———

I went back to work part-time when my daughter was small, and I didn’t ask for a raise for two years. Not because I didn’t need one, or because I thought I was paid fairly. But because I’d been gone, and I felt it – the particular lurch of returning to a job that had moved on without you, of sitting in meetings and not knowing what was going on, of being uncertain whether the work I was doing was actually good enough. And I was already asking for part-time hours so it felt like I was asking for a lot.

So I didn’t ask. And that decision, which felt like tact, like being realistic, cost me. Not just the salary I didn’t earn in those two years, but the compounding effect of a lower base for every negotiation that came after.

I’m telling you this because I think you’ve done a version of this too, and I want to show you what it actually costs.

The story we've been told is wrong

The standard explanation for why women invest less than men is that we’re risk-averse, too cautious or (one of my favourites) too emotional about money. This is a convenient story for the people it flatters.

Research consistently shows that women who invest achieve returns equal to or better than men. A Warwick Business School study found that women outperformed their male counterparts by 1.4 percentage points annually¹ – not a rounding error over decades. The gap between men and women is not in investment performance, it’s in investment participation.

Which means the question isn’t why women are bad at investing, it’s why fewer women invest in the first place.

Three real reasons

1. The money simply isn't there.

Women earn less. In the US, full-time female workers earn around 81 cents for every dollar earned by men² – and for women of colour, the gap is considerably wider. In the UK, the gender pay gap sits at around 13% across all employees.³ In Australia, it’s 21% when you factor in total remuneration including bonuses and superannuation contributions.⁴ Across the EU, women earn on average 12% less than men per hour.⁵

Less income means less disposable income; less disposable income means less to invest.

Add to that the unpaid labour dimension: Women across the OECD perform on average 2.5 times more unpaid care and domestic work than men.⁶ In the UK, that’s estimated at £1.24 trillion annually.⁷ That labour: cooking, caring, managing, organising, anticipating – doesn’t show up in a bank account. But it does absorb hours that could otherwise be spent on paid work, side income, or thinking clearly about your own finances.

2. Investing is coded as not for you

Money culture has historically been built by men, for men. The language of markets, “beating” returns, “aggressive” growth strategies, “killing it” in your portfolio, is not accidental. Neither is the fact that financial media, until very recently, defaulted to a male audience. Neither is the social infrastructure: the investment clubs, the dinner table conversations about shares, the fathers explaining compound interest to their sons.

Women are more likely to have been steered toward saving, which is safe, rather than investing. Saving is putting money under the pillow, investing is putting money to work. The distinction matters enormously over time, and women have been systematically pointed toward the pillow.

This creates a gap in what researchers call financial socialisation: the informal, accumulated exposure to money concepts that makes investing feel normal and legible. Men often absorb this through osmosis, women are more likely to feel they need to formally qualify before they start: to read enough, know enough, be certain enough.

3. Confidence is a structural problem.

Back to my anecdote: the confidence I lost after my daughter was born was a rational response to an interruption that actually did set me back professionally, combined with a workplace that (subtly, never explicitly) made me feel that asking for anything was already a lot.

Low financial confidence in women is the expected output of being told, explicitly and implicitly, that this isn’t your domain. Of watching financial decisions get made around you rather than with you. Of having your financial judgement treated as less authoritative than your partner’s, your father’s, your male colleague’s.

The advice to “just be more confident” is a deflection. Confidence follows action, not the other way around – and the real solution is lowering the barrier to entry enough that you act before you feel ready.

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When it happens matters as much as that it happens

Here is the part that should make you angry.

The years women are most likely to shrink their financial ambitions, roughly the late 20s through early 40s, when caregiving, part-time work, career interruptions, and the psychological aftermath of all of the above converge, are precisely the years when invested money has the longest runway to grow.

Compound interest is not complicated, but its implications are brutal if you’re on the wrong side of them. Money invested at 32 has roughly 30 years to grow before a standard retirement age. Money invested at 42 has 20. That ten-year difference, on even modest contributions, produces a gap in outcomes that cannot be closed by “catching up later”.

Let’s make it concrete. Say you invest $300 a month from age 20 to age 35, then stop contributions entirely and just leave it to compound. Assuming a ~7% average annual return – roughly the long-run average of a diversified global index fund – you’d have around $750,000 by 65. Now say you wait until 35 to start, and invest $300 a month from 35 to 65. You’d have around $370,000. The person who invested for fifteen years and stopped ends up with significantly more than the person who invested for 30 years and started late.

This is not to say don’t start at 38. Start at 38. Start at 48. Start now.

But understand that the pause – the years you didn’t invest because money was tight after the baby, because you were rebuilding confidence, because you were putting the joint savings goal first, because you just hadn’t got around to it – those years are expensive.

It happens in increments

Nobody sits down and decides not to build wealth, it happens in small increments.

It’s reducing your pension contributions when cash is tight after parental leave and not reinstating them when things get easier. It’s putting the joint house deposit ahead of your own investment account, indefinitely. It’s not negotiating your salary because you’re already asking for flexibility and you don’t want to push it. It’s spending your cognitive energy managing everyone else’s finances – the household budget, the kids’ activities, the family holiday – while your own financial future sits in a tab you never quite get to.

None of these feel like wealth decisions at the time, but they are.

And they accumulate in a particular way for women, because women are more likely to be the default household manager, more likely to have taken the career hit for childcare, more likely to be the lower earner in a heterosexual partnership and therefore more likely to defer on financial decisions.

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What to actually do

Start before you feel ready. The feeling of readiness is not coming. Investing something, even a small amount, into a low-fee index fund can help getting unstuck. Low-fee index funds – funds that track the broad market rather than trying to beat it – are widely available in most countries, and the platforms to access them have never been more accessible. Most require very little to start. A quick search for "index fund platform" plus your country will surface the main options; reading a few independent reviews will tell you which have the lowest fees. If you have a workplace pension or superannuation fund, it's also worth checking what investment options sit within it – many people have more choice there than they realise.

Reinstate contributions you reduced and never got around to restoring. This is the single most common and most costly inaction. If you dropped your pension or superannuation contribution during a tight period, check what it’s set at and how you can increase it again.

Separate “our money” from “my money.” Joint finances are fine, joint finances as your only finances are not.

Negotiate everything, every time. Salary is the obvious one, but it’s not the only lever. When you’re offered a role, or up for a review, or changing hours – negotiate the full package. That means your bonus percentage and the targets it’s tied to (vague targets are unpaid bonuses). It means superannuation or pension contributions above the statutory minimum; many employers will go higher if asked, and a 1-2% difference in employer contributions compounds significantly over a career. It means additional leave, flexible working arrangements formalised in writing, professional development budgets, health insurance, income protection and life insurance cover. These are not extras, they are compensation, and they are negotiable. Most women don’t ask because it doesn’t occur to them that the package is a package, not a fixed object.

And yes, salary too – for the version of you at 65. Every increase you don’t negotiate is money absent from your base for every negotiation that follows. The compounding effect of under-negotiating your salary isn’t just this year’s shortfall, it’s a smaller foundation for every future raise, a lower figure on which any percentage increase is calculated, and – where pension or superannuation contributions are salary-linked – smaller retirement savings across your entire working life.

Know what’s yours. If you’re in a relationship, know what you own, what’s in your name, and what would happen to your financial position if that relationship ended.

Where to go from here

The resources below might be useful and a good starting point. None of this is an endorsement, and nothing replaces advice tailored to your situation.

Friends That Invest (formerly Girls That Invest) – founded by New Zealander Simran Kaur, this is the world’s number one investing podcast for women, with over six million downloads. Accessible, jargon-free, and good on the basics. The book Girls That Invest is worth having on your shelf.

Her First $100K - Tori Dunlap's platform, described by CNBC as "the voice of financial confidence for women." Podcast, courses, salary negotiation resources, and a community of over five million women. Explicitly feminist framing – money as a tool against systemic inequality.

She’s on the Money – Victoria Devine’s Australian podcast and Facebook community (search ShesontheMoneyAUS) has over 400,000 members. The Facebook group in particular is an unusually high-quality space for practical money questions, peer support, and real conversations about investing. If you want a community, start here.

Ladies Finance Club – Australian-based, founded by Molly Benjamin, with over 70,000 women in its community. Strong on events, courses, and making investing feel accessible rather than intimidating. Also operates in the UK.

Female Invest – a European-founded platform now operating globally, with 85,000+ members across 125 countries. App-based, with courses, a trading simulator, and a community forum. Good option if you want structured learning at your own pace.

MoneySmart – ASIC’s free Australian resource. Dry but reliable. The compound interest calculator alone is worth five minutes of your time.

MoneyHelper – the UK government’s free financial guidance service. Covers pensions, budgeting, and investment basics without trying to sell you anything.

The system is not set up for women to build wealth easily. Lower earnings, more unpaid labour, exclusion from financial culture, and the particular cruelty of peak deprioritisation occurring during peak compounding years – none of this is accidental and none of it is your fault. But fault and agency are different things. You can understand the structural reality and still act within it. Seeing it clearly is the first move. ♡

Nothing in this article is personal financial advice. It is information. For advice specific to your situation, talk to a financial adviser (one who charges a flat fee rather than earning commission on what they sell you).

Sources:

¹ Warwick Business School https://www.wbs.ac.uk/news/are-women-better-investors-than-men/

² US gender pay gap https://nwlc.org/press-release/for-the-first-time-ever-census-bureau-data-shows-gender-wage-gap-widening-for-a-second-year-in-a-row/

³ UK gender pay gap https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/earningsandworkinghours/bulletins/genderpaygapintheuk/2024

⁴ Australia gender pay gap https://www.wgea.gov.au/pay-and-gender/gender-pay-gap-data

⁵ EU gender pay gap https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/policies/justice-and-fundamental-rights/gender-equality/equal-pay/gender-pay-gap-situation-eu_en

⁶ Women do 2.5x more unpaid care work https://www.unwomen.org/en/articles/faqs/faqs-what-is-unpaid-care-work-and-how-does-it-power-the-economy

⁷ UK unpaid labour valued at £1.24 trillion https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/nationalaccounts/satelliteaccounts/articles/changesinthevalueanddivisionofunpaidcareworkintheuk/2000to2015

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The Equitable Home

———

There is a version of girlhood that has been the default for a very long time and it will feel very familiar: quiet, accommodating, likeable. Hair tidy, make-up subtle, voice soft, low-maintenance. The good girl doesn’t take up too much space, doesn’t want too much, doesn’t say too much. Don’t make a fuss.

