Mental Load: Not Just a Home Issue

We’ve all seen the articles about how, despite progress in creating more equity across genders when it comes to the action of household tasks, the majority of the mental load of running a household still falls to women. Tasks like keeping a mental log of when each room was cleaned last, when you need to order the replacement for your fridge’s water filter, making sure to schedule your twice-yearly HVAC maintenance, etc. run on an ever-expanding to-do list in our heads. If kids are in the mix, the list gets even longer.

With this dynamic statistically prevalent in our home lives, it’s no wonder that the same thing is happening at work. Ever wonder why, as of 2019, 94% of Administrative Professionals are women? Those are jobs where being able to keep track of schedules, to-dos, and “what happened last year?”s define success.?

However, administrative jobs are not the only area of the workplace where women are lifting a substantial mental load. “Turning off” your ability to carry the anticipation and knowledge of what needs to happen can often translate directly volunteering for or accepting assignment of the “non-promotable tasks” that make every team run. Planning team birthday celebrations, training new hires, organizing documentation, taking notes, and other simple but necessary and often time-consuming tasks are absorbed by women for a few different reasons.?

Sometimes those tasks are a defined part of their role, sometimes there’s an ask out to a broader group and women are the primary people who volunteer. What I’ve seen anecdotally in the latter example is interesting. Speaking from my own experience and connecting with some trusted colleagues, there’s a sense of “if I don’t do it, no one will,” that pervades these types of tasks. It’s not necessarily other people putting these tasks on my shoulders directly, but rather my own sense of personal responsibility that makes me feel pressure to identify potential gaps, problem-solve, and implement the solutions to fill those gaps. I like to feel relied upon, and to know that others think of me as a subject matter expert on a wide range of subjects.?

While I believe this sense of responsibility can be positively traced back to my career growth, it is also a key source of burnout. For me, the bearing of this mental load means throwing out an unreasonable list of reminders to my team every week, and finding ways to trace any mistakes that happen on our broader team back to myself: if I’d better anticipated anything that could go wrong, I could have gotten ahead of the mistake before it happened. No one expects me to be the sole bearer of every typo, missed deadline, or skipped stakeholder review that happens for our whole creative team. But the weight of the (often self-imposed) responsibility that comes with bearing the mental load for my team sits squarely on my shoulders, and can push me towards self-criticism and burnout more quickly than my other day-to-day tasks.

While this is my own experience, there is also research that shows a correlation between women as those primary bearers of mental load at home, and women as the majority of “people-pleasers” in general. People-pleasing is a large contributor to that sense of personal responsibility to keep all of the metaphorical balls in the air both at home and at work, and is an easy and natural trap to fall into. The desire to ensure harmony and happiness presents itself as helpful and kind, but it also forces one to lose their own sense of self and their ability to protect from burnout by effectively setting boundaries and protecting time.

So what can we do about this? How do women become empowered to release the mental load of the workplace without the fear that everything will crash and burn around them? Firstly, let’s raise awareness that this isn’t just an at-home issue. If you notice women around you at work taking on more than their fair share of the personal responsibility of a team’s success, have a conversation! If you are a man reading this, take a step back and think about the women in your workplace, and think through whether you can see signs of this. When you’ve found an example, do something about it. Volunteer or offer to take on some of those non-promotable tasks. And women, a big piece of getting to the root of this is dealing with people-pleasing behavior by finding small ways to practice saying “no.”?

I want to end this article with a clarification - I’ve referred to “women” as a group quite a bit above. I make that reference because of the strong correlation between the research data that shows women as the majority of people affected by this challenge, but I do recognize that this is painting with a broad brush. I am by no means intending to exclude other people who carry the mental load for their households and workplaces. Sharing the mental load equitably, regardless of gender, is the ultimate end-goal. The more we can do to hold hands and work together to get there, the better.