Invisible & Priceless — What’s your superpower?
Do you cook breakfast, lunch and dinner, and pack lunch for kids and family?
Do you know what annual check-ups and doctor appointments are due, when, and book them before they get filled up?
Do you know the dates of your kids’ field trips, volunteer hours, class and school tests?
Do you help your kids every day with homework, Math, Science, Reading, Writing, projects and various other academic topics?
How about all of the above and a full-time job or maybe a few part-time jobs?
For most of my childhood, I remember my mother did multiple jobs to keep our household running along with my dad’s modest salary. She was a tutor for students of all grades teaching several subjects — Science, Math, Social Science, Geography, English and learning along the way. I could never figure out then, how someone without a formal high school education was able to self-learn and teach so many subjects in a language that was not her first, tutoring students of all grades who came to our home in hordes. And the house was always packed! She was also a tailor, sewing clothes along the way for extra wages, all along toiling for unpaid work — cooking, cleaning, fetching potable water, laundry, teaching, homework, prescriptions, doctor appointments, being the chief nutritionist, organizer, and most importantly inspiring, loving, cheering and instilling the right values in us. And all this she did, even when she was not well or running fever.
This is true today as it was decades ago, and there’s loads of invisible and unpaid work that mothers all over the world do. I struggle with this at home and help strike the right balance with my wife, who I know does a lot more than I do/can. More importantly it’s the constant mind share and mental trapeze she does, to stay ahead of the game, even as she juggles with her professional work.
One of the key challenges women around the world face is unpaid labor. If you look at the unpaid labor that women do at homes — from doing the dishes, the laundry, the shopping, to cooking meals, cleaning, to all the other household chores, it averages out to seven years of a woman’s life — many women could do a lot with seven years of their life.
I was fortunate to attend a “Moment of Lift” visit and talk by Melinda Gates, interviewed by Satya Nadella last week. She shared stories from her trips around the world, visiting and living with women in various cultures, and the central theme of her book by the same name, “How Empowering Women Changes the World.” In the book, Melinda notes that a woman could earn a PhD in the time she spends on unpaid labor. It’s one example of how inequity between genders leads to fewer opportunities for women.
Melinda recounted a story when she visited a village in Northern India and had met Meena, who’d just had another child. She asked Meena what her hopes and dreams for her kids were, when all of a sudden Meena cast her eyes down and was silent. She eventually looked up and told Melinda “I don’t have any hope for my children. Their only chance is if you take them home with you.” This was a heart-breaking moment for Melinda, as she realized the power of mother is such that, Meena was willing to give her children away for a better future for them.
“I’m the person who notices we are running out toilet paper, and I rock”, Ellen Seidman wrote in her blog “Love That Max” about her role in her household, as a tribute to mothers everywhere. She notes it’s her uncanny ability to see things like –
- “I am the person who notices we are running low on clean underwear, unless you count the pairs with holes which some people do.
- I am also the person who notices we are running low on children’s clothing that actually fits them.”
Even though fathers do their share of chores and errands, mothers do a lot more physical, emotional, mental and intellectual work than men. According to Gates, women still end up doing about 90 minutes of extra unpaid work a day. There are so many emotional cues mothers pick up, like when a child says her day was fine at school, it’s the mother who knows when fine is not fine, and what consumes their mind, time and emotional energies.
It’s the constant mindful awareness about things like tracking developmental milestones for kids, choice of after-school and summer classes, planning the next meal, dealing with school drops and pickups after school, while ensuring their professional work is not affected, that’s a big part of the invisible work. It is a superpower only mothers have. This invisible workload is a mental burden that she carries, a safety net and benevolent motive force which families thrive on.
Lisa Wade, an associate professor of sociology at Occidental College says “To truly be free, we need to free women’s minds. Of course, someone will always have to remember to buy toilet paper, but if that work were shared, women’s extra burdens would be lifted. Only then will women have as much lightness of mind as men.”
Like many others, I was taken by this creative campaign by BBDO from India — which ignited a conversation around the uncomfortable truth that most household chores are done by women in the family and our social conditioning which expects daughters to do much of the household work with no such expectations from sons, especially in some cultures.
The campaign is powerful as it challenges the notion of upbringing (of sons), urging this generation of mothers to be the change agents for the future, by teaching sons what we have been teaching daughters.
Dads need to set a good example for sons by sharing more of the household chores and the invisible workload. Even before this, the first step would perhaps be to acknowledge and be grateful to the superwoman protecting and powering our lives…Now that’s a superpower worth having!