Most of us grew up inside that version, to varying degrees. Some of us didn’t notice until adulthood – until we found ourselves automatically apologising for existing in someone else’s way, or shrinking a salary negotiation because asking felt aggressive, or realising we had spent twenty years being very good at making other people comfortable.

Before my daughter was born, I made a decision: I was going to fight, tooth and nail, the idea that girls should be invisible and quiet. I didn’t know exactly what that would look like yet – I just knew I wasn’t handing her that particular inheritance.

What I’ve figured out since is that the work is the accumulation of small actions, over years, that add up to a different kind of formation.

The problem isn't individual parenting, but it can start there

Before I go into specifics, I need to acknowledge the structural reality first. The patriarchy is not a conspiracy run by villains; it’s a set of deeply embedded arrangements that benefit men at women’s expense and reproduce themselves through ordinary life: Through who does the housework, through whose career gets treated as the more important one, through who gets interrupted in meetings and who gets called abrasive. Through what girls are told they’re good at, what they’re discouraged from attempting, and what gets described as a personality trait when it’s actually a survival strategy.

Girls learn very early that the world rewards them for being easy, for not making a fuss, for caring (a lot) about how they’re perceived. The research is clear: girls receive more praise for compliance than boys do, and more criticism for assertiveness. They’re told they’re bossy when they lead, dramatic when they express emotion, and intimidating when they’re competent. By adolescence, many have learned to manage their own visibility as a matter of social self-preservation.

I had a boss once tell me, in an annual review, that I needed to work on my confidence – and that heels and more make-up might help. It cost me a year of therapy to come back from that comment. A year of unpicking why a sentence about footwear had managed to dismantle something load-bearing in how I saw myself.

A year later I mentioned it back to him, he’d forgotten he’d said it. Genuinely forgotten while I’d spent twelve months rebuilding around it. He told me I’d done a great job that year and we should just put it behind us. A throwaway comment, to him. A landmine, to me.

That asymmetry is the whole mechanism in miniature. He could say it lightly because it cost him nothing. It cost me a year, because somewhere underneath the confidence and the competence I’d built was still a girl who’d been trained that how she looked was the metric that mattered most, and one offhand sentence from someone with power over my career was enough to find that dial and use it.

Girls thinking they need to be invisible is a structural outcome of a patriarchal society. Parenting is one of the places where we can insert friction into that process.

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What this looks like

It looks like small consistent signals, sent over time, that build a different set of assumptions.

It looks like not praising girls primarily for how they look. This one is harder than it sounds – because it’s what adults reflexively say to small girls. “You look so pretty.” “What a beautiful dress.” It’s not malicious, it just trains girls to understand that their appearance is the most interesting thing about them. Swap it for “what did you make today” or “I like how far you threw that ball” and you’re building a different kind of self-concept.

It looks like letting girls be bad at things without rescuing them from it. The research on girls and risk aversion is fairly consistent: girls are socialised to avoid failure rather than seek challenge. They tend to interpret difficulty as evidence of incapability, where boys are more likely to interpret it as a problem to solve. The antidote is not pressure but exposure – letting them struggle, make things worse, figure it out, and experience the satisfaction of getting there without being managed through it.

It looks like anger being allowed. Girls who learn that their anger is acceptable – that it’s information, not a malfunction – grow into women who can hold a line. Girls who learn that anger is unattractive or frightening learn to disguise it as something more palatable, usually sadness, and spend years trying to work out why they cry when they’re actually furious.

It looks like money being a normal topic of conversation. Girls who grow up watching women manage finances, discuss them plainly, and take ownership of financial decisions don’t absorb the lesson that money is a male domain and they’d better find someone who knows about it. That lesson is devastating in practice, and entirely preventable.

And it looks like taking their observations about unfairness seriously. Not talking them out of it, not telling them they’re being sensitive, not explaining why the world is the way it is as though the explanation makes it acceptable. When a girl tells you something isn’t fair, she is usually right. She is also practising the cognitive and moral work of recognising injustice.

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What they read and watch matters

Because stories are where children absorb what’s possible and find the characters to identify with. For a long time, the default was stories where girls waited, girls were rescued, girls were beautiful and passive and ultimately rewarded for it. The princess who endures, the girl who sacrifices herself, the one whose goodness is proved by her willingness to suffer quietly.

What you’re looking for are girls who are fully drawn characters. Who want things, who make mistakes and live with them, who have inner lives that aren’t organised around other people.

Some that do this well:

Books:

• Rosie Revere, Engineer – a girl who keeps building after her inventions fail, with an aunt who reframes failure as data.

• Pippi Longstocking – no adult authority, total competence, zero interest in being liked.

• Anne of Green Gables – talks too much, has a temper, refuses to apologise for her imagination. The whole arc is the world adjusting to her rather than the reverse.

• Matilda – the fantasy that every overlooked, underestimated girl deserves.

• The Girl Who Drank the Moon – a girl raised by a witch, full of unexplained power she has to grow into rather than have explained to her.

• Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret – still unmatched on the specific anxieties of early adolescence: body, belief, belonging, treated as worth taking seriously rather than cute.

• Anne Frank’s Diary – not fiction, but a real girl claiming narrative authority over her own life while hiding from people trying to erase her entirely. Sharp, self-aware, and openly ambitious about wanting to be taken seriously as a writer, not just a child.

• The Hunger Games – Katniss is reluctant, tactical, and never performs likeability for the reader or the Capitol.

• The Hate U Give – Starr's politicisation across the book is the plot, not a subplot.

Films & TV:

• Bluey – Bluey and Bingo aren't framed by gender at all, which is itself the point; both girls get full emotional range, physical confidence, and competence without a single episode treating either as the "girly" one.

• Moana (Vaiana in the US) works because her desire to go beyond the reef is treated as legitimate, not corrected by a love interest.

• Brave – Merida point blank refuses an arranged marriage and the plot backs her, not the suitors. The mother-daughter repair at the centre is rare too: it’s not a romance plot resolving the story, it’s a relationship between two women.

• Encanto – not a single protagonist but does excellent work on the “good girl” trap specifically, through Mirabel and Luisa both.

• Coraline – a girl who is bored and dissatisfied and goes looking for more, which is not what girls are generally encouraged to do.

• Whale Rider (one close to my heart) – a girl fighting her grandfather's conviction that leadership is only for boys, set against Māori cultural inheritance. One of the clearest "girls are told they're not allowed and do it anyway" films that exists.

• A Series of Unfortunate Events (Netflix) – Violet is the inventor and eldest sibling carrying real responsibility, never reduced to a damsel role despite constant peril.

• Hidden Figures does something different – it puts women into a story that erased them, and lets them be right.

• Derry Girls – female friendship, mess, and ambition played for comedy without anyone needing to be the "good" one.

• Lady Bird – mother-daughter conflict without villainising either of them, and a girl whose self-mythologising is treated with real tenderness.

• Never Have I Ever – Devi is allowed to be genuinely unlikeable at points; the show doesn't rescue her likeability, it lets her sit in consequence.

• Sex Education – Aimee and Maeve between them cover sexual shame, class, and self-worth without either being reduced to a lesson.

• We Are Lady Parts – an all-female Muslim punk band where every member is drawn with total specificity. Funny, messy, and refuses respectability politics as a goal entirely.

I’d love to extend this list - please drop your recommendations in the comments.

What we’re actually fighting

The goal isn’t to raise a girl who is confident in the motivational-poster sense – chin up, self-belief, you can do anything. That framing is nice and sells well, but it puts the responsibility for outcomes on the individual child and ignores the structural reality she’s going to enter.

The goal is to raise a girl who knows how to name what she’s experiencing, who doesn’t automatically assume that discomfort means she’s wrong, who has a clear enough sense of her own value that she doesn’t trade it away for approval. Who, when someone tells her to be quiet or smaller or more palatable, registers that as information about them, not her.

Most of us weren’t raised that way. We figured it out later, at varying cost. We read the books in our thirties that would have saved us something in our twenties. We had the conversation with a therapist that untangled what held us back for twenty years.

We can’t hand our daughters a world that has fixed the structural problem but we can hand them a different set of starting assumptions about themselves. ♡

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The Equitable Home

———

To support 700 cats, you need roughly 600 pounds of litter a week, 1,000 cans of wet food, sixty rolls of paper towels, nine bottles of laundry detergent, and 400 rubbish bags. Lynea Lattanzio knows these numbers by heart. She sold her 1973 Mercedes and her two-carat diamond wedding ring to fund the California no-kill cat sanctuary she has run for 33 years, caring for 44,000 cats in the process.

She has grey curly hair, an affinity for cat T-shirts, no children, and an ex-husband she dispatched efficiently.

“I said no man is going to want a woman with 700 cats – I’m safe. I did that on purpose. I’ve dated every anal orifice in the tristate area.”

Out of human pettiness, a sanctuary was born.

This piece was inspired by Ava Portney's reported feature in the Guardian, which introduced me to Lattanzio, Richter, and the researchers quoted throughout. Go read it – it's worth your time.

Eight centuries of the same joke

The crazy cat lady did not spring fully formed from a Simpsons writers’ room. She has a much longer paper trail, and it is not subtle.

Cats and women have been linked across recorded history as symbols of feminine power. The Egyptian goddess Bastet represented domesticity and childbirth; Sekhmet, the lion-headed goddess, was a patron of physicians, able to cure diseases and ward off plagues. In Japanese iconography, the maneki-neko figure represents the goddess of mercy. Chinese mythology placed cats in charge of the world entirely, which, in retrospect, tracks. “Feline characteristics and female characteristics were considered the same thing,” says Irina Frasin, anthrozoology researcher at the Romanian Academy, “and both were considered sacred.”

Then came the Middle Ages, Christian Europe, and the witch trials, and the whole framework inverted overnight. Independent women and their cat “familiars” were targeted as antagonists of the church; a smidge of socially unacceptable behaviour and they were burned at the stake. Pope Gregory IX issued a papal bull in 1233 declaring black cats to be the reincarnation of Satan, leading to their mass extermination. “You have all these characteristics of women embodied in cats that were once worshipped by ancient societies become flaws under patriarchy,” Frasin says. “Because strong women were to be suppressed in that time.”

Black cats have never fully recovered. They still have the lowest adoption rates and highest euthanasia rates of any cat. The original PR disaster has proven remarkably sticky across eight centuries.

