The Brief
Women’s mental load at work is the effort of keeping track of what others need, what could go wrong and what still needs doing, alongside the work a woman is actually paid to do. Some of it starts at home; offices, shop floors and shift teams generate plenty of their own. It can be hard to explain why a perfectly ordinary working day felt exhausting when everything on the list got done. Sometimes the explanation is that you were keeping everyone else’s list as well.
Women’s mental load at work: At a glance
- A task has changed hands fully when someone else notices when it is due, acts on it and checks the outcome.
- Workplace experiments found that women were more likely to receive requests for necessary duties that count for little towards promotion.
- In a study of 322 mothers, carrying more of the household planning was associated with greater stress and depressive symptoms. The study did not establish cause and effect.
- Managers can start with one recurring duty: give its owner time, authority and a backup, then see whether the old owner can take leave without a call.
How does a 5-minute favour become your job?
The telling word is remind. A colleague agrees to ring the supplier on Thursday. As you both leave, he says, quite sincerely, “Remind me in the morning?” His part takes five minutes on Thursday. Yours begins on Tuesday, when you realise you can no longer afford to forget.
You might recognise women’s mental load at work in that exchange even if you like your colleague and he usually pulls his weight. He has agreed to make the call. You still own Thursday. And if the answer affects Friday’s delivery, you may find yourself asking how the call went, then telling the people on the late shift. None of that figured in the original favour.
There is real skill in seeing round corners. Ask anyone who has run a ward, a production line or a client account. The trouble begins when people rely on that skill without agreeing whose job it is or what other work it displaces. A colleague covering a shift can point to four hours on a rota. The person who spotted the gap, found cover and made sure the replacement had a key may have nothing to point to at all.
Why does it so often land with women?
One answer sits in the few seconds before somebody volunteers. In research published in the American Economic Review, Linda Babcock and colleagues examined tasks that benefited the group but did little for the person’s prospects of promotion. Women were more likely to volunteer, more likely to be asked and more likely to accept. People expected women to say yes. A manager who keeps asking whoever agreed last time can reproduce that pattern without ever deciding that a job belongs to women.
It costs something to be the reliable one. The colleague who follows up on every late approval has less uninterrupted time to prepare the pitch. Come appraisal season, the pitch has a client’s name and a result attached to it. The approvals all came through, so nobody remembers there was a problem. Giving women credit for the work that made an outcome possible helps. Giving the next pitch to the woman who cleared the way for the last one might help more.
What does carrying it do to your health?
Consider the difference between collecting a prescription for a parent and being the person who knows there are only three tablets left. The first job fits into a lunch break. The second can come to mind halfway through a difficult conversation at work. Later, a colleague’s unfinished handover can intrude on a quiet evening in much the same way. Even on a day when nothing goes wrong, there may be very little time when nobody is depending on you to remember.
A study of 322 mothers of young children asked about 30 household tasks, separating the planning from the doing. The mothers reported taking on roughly 73% of the planning and 64% of the physical work. A greater share of the planning was associated with higher reported stress, burnout and depressive symptoms. The researchers relied on the mothers’ own accounts. Those findings cannot tell us that planning caused a particular woman’s symptoms, or how common those symptoms are among working women generally.
Nor does the issue begin with motherhood. Research on dual-earner couples found that, among women without children, an unequal share of household thinking was linked with emotional exhaustion, which in turn was associated with a greater intention to leave work.
An intention is different from a resignation. It is still worth a manager’s attention before a valued colleague starts looking elsewhere. If poor sleep, low mood or trouble concentrating persists or interferes with daily life, it is worth speaking to a qualified health professional. Nobody needs to prove that work caused it to ask for support.
What can you hand over on Monday?
If you recognise yourself here, you do not have to present a diary of everything you do to make a reasonable request. Try naming the part that tends to come back: “Can you take the supplier call through to Friday’s delivery? That includes putting it in your diary and telling the late shift what you hear.” At home, owning a prescription refill could mean checking the supply, arranging the repeat and collecting it. Agree what a good outcome looks like, then leave room for the other person to get there their way.
A junior employee or a woman on a temporary contract may reasonably feel she cannot say that to her manager. That is where the manager has to go first. Take one recurring snag to the next shift meeting. Ask who spotted it the last three times, who could authorise a fix, and who was chased if it went wrong. Give one person enough paid time and authority to see it through, name cover, and take something else off their list.
Rotate routine duties; where coordination takes expertise, give it a proper place in the role and the pay discussion. The World Health Organisation recommends changing working conditions that pose risks to mental health. A confidential counselling service can help someone who is struggling; it cannot authorise a replacement on the late shift.
Let her forget Thursday
There is a particularly good test of a handover. Thursday comes, the supplier rings back, the late shift gets the message, and the woman who used to keep track hears about none of it. She might use the time to finish a proposal. She might eat lunch while it is still hot. Either way, she was free to forget. That is what sharing the work feels like from her side.
Editorial Note
This Knowledge Hub article was prompted by Femtech World’s feature on women’s mental load at work, which brought together interviews, published research and early observations from Véa’s platform. We returned to the original research. App users are a self-selected group; their experiences are not a prevalence estimate or evidence that a product treats distress. The supplier call, shift handover and prescription are illustrations, not interviews. Household planning, workplace task allocation and clinical symptoms are different things; no single study measures all three. No claim here is an estimate for India.
Sources
- Allison Daminger, The Cognitive Dimension of Household Labour, American Sociological Review (2019): qualitative research distinguishing anticipation, finding options, decisions and monitoring.
- Linda Babcock and colleagues, American Economic Review (2017): experiments on who volunteers for, is asked to do and accepts tasks with little promotion value.
- Cognitive household labour, Archives of Women’s Mental Health: self-reported planning, execution and wellbeing among mothers; the percentages above are rounded.
- Taking on the Invisible Third Shift, original research: dual-earner couples, emotional exhaustion and work attitudes; the largely white, highly educated sample limits generalisation.
- WHO, Mental health at work: risks associated with workload and control; organisational responses. The handover suggestions are our practical applications.
