The school calls in the middle of the workday. Your child is sick. That means you have to leave the meeting, cancel the rest of your afternoon, and rearrange appointments for tomorrow. Research shows that when this happens to a father, he has a childcare problem. But when it happens to a mother, she can become the childcare problem.
That distinction explains something we don’t talk about enough when we discuss working parents. The inequality isn’t just about who spends more hours doing laundry, cooking dinner, or making appointments for the family. It’s also about which parent gets uninterrupted time to work and what happens when family life (inevitably) disrupts it.
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It’s about more than hours
We usually assess the unfairness that occurs with working parents by looking at hours. How many hours is one parent spending over the other. Who makes dinner most nights? Who helps with homework? Who drives the kids to their orthodontist appointments? But another important aspect that gets overlooked is how much time you can devote to work without being interrupted.
Three hours of work is different than three hours of focus. Most default parents tell me there is often some family matter that requires attention during the day. Schedule the parent-teacher conference. Order larger cleats. Get a birthday gift. Fill out that permission slip. Wonder if your child’s rash is no big deal or will you be at the pediatrician’s office half the day tomorrow. Ok, now back to that quarterly report you are working on.
The problem isn’t really the number of minutes taken away from work. It’s the projects they interrupt. The tough assignment that gets broken up into smaller chunks. The good idea you have to abandon part way through. The project that is supposed to be done by morning that you now have to take home and finish after the kids go to bed. Yes, you can still get everything done on time and excel at your job. But you’ve had to work around interruptions that someone else may never have to consider.
A cumulative effect
None of these items seem too burdensome on their own. Which is the point. Nevertheless, cumulatively they can take up a chunk of your day. This is why I loved the book Fair Play by Eve Rodsky. Her argument wasn’t simply that women perform more household labor. It was that so much of family life involves noticing, anticipating, planning, and remembering.
In one study, researchers looked at 322 mothers with small children and asked them about common household responsibilities. They wanted to understand who did the task but also who did the invisible work of making sure it got done. Mothers did about 73 percent of the planning and organizing and 64 percent of the actual execution. So, your partner might take your son to the dentist, but you found a dentist that takes your insurance, made the appointment, added it to the family calendar, and reminded your husband to leave on time.
Uneven penalties
However, the consequences go beyond workday disruptions. A study published in Gender Work & Organization gave 975 managers in the United States hypothetical situations about mothers and fathers losing productivity because of childcare situations. They were both held accountable. But when asked if they would raise the pay of that person or promote them, mothers were penalized more than the fathers even when the scenarios were identical. Male managers gave dads the benefit of the doubt and still viewed them as capable, committed, and wanting to move up in his career. His issue was seen more as an unfortunate circumstance, but hers was more likely to become evidence of her inability to perform as expected.
What to do
Naturally I wondered, how do we fix this? Women (and surely all default parents) know how to manage the mental load. Probably too well. The better question is why do we expect one person to constantly handle everything that needs to be done?
At home couples should start sharing these tasks and be explicitly clear about who does what. If your domain is dental appointments, that means taking care of appointments, follow ups, phone calls, ordering that lost retainer for the third time. And not waiting for someone else to remind me. The Fair Play system is a great guide for divying things up equitably.
Employers should play a role too. They need to recognize that family responsibilities don’t change someone’s ambition or ability. Employees should be judged on consistent performance standards and not assumptions about which parent is supposedly more dedicated.
And for couples, it means recognizing that uninterrupted time is something both parents need and deserve. And I am not talking about catching up on work after everyone goes to bed. You should have real time to think, create, and concentrate. The real privilege isn’t just having fewer things to do. It’s having the freedom to devote your full attention to things that matter to you. And that freedom shouldn’t be a luxury given to just one parent.
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