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By the 1870s, the archetype had been laundered into something that looked less like a witch trial and more like a newspaper column. A New Yorker named Rosalie Goodman – dubbed "Catty Goodman" by local children – was described by the press as a cat hoarder and portrayed as deranged. In 1872, the New York Times published a piece titled Cats and Craziness that opened by comparing cat owners to lunatics. One hundred and fifty years later, Eleanor Abernathy – Yale, Harvard, wanted to be both a doctor and a lawyer, ended up throwing cats at strangers – is still running on repeat in Simpsons reruns. She was supposed to appear once. She appeared forty-two times, because the material had too much cultural utility to retire.

The real utility

“The dislike of cats is the dislike of an idea: female autonomy.” That is Frasin again, and she is not being hyperbolic. Cats are, as she notes, not completely domesticated – independent, unruly, resistant to submission. These are the same qualities women have historically been punished for displaying. The crazy cat lady is a warning issued to women who are not organising their lives around male approval, dressed up in fur and eccentricity so it can be delivered as a joke.

Liz Richter, extroverted and recently divorced, keeps getting unmatched on dating apps the moment she mentions Stevie, Joplin and Millie – her three cats, sisters from the same litter. “There have been plenty of men who ask questions and I’m like, ‘Yeah, I have three cats,’ and they’ll unmatch with me. It’s the whole cat lady stigma.” She is direct about what she thinks is driving it: “I think the idea of being independent as a woman is scary for men.”

The cats are the visible evidence of a woman who has arranged her life to suit herself.

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The science is not cooperating

The stereotype has a pseudo-scientific wing, which deserves brief acknowledgment before being dismissed. Some researchers have speculated that toxoplasmosis – a parasite carried by cats, linked in certain studies to subtle behavioural changes in rodents – might explain the “craziness” of cat ladies. Over 200 papers have been published on this since 1994. The collective finding, per a 2020 literature review, is that if the parasite influences human behaviour at all, “the effect is likely subtle.” Science, having looked hard for a biological basis for the crazy cat lady, has largely concluded she does not exist.

The research that does hold up runs entirely in the other direction. Dennis Turner, an animal behaviourist at the University of Zurich who has spent more than forty years studying human-cat relationships, has found that cat owners are less depressed, less fearful, and more extroverted than non-owners. Both the presence and the interaction with a cat reduce negative moods significantly. His most interesting finding: “We found that a cat has the same positive effects on women as a male partner. But for men, a female partner has a stronger positive effect on their moods than a cat.”

Draw your own conclusions about who is getting the better end of that arrangement.

The double standard

Cat Man Chris – real name Chris Poole, YouTuber, father of Cole and Marmalade, man who wakes up and drives around feeding forty to fifty feral cats before breakfast – has not received meaningful criticism for any of this. His friends thought it was cool, he does not remember getting any strange comments, he has been doing this since 2013.

Liz Richter, who appeared in the same photography project as Poole, received comments including: “Chick seems like she has a lot of personal problems, some people use cats as a crutch when they have socialization issues.” (Credit: derricklangford4725 on YouTube, who one imagines is thriving.)

The crazy cat lady is a charge levelled at women specifically, dropped entirely when a man does the same thing.

The political deployment

JD Vance understood exactly what he was doing in 2021 when he described the Democratic Party’s leadership as “a bunch of childless cat ladies who don’t have a direct stake in this country.” The phrase did not emerge from nowhere, it reached for the same archetype the New York Times was deploying in 1872: the woman without a man, without children, without the conventional markers of a life that counts, and therefore without standing to participate in public life.

Taylor Swift's response: endorsing Kamala Harris and signing the post Taylor Swift, childless cat lady. This landed because the insult only works on women who are afraid of the category – and increasingly, they are not. What Vance miscalculated is that the stereotype's power was always borrowed: it runs on the threat of social shame, and once enough women decide the shame is not theirs to carry, the weapon is just a word.

For the record

Lattanzio is in a relationship. His name is David Anderson; they were on the same dive team as teenagers, lost each other for decades, and found each other again. He sits quietly in the background of Zoom calls and answers questions about her before she can.

At the edge of the Kings River, there is a bench where she sits in the evenings watching 700 cats run through the hills and climb trees in the pocket of the world she carved from six acres and one bad marriage.

Vance was right about one thing: she is ungovernable. ♡

Please restack with photos of your cats. We might get to 700.

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The Equitable Home

———

My daughter is eleven. She still thinks boys are mostly annoying. She has opinions about what’s “cringe” and a deep relationship with her cat. The idea of her dating anyone feels distant enough that I can almost pretend I don’t need to think about it yet.

Almost.

Because I have been paying attention to what the boys a few years ahead of her are watching online, what they are repeating to their friends, and what they’re arriving at first relationships already believing. And what I’ve found has made “be careful out there” feel laughably inadequate as a parenting strategy.

The pipeline

20-year-old US influencer Clavicular – real name Braden Peters – has built a significant following through a subculture called looksmaxxing: the relentless, pseudoscientific optimisation of male physical appearance. In May this year, a clip of him on a podcast went viral. In it, he explained that he doesn’t think it’s important for a woman to have an orgasm during sex, because “the amount of extra effort that’s required to do that is just not gonna have much ROI [return on investment].”

The clip was shared millions of times, mostly in outrage. But here is the thing about outrage cycles: they spike, they fade, and the content stays. The boys watching Clavicular didn’t stop watching him because women were angry on X. His audience is not women or girls.

Looksmaxxing operates inside a broader ecosystem we know as the manosphere – a network of online spaces that convert masculinity into a self-improvement project and relationships into a transaction. The language is explicitly financial: sexual market value, high-value versus low-value partners, optimisation, levelling up. Women are assessed as assets or liabilities. Pleasure, reciprocity, and emotional intimacy are inefficiencies to be designed out.

This is what a significant cohort of young men is marinating in, often from early adolescence. And it is not a fringe phenomenon. It is mainstream enough to be the subject of Louis Theroux’ latest documentary. It is mainstream enough that Clavicular’s ROI comment was treated as news.

Then there's the other thing

While the manosphere teaches boys that women’s pleasure has no return on investment, something else has become normal in the bedrooms of young people.

A decade ago, strangulation during sex would have been considered extreme. Today, research consistently finds it is routine. Approximately 58% of female university students report having been strangled during sex. Around one in three first experienced “rough sex” between the ages of 14 and 17. In Australia, where strangulation has been explicitly criminalised in all states and territories, 61% of women aged 18–35 reported having been strangled during sex. A 2025 UK study found that over a quarter of young women had been strangled without agreeing to it first.

Without agreeing to it first.

This is not about what consenting adults choose to do, it’s about what young women are being expected to accept as a baseline, without discussion, without warning, and without any real understanding of the risks involved. There is no physiologically safe way to compress someone’s carotid arteries. At worst, the outcome is a stroke or death. There is now a documented pattern of strangulation deaths of young women in which the surviving partner claims that consensual rough sex “went wrong.”

The mechanism driving all of this is well-established: pornography normalises what it depicts. When strangulation appears in mainstream porn as a routine feature of sex rather than a specialist category, the young men watching it arrive at their first sexual encounters with a completely different set of expectations about what normal looks like. And the young women – who are watching the same pornography, who have absorbed the same cultural messages about what an adventurous, non-prudish woman accepts – often go along with it not because they want to, but because refusing feels like the abnormal response.

Social pressure is enough.

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What we actually need to do

The instinct, when confronted with all of this, is to protect: lock down the phone, monitor everything, keep her young as long as possible.

That instinct is understandable but not effective – not because safety doesn’t matter, but because the goal is not to delay her engagement with this world; it is to arm her for it. Girls who have been kept deliberately naive are not safer, they are less equipped.

Here is what might actually help:

Start the conversation before it’s urgent. The pre-teen years are not too early; they are exactly the right time, while the relationship is intact and before she needs to apply anything in real time. You don’t need a formal sit-down, you need a series of small, normal conversations that establish that you are someone she can ask, without shame, without drama.

Name what coercion actually looks like. Most consent education focuses on the word “no” and whether it was said. That framing is too narrow because coercion doesn’t always look like force; it looks like “everyone does this,” “you’re being frigid,” “I thought you trusted me,” “it’s not a big deal.” She needs to be able to recognise the pressure before she needs to resist it.

Tell her specifically about strangulation. Not in a terrifying way; in a factual one. That it is not safe regardless of what she’s seen, been told, or what a partner claims. That there is no “right way” to do it. That if anyone does it to her without asking, that is assault, not rough sex. That her saying no is not prudishness; it is the correct response.

Talk about pleasure as something she is entitled to. The ROI comment lands so hard because it makes explicit what is often implicit: that male pleasure is the point of sex and female pleasure is a bonus, if there’s time. Counter that directly: she is not there to provide a service. Her experience matters as much as anyone else’s, and a partner who operates otherwise is not a partner worth keeping.

Tell her what a decent partner actually looks like. Not in a fairy-tale way – in a realistic one. Someone who asks, someone who checks in. Someone whose first response to “I don’t want to do that” is “okay,” not negotiation. The bar is not high, but if she doesn’t know what it looks like, she won’t know when it’s missing.

Watch things together that show what it should look like. Conversations are easier when they're not about her. Shows like Normal People and Sex Education depict sex as something that involves negotiation, awkwardness, and genuine attention to another person's experience. Watching with her and talking about what the characters do well and badly is a lower-stakes entry point than a direct conversation, and it gives you both a shared reference point.

The thing underneath all of this

What Clavicular’s ROI comment and the normalisation of sexual strangulation have in common is that they are both logical endpoints of the same premise: that women’s bodies exist primarily for male use, and that women’s comfort, pleasure, and safety are secondary considerations at best.

What is new in this is that it is being delivered to young men at scale, through entertaining content, from the time they are old enough to have a phone. And it is being delivered to young women too – dressed up as liberation, repackaged as what confident, non-uptight women accept.

Our daughters are walking into this. The least we can do is make sure they know it’s there.

Have you had this conversation with your child? I’d love to read about it in the comments.

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The Equitable Home

———

A woman goes on a first date. It goes well – the kind of well where you’re already doing the arithmetic of a second one. At some point she mentions she’s buying a house.

He pauses, and then says, with what appears to be complete sincerity: “If you buy that house, what’s a guy going to do for you?”

This is, presumably, not a trick question.

