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Year: 2018

2019 Wellbeing

Why Emotional Labor May Be Physically Hurting Women

5 min read

September 26, 2018 at 12:16AM When can women finally say, “I’ve done enough”? Continue Reading… Caretaking is still a woman’s domain. For all the advances modern technology, birth control, and feminism have given us, the so-called second shift in most homes across the world still falls to women, who are not only often the primary caretakers for children but also generally the household managers, upkeepers, and decision-makers. A United Nations report this year found women do some 2.6 times the amount of unpaid work that men do, including everything from physical tasks like cooking, cleaning, and picking up the kids from school to mental tasks like planning meals and vacations, coordinating schedules, figuring out logistics, remembering family birthdays and special events, and delegating chores. Even as changing attitudes around gender and women’s participation in the workplace have somewhat eased the gap between men and women’s physical contributions to the house over the last several decades, women still generally bear the brunt of the emotional labor involved in making sure these domestic responsibilities are being fulfilled. When it comes to heterosexual partnerships, she’s the one saddled with the responsibility, stress, and emotional burden by default, the one whose head space must be partially filled with the work waiting for her at home—the “overhead of caring.” But in addition to all the mental stress and exhaustion, it seems that emotional overhead may even be harming women’s physical health. New research in the journal Sex Roles found perceiving an unfair division of labor

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