Creating an equal household is challenging due to ingrained gender norms, such as women often handling more mental load and managerial tasks. Strategies include sharing chores equally and fostering kindness in relationships to achieve fairness.
And why making a fair split of chores actually stick is so hard Martin Barraud / Getty
This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.
How does a life spent studying gender equality translate to someone’s real relationship? In 2021, Joe Pinsker wondered if the gender scholars he’d interviewed for his stories were able to take what they knew home with them. He discovered that they seemed better than the average individual at avoiding common patterns in different-sex relationships.
But even all of their training couldn’t prevent some pesky norms from creeping in: “The women I interviewed tended to disproportionately handle the managerial elements of running a home, as well as their household’s ‘mental load’—the invisible logistical and emotional work of, among other things, keeping track of when kids need new clothes, planning family outings, and remembering to send birthday cards to loved ones,” Pinsker wrote. Today’s newsletter explores strategies to ensure an equal household—and why making that happen is so hard.
On Equal Partnership
The Gender Researcher’s Guide to an Equal Marriage
By Joe Pinsker
In their personal lives, sociologists attempt to ward off the same inequalities that they study at work. (From 2021)
I recently asked readers to share a photo of something that sparks their sense of awe in the world. Mike M., 73, sent this photo of “sunset on Lake Springfield from the Abraham Lincoln Memorial Gardens,” taken one day after Lincoln’s birthday.
I’ll continue to feature your responses in the coming weeks.