The woman in question, Tiffany Tate, 29 at the time, newly relocated to Charlotte, newly on Match.com, freshly ended relationship in the rearview, was also not sure how to respond. “I was like, ‘I don’t understand the question,’” she later told The Guardian. It was a reasonable reaction. The date had just revealed that female homeownership, an objective marker of financial stability and adult competence, was to him a liability. The implication being: if she could provide for herself, she was somehow unavailable to be provided for, and therefore, what was the point of him?

It was their last date.

This anecdote would be depressing if it were an outlier. It is, unfortunately, a pattern that sits at the uncomfortable intersection of two large and accelerating trends: women buying homes in unprecedented numbers, and a subset of men responding to female financial independence as though it were a personal insult.

The numbers are not subtle

Single women now make up 21% of all US home purchases. Single men account for 9%. A gap that has been widening consistently since the National Association of Realtors began tracking the data in 1981, when women were at 11% and men at 10% — a near-tie in a year when women had only just been legally allowed to obtain a mortgage without a cosigner for seven years. Yes, seven years. The Equal Credit Opportunity Act passed in 1974. Before that, banks could and did refuse women credit on the basis of sex or marital status.

The 2025 data produces a detail so perfectly timed it sounds like satire: for the first time in NAR's recorded history, single women first-time homebuyers are now reporting higher median incomes than single men first-time buyers. Women: $73,000. Men: $66,400. The reversal may be a one-year anomaly, NAR's deputy chief economist Jessica Lautz was careful to note. It may also not be. Either way, the trend line points in one direction.

They are doing this, crucially, while earning less overall. The broader gender pay gap persists, women earn roughly 85 cents to the male dollar nationally, and yet single women are making it work through what the data politely calls "financial sacrifices." 45% of single women buyers cut non-essential spending to save for a deposit, versus 40% of single men. Among Black single women buyers, who represent 39% of all Black homebuyers, nearly matching the 42% share who are married couples, the determination is especially striking. They are building wealth in a market designed to exclude them, against a system that historically did exactly that, without waiting for a partner to make it possible.

"I wanted to make sure that there was something in my name."

Tonya, scientist and condo owner, whose date then became hostile about it

Enter: the offended man

Women are buying homes, they’re sacrificing for it, they’re building equity. They are doing, in other words, the thing that financial advisers, wellness influencers, and every piece of personal finance content since 2010 has told everyone to do. And some men, when they discover this, are losing it.

The reactions follow a pattern that would be funny if it weren’t so consistent. A man finds out a woman owns her home. He immediately begins cataloguing his own financial credentials. His energy shifts: He becomes competitive, then combative. He asks her, with a straight face, “Do you want to be the husband in the relationship now?” as though homeownership is a gendered activity that she has performed incorrectly.

Diana Pegoraro, a Toronto attorney who bought her waterfront condo in 2020, has lived this in multiple relationships. In several cases, her partner, a man who could afford to own but chose to rent, asked her to move into his rental rather than her owned property. The logic (if it can be called that): living under a woman’s roof apparently requires a level of ego flexibility some men cannot access. Redfin’s chief economist Daryl Fairweather put it plainly: “She would become their landlord, right? And the landlord has power over you. They can evict you.”

The science on this is, by now, fairly robust. Dr Joanna Syrda’s 2019 research found that men’s stress levels rise when their wives earn more than 40% of household income. A 2025 study in Sex Roles documented that female-breadwinner relationships are perceived, by both men and women, as less desirable, worse quality, and less stable than male-breadwinner arrangements. Across four studies, men in these relationships suffered greater “gender threat” than women. Research published through the PMC found associations between male economic dependency and increased rates of infidelity, anxiety, and depression, and (drum roll) higher usage of erectile dysfunction medication.

Dr Y Joel Wong, a counselling psychology professor at Indiana University who studies masculinity, offered the mechanism: when women outperform men in traditional markers of status, some men experience it as a loss of manhood. Not a threat or a challenge to adapt to. A loss. “I have lost a little bit of my manhood,” as he summarised it. The question of whether this constitutes the woman’s problem is, apparently, still up for debate among the men affected.

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The MAFS case study

In March 2026, a dinner party on Married at First Sight Australia produced one of the more clarifying moments in recent reality television. Groom Danny, explaining to the assembled table why he was reluctant to move into his wife Bec’s home, offered this:

“I suppose everyone looks at it differently. But it makes you feel like a bit of a b***h moving in with a woman.”

Bec’s home in Adelaide sat on 800 square metres, five minutes from the city, with a $97,000 mortgage on a $3 million property. By any material measure, an extraordinary asset. The couple had already agreed that Danny would move in. Bec was blindsided. The show’s “experts” held their heads in their hands.

A majority of the grooms at the table agreed with him. Scott said he couldn’t go to hers. Steven said he needed to feel like “the provider”, he was raised with those values, he noted, as though that settled it. David said if he moved to Adelaide he’d be “getting my own spot.” Filip called it a “mental thing” before adding, with the confidence of someone explaining gravity: “Females feel more secure when it is like that, it’s just how it is.”

Even some of the brides agreed: “He wants to feel like the man, and he has every right to feel like that”, said Gia.

When pushed to explain himself, Danny doubled down: “When I’m in a relationship, you want, as a man, to feel like you bring something to the table. Going to Adelaide and moving into Bec’s house – it wasn’t me feeling like I was bringing nothing to the table. It made me feel like a bit of a b***h.”

Read that back slowly. A woman’s property, one she worked for, one she owns, one with a $97,000 mortgage on a $3 million block, became the problem. A threat to his identity. Her financial competence re-framed as his inadequacy. The thing some people might think but wouldn’t say out loud, said plainly, on television, to a table of nodding men.

The idea that a man moving into a woman’s home diminishes him only makes sense if you believe that her owning it diminished her in some way to begin with. That her name on the title is a kind of anomaly to be accommodated, rather than an ordinary fact to be built around. Bec said she would not move out. That she even had to say it, that stating the obvious required stating, is most devastating.

The contradiction

The manosphere has spent a great deal of energy in recent years decrying women as “gold diggers” who exploit men for resources. The 6-6-6 rule (six feet, six-pack, six figures) is cited constantly as evidence that women only want wealthy men. Women are hypergamous, we are told, meaning women only “date up.”

And then: a woman earns her own money, buys her own home, requires no financial rescuing, and the same cultural forces respond with: hostility. She is too independent. She is emasculating. She has, in the words of one memorable date, made herself into someone a man has nothing to “do for.”

"It's interesting, the same group that constantly complains women are gold diggers... it turns out they can't think of what they bring to the table other than money."

Dr Jennie Young, rhetoric professor

Dr Jennie Young, a professor of rhetoric who studies how men communicate on dating apps, articulated the bind with devastating precision: the men who most loudly complain about female hypergamy are often the men who cannot conceive of their own value outside of a provider role. Remove the financial need, and they genuinely don't know what they offer.

The Gen Z divide: it gets worse before it gets better

If you were hoping this was a generational problem that young people had figured out, a gentle heads-up: they haven’t. In fact, the gender values gap is largest among Gen Z. An October 2024 New York Times/Siena poll found a 51% political gender divide among voters aged 18–29, the widest of any generation. Young women are moving left; young men are moving right, with some moving very far right. According to Ipsos, women under 30 in the UK are 25% more progressive than men the same age. In Germany’s 2025 federal election, roughly a quarter of 18–24 year old men voted for the far-right AfD.

The housing data adds a neat generational wrinkle: Gen Z women have the highest rate of single female homeownership, 33%, of any generational group. They are the youngest, the most financially stretched, and the most determined. Meanwhile, one in three Gen Z men reports no partnered sexual or romantic experience at all, versus one in five Gen Z women. The “relationship recession” is, for now, falling harder on young men, partly because young women are deciding their standards are non-negotiable, and partly because a meaningful number of young men have been radicalised by an online ecosystem that frames women’s gains as male losses.

Six in ten Gen Z men globally agree that men are being “expected to do too much to support equality”, a view held by only 38% of Gen Z women, a 22-point gap that is, again, the largest of any generation. The irony of men feeling put-upon by equality while women are out here cancelling holidays to save for mortgage deposits is not lost on the women in question.

What this actually means

The homebuying data is, at its core, an optimistic story. Women who couldn’t get credit in their own names fifty years ago now represent the second-largest category of homebuyers in America. They are building wealth. The typical homeowner holds roughly 430,000 USD in net worth, compared with 10,000 USD for the typical renter. Single women are choosing wealth-building over waiting. That’s rational, it’s admirable, and it reflects decades of (hard won) progress in women’s financial rights and economic participation.

The dating backlash is a less optimistic story. It suggests that social norms around gender, money, and partnership have not kept pace with economic reality. Men who have internalised their value as primarily financial, and who cannot update that model when a woman no longer needs them to provide, are going to struggle. They are also going to make dating difficult for women who have done exactly what they were advised to do.

Tiffany Tate, now 40 and looking back on her homeownership journey, is proud of what she built: freedom, stability, opportunities she wasn’t supposed to have access to. She’s also deleted her dating apps. “Where is the pool of men who are self-sufficient and like to read, are willing to go to therapy and are not afraid of a woman who has a passport?” she asked. It sounds like a simple request. It is not, apparently, a simple request.

Bec didn’t move out. Tiffany deleted the apps. Tonya kept the condo. The women in this story all arrived at the same conclusion eventually: they stopped organising their lives around a discomfort they hadn’t caused and couldn’t fix.

Have you experienced something similar? I’d love to read about it in the comments.

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The Equitable Home

———

The word “sovereign” is what stopped me.

I was reading a piece by Astrid, an essay about a women’s surf retreat in Nicaragua and the pattern she’d noticed about which hobbies women are steered toward versus which ones they’re kept out of. She’d built a matrix: one axis for who the hobby serves, another for who adapts to whom. Domestic hobbies at the top, flexible and interruptible and socially justified by their usefulness. Sovereign hobbies at the bottom: golf, sailing, surfing, climbing; activities that require life to make room for them.

She wrote about the gravitational pull that drags women’s hobbies back toward the interruptible, the provisional, the easily cancelled. She wrote about how women treat even the most self-serving activities with an internal audit running in the background: have I earned this, is someone managing in my absence, will there be a reckoning when I get back. She wrote: “We are so conditioned to feel needed that we rarely get to ask what we want for no other reason than that we want it.”

I put the phone down and thought about my own list and the hobbies I’ve picked up over the years. Strength training, writing, Pilates, sewing, learning to play the piano, gardening…Most of my hobbies are flexible, health-justified, easy to reschedule. Not one of them require the world to wait.

