-lockdown times.

GenVic’s latest research, in partnership with 11 women’s health organisations and featuring interviews with more than 100 women, delivers a number of key concerns as well as recommendations on women’s health during the COVID-19 Pandemic.

*********
Subscribe to get our weekly Women’s Health News in your inbox

It highlights how the triple load, as well as how other forms of inequality and discrimination — racism, ageism, economic inequality etc — are compounding into significant mental health impacts. They find that these impacts can exacerbate reoccurring and existing conditions, and impede recovery of other conditions.

The report pulls on Victorian Population Survey data that finds Victorian women during lockdowns are more significantly likely than men to feel nervous (40% compared with 30%), lonely (28% compared with 16%) and ‘that everything was an effort’ (30% compared with 22%).

The report also notes that 35% of women (compared with 19% of men) have moderate to severe levels of depression during the COVID-19 crisis, as well as 27% who report moderate to severe levels of stress (just 10% for men), and a very concerning 37% of women aged 18 to 24 have had suicidal thoughts, compared with 17% of men.

These figures are given amidst other important data points, including the 55% of job losses during COVID-19 that were held by women and the concerning economic security impacts ahead, with women accessing their superation early at higher rates than men. Women have also taken on the majority of essential work roles, which also happen to be some of the lowest-paid jobs.

Women interviewed for the report talked about the “4 to 6 hours of extra time” they took on during lockdowns, the responsibility they felt for the mental health of friends, and the need to work in the middle of the night just to find some space, among many other things.

They spoke about an increase in household duties, the additional needs and support required for caring for people with a disability or having a disability themselves.

So what needs to be done?

GenVic’s report shares a number of recommendations on what more needs to be done. While it’s specific to Victoria, it’s clear these recommendations can apply to other parts of the country also. Given the rolling lockdowns still occurring in the state, it’s also clear that the pandemic is far from over and much more needs to be done to support the mental health and wellbeing of women, girls and gender diverse people.

The 24 recommendations include:

1. Funding for ongoing support for women’s health must be a priority.
2. Loneliness is a big issue, so it is important to address the daily isolation and loneliness that can result from working from home, caring and being responsible for additional household labour.
3. Government support payments must be made accessible to migrant and refugee women to protect women and their children from poverty and serious mental health issues.
4. Funding for Family Violence prevention and response is needed to make sure women and children are able to leave violence safely.
5. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities should have the rights and funding to self-determine health and welfare needs throughout communities.
6. LGBTIQ/trans/gender identity training needed for health services to ensure appropriate and safe provision of services.
7. Free or subsidised childcare necessary.
8. Access to disability support services must be made more accessible and equitable for women living with disability. Many women with disability struggled to access supports throughout the pandemic, or found their necessary services were deemed non-essential during lockdowns.
9. Ongoing emotional, mental health support and counselling.
10. Waitlists should be revised and adjusted to avoid long wait times.
11. Continued secure housing.
12. Vocational counselling and financial planning to help women ‘pivot’ to new careers or working arrangements after the pandemic.
13. Changes to supports must be clarified and communicated effectively.
14. Information about restrictions, financial aid and supports must be made accessible to all, especially women who speak languages other than English.
15. Definitions and ideas around care work should expand to include community responsibilities.
16. Value the essential services provided by those working in the feminised health, social assistance and education sectors, including by increasing pay equity.
17. Address gender norms and practices that harm women’s mental health, for example rigid gender stereotypes that underpin the division of household labour and the undervaluing of unpaid care work.
18. Ensure the universal public health approach is gender-responsive, enabling women to access mental health information, online resources, helplines and support that best meet their needs, when and where they need it, including by resourcing both generalist mental health helplines and specialist agencies such as PANDA.
19. Retain extension of the Medicare Benefits Schedule (MBS) to cover telehealth consultations for mental health and increase access and affordability by increasing the Medicare rebate, as well as providing a diversity of support options for those unable to use telehealth.
20. Expand the support available through Mental Health Treatment Plans under Medicare to address the anticipated increase in people needing support for mild to moderate mental health issues.
21. Support perinatal mental health by expanding access to appropriate, affordable support services for women during pregnancy and after a baby’s birth.
22. Create clear pathways to care for people with pre-existing mental health conditions who are not able to self-manage during the COVID-19 response and recovery, strengthening and making use of the full suite of outreach, community-based and home-based health and support options to prevent entry to acute care.
23. Provide specialised and targeted mental health support for those experiencing compound trauma from multiple emergencies/disasters, such as bushfire and drought.
24. Provide additional financial, practical and mental health support for carers.

Check out the full GenVic report here.

The post Paid work, care work, mental labour: The triple load impacting women’s health appeared first on Women's Agenda.