We teach our kids to be “fair” and to make things “equal” when they squabble. So why doesn’t “equal” ever seem to work when it comes to sharing family duties in the household?
By Eve Rodsky Sept. 20, 2019 10:25 am ET Some of my dearest friends and I met in downtown Los Angeles one Saturday morning to join a march to honor breast cancer survivors. As we walked through the streets in pink leggings, chanting, “Courage, strength and power,” it felt like a true girlfriends’ getaway with high-energy sisterhood in the air.
I decided to dig into the issue. I’m trained as a lawyer, mediator and negotiator, and my whole job is to find win-win solutions to thorny issues, so I put my researcher hat on and went to work. Over the course of several years, I interviewed more than 500 men and women about how they divide responsibilities at home and spoke with a range of experts who have studied the problem.
“I don’t have any grand illusions of my husband doing equal to what I do,” confided one woman from Ann Arbor, Mich., “but I would like him to take responsibility for those things he promised to ‘handle’ and without reminders from me.” But here’s the good news: Among couples I interviewed, once they began to understand every part of what was required to meet a responsibility fully, the sense of fairness shifted. Specifically, when women felt relieved of a share of the cognitive labor, they reported that the division of tasks was more equitable—even when the division was not straight down the middle.
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