That’s when I went looking for the data. There is a word for what the data describes, researchers call it time poverty: having insufficient discretionary time after paid work, unpaid labour, and personal maintenance are accounted for. It is measurable and it is gendered.

The data is unambiguous: women across almost every demographic group studied have less free time than men. The gap exists before children arrive and it predictably widens after. Most of us have absorbed the conditions that create it so thoroughly that we describe them as choices.

The numbers

In October 2024, the Gender Equity Policy Institute published a comprehensive analysis of time-use data, and the headline figure was this:

Read that third figure again: young women without children, with every structural freedom theoretically available to them, still have a fifth less leisure time than their male peers. The gap does not wait for the baby, it is baked in from early adulthood, and it is rooted in nothing more complicated than who cooks dinner and who doesn’t.

In an average week, GEPI found that women spend 12.6 hours on cooking, cleaning, and household tasks; men spend 5.7 hours. Women with children spend roughly 15 hours per week on household work alone, compared to 6.2 hours for fathers. Combine childcare and domestic labour, and mothers are doing 2.1 times the unpaid work of fathers, every week, on top of whatever else they are doing professionally.

“Just as there is a wage gap between men and women in the workplace, there is a leisure gap between them at home.”

Arlie Hochschild, The Second Shift (1989)

Hochschild named this in 1989. She called it the "second shift": the full load of domestic labour women absorb after returning from paid work. Thirty-six years later, the GEPI data confirms the gap has not meaningfully closed.

The quality of leisure time matters

Even when women do get leisure time, researchers have found it tends to be structurally different from men’s. Women’s leisure is more likely to occur at home, to be fragmented across care-giving interruptions, and to coexist with monitoring responsibilities: a child napping upstairs, dinner to think about in an hour or the kids’ sport WhatsApp chat to monitor. Sociologists use the term “contaminated time” for this: hours that look like rest in the family calendar but are polluted by interruptions, digital distractions or household obligations.

A 2017 study found that fathers were engaged in leisure activities 47% of the time that mothers were doing childcare, and 35% of the time mothers were doing housework. Fathers’ leisure happened while mothers’ leisure happened in the gaps between other people’s needs.

The type of leisure differs, too. Research consistently shows men spend more time on active, social leisure: sport, exercise, time with friends outside the home. Women’s leisure skews more sedentary and solitary, partly because it is more likely to happen inside the house and partly because genuinely unstructured time away from domestic space requires a degree of permission, logistical negotiation, and guilt management that men do not typically face in the same way.

Active leisure is associated with better physical health outcomes, higher rates of social connection, stronger stress recovery, and reduced dementia risk in later life. The leisure gap is, with a thirty-year lag, a health gap.

How we were trained not to notice

Time poverty tends to be framed as a scheduling problem or a productivity problem. A problem of individual women failing to prioritise themselves. The self-care industry was built on this logic and the solution it sells is the bath bomb, the Sunday morning run, the five-minute meditation, all of which require women to carve rest from the same exhausted margin rather than interrogating why the margin is so thin.

The structural account is less flattering: women spend more time on unpaid work because society has arranged for that labour to flow downhill toward them, and because women have been socialised to pick it up before it lands. The expectation that women will manage the household, track the children’s schedules, remember the appointments, and feel guilty when they don’t is a norm that operates independently of any individual relationship, as the data on single and childless women demonstrates clearly: the gap exists before any of the obvious variables are present.

Italy offers a useful illustration of what this looks like at scale: Italian women spend an average of five hours and five minutes per day on unpaid domestic work; Italian men spend one hour and forty-eight minutes. In higher-income households, some of this labour gets outsourced: cleaners, food delivery, after-school care. The relief is real but the dynamic underneath it is unchanged: it is still women who identify the need, find the provider and manage the relationship. Researchers call this the mental load, and it consumes time just as physical labour does.

The cost we ignore

Time poverty is linked to worse mental health outcomes, higher rates of burnout, reduced capacity to exercise, and fewer social connections. A 2025 Japanese study found time poverty was specifically associated with higher smoking rates in mothers of preschool-age children, a finding the researchers attributed to the intersection of gender-bound social roles and the complete absence of alternative coping time. When you have no time to recover, you find faster methods.

The economic consequences compound over decades: every hour a woman spends on unpaid work is an hour she is not spending on paid work, professional development, or the networking that accelerates careers. The OECD has documented a statistically significant relationship between the gender gap in unpaid work and the gender wage gap, even after controlling for labour force participation, education, and fertility. The time you don’t have at thirty becomes the pension you don’t have at sixty-five.

Women’s time poverty is, at its base, a resource extraction. Labour with a market value, flowing unpaid from women into households, businesses, and communities.

Every minute more that a woman spends on unpaid care work represents one minute less she could be spending on market activities or investing in her own skills.

OECD, Unpaid Care Work: The Missing Link in the Analysis of Gender Gaps (2014)

So what, you ask?

There is a version of this conversation that ends in individual solutions: negotiate better at home, lower your standards, hire help if you can, protect your calendar. All of these are reasonable but none of them address the system that generates the problem.

The structural question is: why, in households where both partners work full-time, does one partner still do twice the unpaid labour? The answer involves the patriarchy, gender norms that are centuries old, an economic system that treats care work as valueless, and a cultural story that frames women’s service orientation as personality rather than conditioning. Changing any of those requires more than a Sunday morning to yourself, though that is a start.

While we can’t, individually, unravel centuries of patriarchal effects, it’s important to make the impact visible and call it out clearly. What shifts things, historically, is naming the problem precisely. Not “I’m so busy” but “my time is being structurally extracted.”

Reflect

• When did you last have two uninterrupted hours that belonged entirely to you, with no monitoring responsibility running in the background?

• If your partner or housemate has more leisure time than you, is that because of explicit agreements, or because of defaults no one examined?

• What would you do with five extra hours a week? Is there something about that question that feels almost hypothetical?

• If someone added up your unpaid labour and gave it an hourly rate, what would you be owed?

♡

Source note: The opening of this piece was prompted by "The Undertow" by Astrid (April 2026), an essay about sovereign hobbies and the gravitational forces that keep women out of them. It is worth reading in full.

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The Equitable Home

My reader Evie left a comment on a Note I posted last week. Her kids’ school has both parents’ numbers on file. Her husband’s number is listed first, with a note that he’s home more often – so please call him first.

But they still call her first.

She has pointed this out to the school directly. Their response: it’s because mums always answer.

She is considering removing her number entirely. But she knows that will be the day there’s a serious injury and her partner is out of town.

This is the trap: The system defaults to her, she absorbs the calls to keep things safe, and in doing so she confirms the assumption. The school learns: mums always answer. The bias is self-reinforcing.

Economists now have the data to explain exactly why – and what that phone call is actually costing us.

In 2025, researchers Kristy Buzard, Laura Gee, and Olga Stoddard published a study in the Quarterly Journal of Economics that began, like so many good research projects, with personal frustration. Gee, an associate professor of economics at Tufts, and her co-author Stoddard were both parents, both academics, both women who had, at some point, been in another country giving a talk when their phone rang with a school number on the screen.

Their question was simple: when a school has contact information for both a mother and a father, who does it call?

The answer, across more than 80,000 school principals in the United States, was unambiguous.

The experiment

Each principal received an email purportedly from a two-parent heterosexual household exploring school enrolment. The email listed contact numbers for both a mother and a father and asked for a call back. In some versions, neither parent was flagged as more available. In others, the email explicitly stated that the father had a lot of availability. In a third version, it was the mother who was flagged as more available.

The results:

• When no preference was given, 59% of principals called the mother, and only 41% called the father.

• When the email specified that the father was more available, the father was called 74% of the time – but the mother was still called 26% of the time.

• When the email specified that the mother was more available, she received 90% of the calls, with the father contacted just 10% of the time.

When mothers are flagged as available, institutions act on that information almost completely. When fathers are flagged as available, a quarter of schools still call the mother anyway.

The implication is that even when mothers and fathers try to share childcare responsibilities equally, society’s gender biases are working against them. The family can fill out every form correctly and it still will not matter, because the person receiving the form has already made a decision about who the real parent is.

Beyond the school gate

If you felt a flicker of recognition reading that and then immediately thought of your child’s paediatrician, their swim coach, the after-school programme coordinator, the dentist’s office – I see you.

This institutional bias is not limited to schools. In a survey of parents of school-aged children, the same researchers found that decision-makers consistently identified mothers as the primary point of contact across a wide range of domains – doctors, sports coaches, religious leaders, and more.

The school is simply the most measurable example. It is the institution researchers could most easily run a controlled experiment on, but the pattern is everywhere.

And the school system itself compounds the problem structurally. Many school contact systems only allow one ‘primary contact’ per child, reinforcing a winner-takes-all allocation of responsibility. And in practice, that ‘primary’ is usually mum.

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What this actually costs

There is a version of this conversation that treats the phone call as an inconvenience. An interruption. Mildly irritating, quickly forgotten.

But this pattern of defaulting to mothers as the primary contact point feeds into broader issues of gender inequality. If mothers are always the ones being contacted by schools, they are more likely to miss work, adjust their schedules, or take time off. Over time, that has real consequences for their careers and income.

The researchers are careful to note that isolating the precise causal link between phone calls and labour market outcomes is methodologically difficult. But the survey data they collected alongside the experiment is pointed. 45% of mothers, compared with 23% of fathers, report negative mental or physical health effects from carrying this burden. Surveyed mothers were more likely to say they had chosen lower-paying or more flexible jobs as a result of managing these demands. This is where the phone call and the pay gap connect.

Research shows that the motherhood penalty is responsible for nearly 80% of the gender pay gap, and the gap widens as women age and are more likely to have children. Meanwhile, fathers receive what some social scientists call the “fatherhood bonus” – men with children are offered jobs more often and at higher pay, while mothers are offered jobs less often and at lower pay.

The phone call is not the cause of the pay gap. But it is one of the mechanisms through which the assumption that mothers are the responsible party gets enforced – interruption by interruption, adjustment by adjustment, missed meeting by missed meeting.

Fifteen years after the first child, the male-female income gap within couples has widened by 32 percentage points.

The cognitive weight underneath the phone call

It is the mental pivot from whatever you were doing. It is the decision-making that follows. It is being pulled back into the logistics of a life that never fully releases you, even when you are sitting at your desk trying to be a professional.

