The Hidden Mental Load of Household Cognitive Labor

Mothers do more than fathers!

A new cognitive household labor study confirms what moms have been reporting for the last few years – they do more emotional and actual household work than their partners.  

A study called “Cognitive Household Labor: Gender Disparities and Consequences for Maternal Mental Health and Wellbeing” was published in July 2024 in the Archives of Women’s Mental Health. It revealed that the simple anticipation, planning, organizing, and delegation of household tasks – things like scheduling, tidying, making dinner, washing up, bedtime routines - may be just as taxing on mothers as actually doing those tasks.

Cognitive household labor

This concept of thinking about tasks yet to be done is called cognitive labor. The researchers studied thirty different tasks, things like medical appointments, teacher meetings, extracurricular activities, childcare helpers, transportation, etc. The study's lead researchers, Darby Saxbe, Lizzie Aviv, and others in the Dept. of Psychology at Univ. of Southern California in Los Angeles, report that many more mothers struggle with this than fathers.  

The researchers spoke with 322 mothers of young children under the age of 3 years. For the household labor inventory, they adapted the Fair Play deck of cards, in which each card represents a domestic task. The Fair Play deck is a couple’s conversation deck for prioritizing what’s important. Various scales were used to detect overall mental health, stress, burnout, depression and relationship quality.

Gender differences in cognitive labor

This study found that mothers perform 73% of all cognitive (planning) household work and 64% of physical work in contrast to their partners’ doing 27% and 36% respectively. The figure reveals for many of the household tasks, whether planning (red dots) or doing them (yellow dots), mothers do far more than fathers. The less cognitively demanding tasks that do not relate to childcare (e.g., garbage, home maintenance, and bills) tended to be divided more equally between mothers and fathers.