Dr. Patricia Schmidt

How the “helper” mentality reinforces gender inequality

Recently, I saw the following post on social media:

The post is full of good intentions, you might say.

How nice of this guy! He wants to support his partner and help.

Some women commented on the post, complaining that they didn’t want an extra task, such as writing a list, or that their partner should know what to do without giving him a list or telling him every time.

But I have a more fundamental problem with this message.

What bothers me is the word “help.”

When a man says he’s “helping” with housework, it feels like a favor rather than an obligation. The problem with the “helping” mentality is that it frames domestic work as a woman’s job, with men only stepping in to assist.

Helping is not enough

I grew up in a household with a “classical” division of work. While my father ran his business and earned money, my mother stayed home to care for me and my sister. My father didn’t even know how to switch on the kitchen stove. I learned from a young age that household and care work was for women.

This mentality slowly changed during my adolescence and early adulthood, and I was lucky enough to find a husband who, despite growing up in a household with a similar scheme, participated in household and care tasks.

Yet, our share was unequal, despite both of us holding university degrees and me being more advanced in my academic career than him.

A few years ago, he saw me overwhelmed with all the housework and care tasks. While he participated in other tasks, meal prepping for the whole week for our family of 4 was my task.

It was a lot, and I felt like I was drowning in an endless sea of meal prep, laundry, and other tasks next to my demanding university job.

He offered to take turns.

“Just tell me what to cook, and I’ll do it.”

That’s precisely the “help” mentality.

Cooking involves a lot more than the mere act of prepping the food. There’s a planning phase regarding which dishes to prepare and more planning involved regarding grocery shopping (when, where, and what to buy).

It’s a lot of cognitive work.

These invisible activities constitute the mental load associated with household and care tasks.

Luckily, we could work it out and advance towards a more equal relationship and workload at home.

But the social media post above clearly shows that the “helping” mentality is still in men’s (and women’s!!!) heads and how housework is reduced to the visible, physical part.

The problem with the “helping” mentality

According to the Cambridge Dictionary, the word help is defined as follows: “to make it possible or easier for someone to do something, by doing part of the work yourself or by providing advice, money, support, etc.”

In other words, this definition implies that helping means assisting somebody with their tasks.

Yes, with their tasks.

By assuming that men “help,” we imply that the task is assigned to women, and men make it easier for them because they’re so lovely and help.

If this is today’s mentality, then not much has changed, even though men participate in household tasks more than a few decades ago.

The hard facts:

• Women still do more housework and care work than men.
• Housework is more than the visible actions of someone sweeping the floor or washing the dishes. It also involves a lot of cognitive work, called mental load.

Let’s dive into the data.

Gender roles in domestic and care work

According to the most recent OECD report, women aged 15-64 still spend more time on unpaid tasks than men. The current OECD mean is 137 minutes/day for men, while women spend 263 minutes daily on domestic and care tasks—almost double the amount!

Sweden is the most advanced OECD country in terms of gender equality. However, even there, we can still observe a difference of 49 additional minutes daily that women invest in unpaid labor compared to men.

Sweden is closely followed by Denmark and Norway, with a gender difference of less than 1 hour daily. On the other side of the spectrum are Portugal (with a difference of 232 minutes/day) and Turkey (237 minutes).

This unequal pattern also holds when looking at equally (and highly) qualified couples where both partners work full-time jobs: Even under these conditions, women spend more time on care and domestic work than men, according to this study and this study. On the other hand, part-time work is more common in women than men, making it more likely that a man has a spouse who stays at home or works part-time than the other way around.

Thus, there is still a massive gap in how much time men and women invest in domestic and care tasks, and the “help” mentality won’t help us achieve the necessary changes.

Furthermore, unpaid work is usually calculated based on physical, observable tasks. But there is more to it: the mental load associated with household and care tasks.

The invisible part of work: Mental load

Domestic and care work goes beyond cooking, cleaning, caring for the kids, etc. A lot of the labor is invisible because it happens at the mental level. Planning the weekly activities, planning the meals, thinking about which groceries to buy, etc., are tasks that occur at the cognitive level and take up a considerable amount of headspace.

These invisible activities are referred to as mental load, sometimes called cognitive household labor.

And who has to carry the most mental load? Of course, it’s women again. According to the recent Skylight report, 73% of women with children indicated they were the only person in the household to run the family’s calendar, and even more of them (78%) indicated they were the primary caregivers at home.

Conversely, a study published this year based on a US sample reported that women spent more time in unpaid labor than men and that the gap was even bigger for cognitive household work than physical work.

Of the 30 activities analyzed, only 2 were executed more frequently by men than women at the physical level: Home maintenance tasks and taking out the garbage. And only the latter task was realized more by men than women at the cognitive level. In all, women were responsible for 73% of all the mental labor and 64% of the physical labor at home.

The same study also found a significant negative association between the amount of cognitive work exerted by women and different indicators of their mental health and subjective relationship quality. Even though the study methodology didn’t allow establishing a cause-effect relationship, this is an alarming finding.

Thus, women experience an enormous mental load associated with household and care tasks, and the imbalance between the genders is even greater for invisible cognitive tasks than for visible physical tasks. That’s why the idea of “helping” women is even more wrong; it only considers physical labor.

The gender gap for mental load is even bigger than for physical labor at home.

The conclusion

Even though I am sure that the social media post referenced above was full of good intentions and a genuine interest of the man who posted it to support his partner, it revealed the “helper” mentality.

It’s time we stopped seeing domestic tasks as something men “help” with and started seeing them as shared responsibilities.

Moreover, all the invisible work that women realize each day, referred to as mental load or cognitive labor, has yet to be considered to advance toward a more egalitarian society.

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