Research from the University of Bath found that, on average, mothers handle 71% of household mental load tasks, while fathers manage only 29%. Eve Rodsky’s Fair Play Institute, in a 500-person study conducted with the University of Southern California, found that women take on the cognitive labour – the planning, the mental load – for virtually every household task. Men assumed the planning and execution of just one: taking out the rubbish. Everything else – including the school contact, the doctor appointment, the sports schedule – lives in the mother’s head.

The researchers in the Tufts study also asked parents how they felt about the volume of calls they received. Women reported they would generally like to be called less often. Men reported they were either satisfied with their current volume of calls or wanted to be called more often.

There is something devastating about that finding. Fathers want more contact. Mothers are drowning in it. Both are operating within a system that has decided, without consulting either of them, how to divide it.

The deeper mechanism

Why does the bias persist even when the father is explicitly flagged as available?

The research found this gender bias is in part driven by entrenched beliefs about parental responsiveness and is reinforced by traditional gender stereotypes. School administrators – most of whom are themselves women, it is worth noting – are not sitting at their desks thinking “I will call the mother because that is her job.” They are operating from a script so deeply embedded it does not feel like a script at all, it feels like common sense.

This is what structural bias looks like in practice. It is an assumption so naturalised that it bypasses conscious decision-making entirely.

The disparity in who gets called is an example of how cultural values and biases have been slow to adjust to structural changes in household relations. And because the bias is institutionalised rather than interpersonal, it cannot be solved by individual families trying harder to divide responsibilities. You can put your husband’s name first on every form, you can add a note saying he is the preferred contact, you can do all of this and still be the one who picks up – because the institution has already decided, somewhere between registering your child and hiring its admin staff, who counts as a parent.

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What would actually help

The researchers are specific about where intervention is possible.

Signalling a father’s availability does help – calling him goes from 41% to 74% when he is flagged as more available. Signalling a father’s availability substantially changes the gender pattern of callbacks. This matters for families who want to redistribute this load: being explicit, even blunt, in your enrolment forms about who to contact first is necessary.

But the structural fixes matter more than the individual ones. School systems that force a single “primary contact” field are architecturally encoding the problem. Changing that field to “Contact 1 and Contact 2 – both equally preferred” would cost nothing. Requiring institutions to distribute communications rather than default to one parent would cost nothing. Training administrators to treat the second name on the form as an equally valid first call would cost nothing.

The person absorbing the cost – the mother whose focus is broken, whose career momentum stalls, whose afternoon dissolves into logistics – is not the one the system is designed to protect.

This is what the data says

The phone rings, you pick up: a small, forgettable moment.

Multiply it across twelve years of school, across every doctor, coach, dentist, and activity coordinator your children will ever have. Across every colleague who sees you step out to take the call. Across every meeting you join late, every deadline you push, every promotion cycle where someone else was simply more visibly available.

–> Think about the last time an institution contacted you instead of your partner, when your partner was equally available. Did you correct it? Did you say something? What would it take for you to flag your partner as the preferred contact – everywhere, explicitly, every year?

–> If you are in a two-parent household, when did you last have a direct conversation about who is fielding the institutional load?

How many times did the school call you last term versus your partner? Leave it in the comments. I have a feeling the data is going to be bleak and I am here for it.

Sources: Buzard, K., Gee, L.K., & Stoddard, O.B. (2025). "Who You Gonna Call? Gender Inequality in External Demands for Parental Involvement." Quarterly Journal of Economics / NBER Working Paper 33775. University of Bath mental load research. Institute for Women's Policy Research, 2024. Fair Play Institute / University of Southern California, 2024. Pew Research Center, 2023.

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The Equitable Home

A Guardian investigation published this week introduced us to Tilly Dillehay, a 38-year-old Baptist writer and pastor’s wife who runs Wife School, a video masterclass teaching women how to “become the kind of woman who inspires a godly leader.”

The bar for women’s self-help content was already subterranean, but Tilly Dillehay has found a shovel. For the price of a six-week masterclass, you can learn to “zip it” when you disagree with your husband, ask his permission to buy a chair, and reframe his failures as quirks you once found attractive and may (fingers crossed!!) find attractive again someday.

Transformational stuff.

Let’s begin with the homework. Students are instructed to seek their husband’s blessing before spending $300 on a chair, signing up for a women’s retreat committee, or going out with friends on a Saturday. Not, notably, before enrolling in Wife School itself, a decision that required initiative, $17, and the use of a credit card. The irony of deploying your autonomous adult agency to purchase a course teaching you to relinquish it did not apparently register as a flaw in the curriculum.

The tandem bike metaphor deserves its own moment of reflection. The wife pedals helpfully from behind, “exerting effort without being in control”, presented as a marital ideal rather than what it actually describes: doing half the work while someone else steers.

Then there’s the sex advice, which manages to be simultaneously the most and least surprising section. “A husband expects a yes” when he asks for sex, Dillehay teaches, citing Corinthians on not depriving one another. The frozen pizza metaphor (“when it’s good, it’s great – and when it’s bad, it’s still pretty good. Unfortunately that means that sometimes wives will have to settle for “frozen pizza”) arrives as warm reassurance rather than what it is: a concept of consent so thin you could see through it. It isn’t until week six that Dillehay claims her course is not meant to address “what to do if you think you are being abused”, after five weeks of instruction in silence and compliance have already done their softening work.

The crowning detail is Dillehay herself. Before marriage, she was a high school teacher, an insurance professional, and the managing editor of a small-town newspaper. A woman who ran copy, managed staff, and made consequential decisions daily, now teaching other women to ask permission before going out on a Saturday. She trained with the Association of Biblical Counselors, a programme not accredited by state licensing bodies, and did not complete that course. She has, however, been very happily married, which she considers equally valid. By this logic, anyone who has successfully digested food is qualified to practise gastroenterology.

The research is damning. A recent study by Rachael D Robnett, a psychology professor at the University of Nevada, found that men who had positive feelings about the tradwife moment were not chivalrous or protective, as the marketing implies, but “overt, explicit and hostile” in their sexism: men who resented wives in bread-winning roles while relying on women for physical and emotional intimacy and expecting submission as a given. Wife School is not, then, teaching women how to have better marriages. It is teaching women how to be more palatable to men who are difficult to be married to.

And when the abuse footnote is finally reached? Dillehay directs wives to a Christian counsellor who argues against always believing victims and suggests that abuse sometimes stems from a victim’s own “sinfulness”.

“If you’re going to suffer,” Dillehay tells her graduates, “suffer as a righteous woman.”

So here we are: repackaging obedience as empowerment and submission as self-development. Remind me again how we ended up in this particular version of hell?

The Guardian article by Alaina Demopoulos is well worth reading: ‘A husband expects a yes’: how wife schools are shaping submissive Christian women.

So is Elena Trueba’s article below:

Unholy Alliances by Elena Trueba

I went to Wife School so you don't have to.

What did I do with my one wild and precious life this week? I spent $17 on Tilly Dillehay’s Wife School…

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5 months ago · 81 likes · 19 comments · Elena Trueba

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The Equitable Home

The first time I tried to talk to my husband about the mental load, I did everything wrong.

I picked a Tuesday evening, mid-week, while he was tired. I led with data (I had a spreadsheet – of course I had a spreadsheet). I said “I do everything,” which was both an exaggeration and, depending on how you counted, fairly accurate. He got defensive, I got frustrated, and we ended up arguing about whose turn it was to clean the kitchen, which was not the point, had never been the point, and somehow became the entire point.

We didn’t have the conversation I was actually trying to have for another six months.

If you’ve already done the Household Audit or filled in the Domain Ownership Map (if you haven’t, it’s worth doing), you now have something most households have never had: a clear picture of who actually owns what. The question is what to do with it, because handing your partner a completed list of tasks or domains and saying “look at this” is not a conversation; it’s almost always an accusation. And an accusation, however accurate, rarely produces what you actually want.

Why it goes wrong

Most people approach this conversation as a negotiation over individual tasks: can you do the bins more, can you take over school pick-up on Thursdays, can you remember to book the car in. That approach has a ceiling, because you can redistribute every task on the list and still end up, six months later, in exactly the same place – because whoever was managing things before is still managing them, still noticing, still the one who knows the dentist appointment is on the 14th, that you’re out of bread, that the cat needs its annual visit to the vet.

Tasks are what you do; domains are what you own. The difference is accountability, and accountability is what this conversation actually needs to be about.

The other reason it goes wrong: it almost always opens as a complaint. “I feel like I do everything” is true, feels urgent, and positions your partner as the problem before they’ve said another word – so of course they get defensive, because you’ve opened with a verdict rather than an invitation.

The two people you might be talking to

Not all reluctance looks the same, and the conversation that works for one person won’t work for the other.

The first type says all the right things: “Of course, just tell me what to do,” “I’m happy to help more,” “Why didn’t you just ask?” This sounds cooperative, and it is, in a limited sense, but it’s not an offer to take ownership. “Just tell me what to do” keeps the cognitive load where it already was, because you still have to notice, decide, delegate, and follow up. You’ve outsourced a task, not a domain. This isn’t malice – it’s a deeply ingrained pattern, one that’s been reinforced for most of his life by a world that rarely asked him to be the one who noticed. The ask here is bigger than “do more things”: it’s “take ownership of a whole area so that I never have to think about it,” and it’s worth naming that rather than hoping he understands the implication.

The second type pushes back, doesn’t see the imbalance, thinks the house is fine, thinks your standards are too high, or does see it and feels ashamed and converts that shame immediately into defensiveness, because that’s easier to carry. What I’ve come to understand about defensiveness is that it almost never means “I disagree with your data”; it means “I feel like I’m being told I’m failing.” And once someone feels attacked, the conversation you wanted to have is over, because you’re now having a different one entirely.

How to actually open it

The timing matters more than most people think, which means: not mid-week when everyone is depleted, not in the aftermath of a specific incident when you’re still carrying the frustration of it, and not as an ambush. A simple, direct approach is to say, a day or two in advance: “I’d like us to sit down this weekend and talk about how we’re running the household. I want us to figure it out together, not argue about it.” You’re signalling that this is something worth taking seriously, that you’ve thought about it, and that you’re coming in as a partner rather than a plaintiff.

When you do sit down, start with the structure rather than the grievance. Something like: “I’ve been thinking about how we divide up the mental work of running this place, and I don’t think we’ve ever actually talked about it explicitly. I want us to look at it together and decide who owns what – not just who does what, but who’s responsible for the whole area.” Notice what’s absent from that opening: “I do everything,” “you never,” “it’s not fair.” All of those things may be true, and all of them are guaranteed to produce defensiveness before you’ve gotten anywhere useful.

