The Mental Load Is Holding Women Back At Work, New Study Proves

Holiday magic. The holiday season can be full of joy, reflection, and quality time — and, for women, an even more overwhelming share of the mental load, the invisible work that goes into managing a household and family.  

Ana Catalano Weeks, a senior lecturer in comparative politics at the University of Bath who often studies gender and society, has two new research papers that study the impact of the mental load on women. 

The first, published with University of Melbourne sociology professor Leah Ruppanner in the Journal of Marriage and Family, follows parents in the U.S. and found that mothers carry, on average, 71% of the mental load. 

This includes the unseen work that precedes physical work: noticing that the faucet is leaking and must be repaired, remembering when to schedule a doctor’s appointment or cut the kids’ nails, or keeping track of who to give gifts to each holiday season.  

Catalano Weeks’ research is among the first to quantitatively, rather than qualitatively, study this labor. 

“This is work that goes on in people’s heads, so it’s not really possible to observe it,” she explains — compared to typical measures of physical labor like time-use surveys.  

So why do women get stuck doing the overwhelming majority of this work? 

Like with the physical labor of housework, it’s a way of “performing gender,” the researchers found. 

“The work itself isn’t visible, but the implications of it are,” Catalano Weeks says. 

If parents don’t remember that it’s Christmas sweater day at school or that the kids are outgrowing their shoes, the mom is typically the one who internalizes that lapse.  

Which brings us to Catalano Weeks’ second study: the impact of all this labor on women’s roles in public life through a study of working parents in the U.K. 

The research, accepted by the British Journal of Political Science but not yet published, finds some of the first causal evidence between the mental load and women’s participation in the workforce and political life. 

It’s not that women don’t have enough time, but that the cognitive load takes up more space in their minds and “crowds out” the ability or desire to take on additional responsibility at work. 

Men, who more often are able to forget about the never-ending work of managing a home and family, don’t see that phenomenon to the same degree.  

What’s unique about the mental load is the way it cuts across class and privilege. Unlike physical household labor like chores, it’s near-impossible to outsource the entire mental load; even for the wealthiest couples who hire a household manager or equivalent staffer to handle much of this work, someone would still carry the mental load of managing that person.  

Written by Emma Hinchliffe and Nina Ajemian for Fortune as “Women carry 71% of a household’s ‘mental load’ and it can limit their participation in the workforce, new research finds” and republished with permission.