The domain conversation itself

This is where the Domain Ownership Map becomes a useful tool to help guide the conversation. Go through it together, as a starting point for a shared redesign rather than as evidence for your case.

The questions that actually move things forward: which of these domains do you genuinely want to own, because some of this is preference, and matching people to domains they’re willing to be accountable for produces better results than distributing things arbitrarily. Which domains are you owning in name only, and be honest about this in both directions – if you’ve “owned” the finances but your husband has no idea what’s in the accounts, that domain needs restructuring too (that’s a whole other issue - I wrote about it here). And crucially: what does owning this domain actually mean in practice? Spell it out, because “you own school logistics” means you notice the invitation to the next parent-teacher check-in, you know what’s coming up, you make it happen without being asked – it doesn’t mean I alert you that Thursday is day of the parent-teacher check-in and you need to be there. If you don’t make this explicit, you will have this same conversation in three months, slightly angrier.

When it still stalls

Sometimes you do everything right and the conversation stalls anyway: they agree in the moment and nothing changes, or they get so defensive that you end up comforting them about their feelings while your original point evaporates.

A few things that help: write it down together at the end of the conversation, not as a task list but as a domain list with a name next to each area, because agreements that live only in memory tend to dissolve. Follow up as a check-in rather than enforcement, because “how’s the school logistics domain going?” is a fundamentally different conversation from “did you remember to book the parent-teacher check-in?” – one signals that the domain has genuinely transferred, the other signals that you’re still monitoring it, which means it hasn’t. And accept that this is a process rather than an event: the first conversation is not supposed to produce a solved household, it’s supposed to open the subject, and the households that actually shift are the ones where this becomes a low-stakes ongoing conversation rather than a high-stakes annual reckoning.

Questions worth sitting with:

—> When you imagine having this conversation, what are you most afraid will happen? That fear is usually worth examining before you start.

—> Is your partner aware that cognitive load is unevenly distributed in your household, or have they genuinely never had to think about it?

—> Are you asking for tasks, or are you asking for ownership, and have you communicated the difference clearly?

—> Is there any domain you’re holding onto that you could let go of fully, without monitoring?

The version of this conversation that works shouldn’t feel like a confrontation; it should feel like two people deciding, together, to run their shared life more deliberately. That's the goal: fairness not as a verdict delivered, but as something you build, iteratively, with someone who's actually on your side. ♡

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The Equitable Home

When my (then not yet) husband and I moved in together, my parents asked us: “So, how are you splitting things?” Intent on doing the feminist (in my mind: ‘fair’) thing, I rolled my eyes and answered: “50/50, obviously.”

That was Model 01 (read: Fail 01).

Since then, we have tried three different financial models across the course of our relationship. Each one taught us something, and only one of them actually worked for us. Here’s our journey.

Model 01

The 50/50 era – Equal amounts, wildly unequal impact

Early on, we did what seemed obvious: split everything down the middle. Rent, groceries, utilities, dinners out – perfectly equal, perfectly logical, completely fair.

But was it, really?

At the time, my partner was working as an engineer on a solid salary. I had just started my first job as an event planner – on below-minimum wage. He’d divide the bill and walk away fine. I’d divide the bill and do the maths on what was left in my account for the rest of the month.

50/50 looks like fairness on paper, but fairness isn’t about equal amounts, it’s about equal impact, taking into account pre-existing inequalities. When one person earns substantially more than the other, equal contributions create very unequal financial strain: the split that left him comfortable left me stretched thin.

50/50 has the aesthetics of fairness. But equal amounts on unequal incomes is just inequality with better branding.

And here’s the insidious part: greater financial ease translates, almost imperceptibly, into greater authority over money decisions. If he paid for things more easily, if he held the surplus, the power dynamic shifted in ways neither of us named at the time.

Model 02

The proportional era – Fairer, but not frictionless

Eventually, we did the actual maths: he was earning roughly 70% of our combined household income and I was bringing in 30%. So we rebuilt the system around those proportions: he’d cover 70% of our shared expenses, I’d cover 30%. Our contributions scaled with our capacity.

It was genuinely fairer and I could breathe again. The constant background hum of financial anxiety – the one I hadn’t even realised was there until it eased – got quieter.

But it came with its own friction. Every time anything changed – a pay rise, a bonus, a slow period, a career change – we’d need to recalculate. It required ongoing admin effort and transparency about our exact earnings, conversations that sometimes felt more like quarterly audits than partnership. And most importantly, we still ended up with very different amounts of personal spending money, which created its own dynamic: whose discretionary spending felt more significant, whose felt more scrutinised.

Model 03

The allowance model – Equal autonomy, shared purpose

Then we found the thing that actually worked.

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People tend to assume that in a household like ours, the male partner manages the money.

He doesn’t. I do.

I manage our weekly budget, the mortgage, insurance, retirement plan, investments…I could go on.

I know exactly where we stand, what we owe, what we’re building, and what each of us would have if something changed. We discuss every significant decision together: large purchases, how aggressively to invest, but the tracking, the management, the staying-on-top-of – that’s mine.

I’m sharing this not to suggest my household is a model. it has its own imbalances, as every household does, but because it directly contradicts the assumption that tends to underlie some conversations about women and money. The assumption that women are the ones who don’t know; the ones who defer; the ones who arrive at the end of a marriage having never looked at their own financial situation clearly.

Sometimes that’s true. And when it is, the consequences are serious.

Here’s what I want to say clearly, and then return to: I am a strong advocate for domain ownership when it comes to household tasks and mental load. One person owning the grocery domain, another owning the home maintenance domain – that clarity reduces the cognitive overhead that sits invisibly on one person’s shoulders.

But I do not advocate for domain ownership when it comes to money.

Finances are different, they are not a domain to be assigned and delegated. They are the foundation of every major life decision a person makes: where you live, when you can stop working, what options you have if things go wrong. A woman who is not involved in her household’s financial life is not simply leaving a task to someone else, she is ceding a say in her own future.

It’s not about distrust, or about assuming a relationship will end. It’s about something more fundamental: financial literacy is not a nice-to-have, it is a life skill. And for women, in particular, the cost of not having it is measurable, well-documented, and entirely too common.

The data on the financial literacy gender gap is consistent across every country that has studied it.

And importantly, this gap is not primarily about capability. Research consistently shows it is driven by who makes the financial decisions in a household. Women who are financially active – who manage investments, make financial decisions, engage with their own money – score just as highly as men. The gap is largely explained by the fact that, in most households, they don't.

That number (more than half of partnered women) is not a reflection of disinterest. It is a reflection of how financial roles have defaulted in most households for most of recorded history. One person becomes the specialist, the other defers. And over time, the person who defers knows less, which makes deferring feel more natural, which means they know even less. It is a compounding that most couples never notice until something disrupts it.

What disrupts it, most commonly, is separation or widowhood. And the financial consequences for women in these situations are stark.

That 30% figure is not primarily about asset division. It’s about the compounded effect of lower earnings, career interruptions, less savings in individual accounts, and *critically* less experience making independent financial decisions. Women who have been financially active throughout their relationship recover from separation more quickly and more fully than those who have not. The knowledge is the asset.

Here in New Zealand, the picture is no different. Women here retire with KiwiSaver (a voluntary, work-based retirement savings scheme) balances 25% lower than men’s on average; a gap that widens to 37% in the years just before retirement. This is not because women contribute less as a percentage of salary. It is because the structural disadvantages – the pay gap, the career breaks, the part-time work taken on to carry the household – compound across decades.

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So what does involvement actually look like? Because I want to be clear that I’m not arguing every woman should manage the budget spreadsheet. I’m arguing for something different: literacy and joint decision-making, not necessarily management.

In our household, I manage the detail. But my husband and I make every significant decision together, because he understands the picture well enough to engage meaningfully with it, and because I’ve made it a point to keep him informed enough to do so. That is the minimum, not that both people manage everything. That both people know enough to have a genuine say.

The practical version of this looks like:

• Both people knowing what the household owns, owes, and has saved – in each person’s name and jointly

• Both people being involved in decisions about mortgages, investment contributions, insurance cover

• Both people understanding what retirement will look like together, and what it would look like if they separated along the way

• Both people knowing where to find documents and accounts if the other person were suddenly unable to act

None of this requires both people to become financial experts. It requires both people to be financially present, to ask questions, to read the statement, to sit in the meeting. To say: this is my financial life too, and I want to understand it.

"Domain ownership makes sense for household tasks. For finances, it is a risk. A woman who doesn't know is not simply leaving the admin to someone she trusts. She is leaving her future in someone else's hands."

If you are the person in your household who manages little and knows less, this is not a judgment. These roles develop gradually, often invisibly, and they are reinforced by every financial system and cultural norm that has ever suggested money is complicated, boring, not talked about or somehow not for you.

It is for you. It is unambiguously, urgently for you.

And if you are the person who manages everything, as I am, this is a prompt to ask whether your partner is genuinely informed, or simply comfortable trusting you. There is a difference: one is a partnership, the other is a single point of failure.

This week’s free resource is a one-hour Couple’s Financial Review template. Use it to get both people looking at the same picture. If you’re the one who manages everything, use it to bring your partner across the detail. If you’ve been the one who defers, use it to start understanding what your financial life actually contains.

This week’s free resource

The Couple's Financial Review: a one-hour template.

Six sections: what you have, what you owe, what protects you, individual financial independence, the retirement picture for each of you, and one action each. Designed to be done together, once every six months.

→ Download free: The Couples Financial Review

Next week: what does your financial life actually look like? A practical guide to getting a clear picture of where you stand: assets, debts, net worth, and what retirement will realistically look like for you, not as a couple, but as a person.

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Until next week – The Equitable Home

Reply any time. I read everything.

By now you might have done the audit. You might even have started the weekly check-in. And if you have, something has probably already shifted: there’s a little less friction, a little more shared awareness, a feeling that things are slightly more visible than they were.

But here’s what I’ve noticed, both in our own household and in the messages I’ve been getting since starting this newsletter: even when the tasks are fairly divided, even when both people are engaged in the weekly check-in, there’s still an imbalance that’s harder to name.

It lives in who decides, who plans, who notices when something within a category is starting to go wrong, and feels responsible for fixing it.

What I’ve come to believe is that most households divide tasks without ever dividing ownership.

Doing a task means executing it when it's on the list. Owning a category means being responsible for the whole thing: the noticing, the planning, the deciding, and the doing.

Here’s what I mean:

Cooking dinner is a task. The food category is a domain. If I own the food domain, I’m responsible not just for making dinner when it’s my turn; I’m responsible for knowing what’s in the fridge, planning the week’s meals, doing or managing the shop, noticing when we’re out of something, and making sure dinner happens whether I cook it or not.

If he owns the food domain, the same is true for him. He doesn’t need to be told, he doesn’t need reminding. He’s not helping me with my domain, it’s his.

This sounds obvious when it’s spelled out. But almost no household operates this way. In almost every household I’ve spoken to, what actually exists is a list of tasks that are nominally shared and one person who holds the map.

The map is the knowledge of what exists, what needs doing, who should do it, and what happens if it falls through. And the map almost always lives with one person. Usually her.

The task audit I wrote about in Issue 001 was genuinely useful. Dividing by time created a fairness that hadn’t existed before. But it left the map intact, held by me, invisible, unexamined.

What changed things more profoundly was what I started thinking of as the ownership map. A different kind of document entirely. Not a list of tasks, but a list of domains, whole areas of household life, each with a named owner.

Not “we both sort of do the groceries.” One of us owns the food domain. Everything within it, the planning, the buying, the tracking, the noticing, is theirs to manage.

Not “I usually handle the school stuff but he helps.” One of us owns the children’s admin domain, fully. Including the worrying about it.

The effect of this, when we actually sat down and did it, was strange and immediate. Things stopped falling through the cracks not because we’d added another check-in or reminder system, but because there was now a person who was definitively, unambiguously responsible. No ambiguity, no assumption, no “I thought you had it.”

Below is what our ownership map looks like. I also share a link to the domain ownership template - to use as a starting point for the conversation about who actually holds what.

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Last week I wrote about the gap between the tasks and the thinking underneath them – how my partner and I had divided our household chores fairly by time, and how I was still the one carrying the complete mental picture of our home. Still the one who knew what needed doing, when, and what would fall apart if I forgot.

Several of you wrote back to say you recognised exactly that feeling. A few asked what we actually did about it.

The honest answer is: we introduced a meeting.

I know, I can hear you: A meeting. We already spend our days in meetings. The last thing most of us want is to come home and schedule another one. When I first suggested it to my partner, he looked at me the way you might look at someone who has proposed reorganising the bookshelf by colour.

But here’s what I’ve learned: the resistance to the idea is almost always larger than the reality of it. In practice, fifteen minutes on a Sunday evening has done more to redistribute the mental load in our household than any single conversation, any amount of quiet resentment, or any renegotiation of the task list ever did.

We weren't bad at communicating. We were just never communicating about the right things at the same time.

The problem our check-in solves isn’t organisation, exactly. It’s alignment.

Before we started doing this, the information about our household lived in different places. Extracurricular activities lived in my head. The state of the backyard lived in his. What was in the fridge, what was running low, who had a hard week coming up – all of it scattered across two people who were moving through the same house largely in parallel, assuming the other one had whatever they didn’t.

The result was a particular kind of low-grade friction that’s hard to name but very easy to feel. The mild irritation of telling someone something you were certain you’d already told them. The exhaustion of always being the one to notice. The vague sense that you are managing a household and your partner is living in one.

A weekly check-in doesn’t fix the underlying inequality on its own. But it does something critical: it makes the invisible visible to both people at the same time, in the same room, on a regular schedule. Once something is visible to both of you, it can be shared by both of you. That’s the mechanism.

Here is what our check-in actually covers. Fifteen minutes. Seven items. We sit down on Sunday evening after dinner, with the same agenda every week.

A few things about this agenda are worth explaining.

The capacity check (item two) is the one that surprised me most. It sounds soft. In practice, it’s the item that most consistently changes the tone of the whole week. Knowing that your partner is going into Tuesday at a two out of five means you can redistribute without being asked. It turns support from reactive to proactive. That shift is not small.

Item five (the four-week horizon) is where a significant amount of mental load used to live exclusively in my head. Knowing that a birthday is coming up, that a dentist appointment needs booking, that we’ll need to sort childcare for a specific weekend – none of that is large, but all of it accumulates. Saying it out loud together once a week means it no longer lives only in me.

Item seven is the most human one, and the easiest to skip when you’re tired. Don’t skip it. It’s the item that distinguishes a household logistics meeting from an actual conversation between two people who live together.

Now, how to introduce this to a partner who is not immediately enthusiastic?

The mistake most people make is framing it as a solution to a problem their partner doesn’t think they have. “We need to talk about the mental load” is a sentence that tends to produce defensiveness rather than collaboration, however valid it is.

A more useful framing is practical and specific:

• “I keep forgetting to tell you things until it’s too late – can we try a quick weekly catch-up so we both know what’s happening?”

• “I’d like us to have a place to put the admin stuff so it’s not just bouncing around in my head. Fifteen minutes, Sunday evening, same agenda each week.”

• “I want to feel less like I’m managing everything solo. I think this would help.”

The third option is the most honest, and for some partners, the most effective. It’s not a complaint or an accusation, just a clear and specific ask.

Agree to try it for four weeks before deciding whether it’s working. Four weeks is enough time for it to become a rhythm rather than an experiment, and a rhythm is the only version that actually helps.

One last thing: the check-in doesn’t have to be perfect to be useful. Some weeks ours takes eight minutes. Some weeks it drifts into a longer conversation about something that needed to be discussed. Some weeks one of us is tired and we do the bare minimum and that’s fine.

The goal isn’t an efficient meeting, the goal is that both people are holding the same information about their shared life at the same time, at least once a week. Everything else follows from that.

This week’s free resource

The Weekly Check-in Template – printable and ready to use.

The full one-page template covering all seven agenda items, with a capacity scale, a task assignment table, and space for open loops and next-week flags. Print one per week, or fill it in together on a screen.

→ Download free: The Weekly Check-in Template

Next week: the task ownership map – why “we both sort of do it” is a system designed to fail, and how to assign whole categories instead of individual tasks. This is the one that changed things more than anything else we tried.

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Until next week – The Equitable Home

Reply any time. I read everything.

A few years into our relationship, my partner and I did something that felt, at the time, quite grown-up and sorted. We sat down together and audited our household.

Not in a vague, “we should probably split things more fairly” way. A real audit. We listed every recurring task we could think of, logged how long each one took, and divided them as evenly as we could by time. It was methodical. Logical. The kind of thing that, had you been a fly on the wall, you might have found either admirably organised or mildly alarming.

The outcome looked like this:

By time, it was close. By visible effort, it was genuinely fair. If you’d asked either of us how our household worked, we’d have said: pretty well, actually.

And for the tasks on that list, that was true. He did the shopping. He ran the dishwasher. I washed the clothes and cleaned the bathroom. We cooked in turns. Nobody was carrying the physical load alone.

So why, a few years later, was I still ending most weeks feeling like I’d been quietly running a small organisation on top of my actual job?

Here’s what our audit didn’t capture. It didn’t capture who notices that we’re running low on washing liquid before we actually run out. It didn't capture who remembers that our daughter needs new shoes before the weekend, that a birthday gift still needs buying, or that the cat is overdue for her annual check-up. It didn’t capture who holds, at any given moment, the complete and current picture of our household, and who simply lives in it.

Our task list divided the labour. It said nothing about the awareness underneath the labour. And awareness, it turns out, is its own full-time job.

The term for this is mental load – the cognitive work of managing a household rather than just doing it. Knowing not just what needs doing, but that it needs doing, and when, and what happens if it doesn’t get done.

It’s the difference between executing a task and holding the system that generates the tasks in the first place. And in most households – including fairly balanced ones – that system lives in one person’s head. Usually hers.

What made it hard to see in our case was that the surface looked fine. The tasks were split. The house ran. There was nothing obvious to point to. The inequality was entirely invisible, which is precisely why it persisted for so long. You can’t fix what you can’t see. And I couldn’t quite see it until I started paying attention to where the information lived.

It lived in me. Most of it. The shopping was his job, but I was the one who knew we were nearly out of olive oil. The rubbish was his job, but I was the one who noticed that we were out of rubbish bags. The calendar was theoretically shared, but I was the one actually carrying it.

Once I saw it, I couldn’t unsee it.

I want to be clear about something, because I think it matters: this isn’t a story about a bad partner. It isn’t really a story about fault at all. My partner is attentive and willing and has never, when I’ve raised something, refused to engage. The mental load didn’t accumulate because he was selfish. It accumulated because we’d never designed a system to distribute it – and in the absence of a system, it defaulted to me. As it defaults to most women.

The task audit we did all those years ago was a good instinct. It solved the right problem, just not the only problem. What it missed was the layer underneath: who carries the knowledge that tasks exist, who tracks the deadlines, who holds the worry.

Fixing that layer required something different. Not a better spreadsheet, but a different kind of conversation – one about visibility and ownership, not just time. We needed a way to make the invisible infrastructure of our household shared, not just the visible tasks on top of it.

What that looked like practically, and how we got there without it turning into an argument, is what I’ll be writing about in the weeks ahead.

The Equitable Home is for women who are doing a lot of things right – who have partners who aren’t useless, households that mostly function, lives that look fine from the outside – and who are still, somehow, carrying more than their share.

It’s for the woman who can’t quite justify her own exhaustion, because she can’t point to anything obviously broken. It’s for the woman who has tried the task list and found it wasn’t quite enough. And it’s for the woman who suspects that the problem is somewhere in the invisible work – but hasn’t yet found the right language to name it, let alone fix it.

I’ll share systems, frameworks, or honest pieces of thinking on what it actually takes to make a household fair. Some weeks it’ll be practical tools. Some weeks it’ll be about money, which has its own invisible inequality that I’m equally interested in pulling apart. Some weeks it’ll just be a random feminist rant.

I’m glad you found this.

Free resource – this week

The Household Audit: 20 questions to see who’s really running your home.

It goes beyond the task list. Four sections – physical tasks, mental load, finances, and your own capacity – with a scoring guide that shows you clearly, and without blame, where the weight is actually sitting.

→ Download free: The Household Audit

Next week: the weekly household check-in – exactly how we run ours, the template we use, and how to introduce it to a partner who finds the idea of "scheduling family admin" deeply unappealing. (Mine did too.)

Until next week – The Equitable Home

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