The Mental Load Doesn't Care How Much You Earn: A Harvard Sociologist Explains Why
Think about the last time you and your partner split up the school pickup list, or decided who was calling the pediatrician back. Now think about who was quietly tracking that it needed to happen in the first place. My guest this week, Allison Daminger, spent eight years and almost 200 interviews answering exactly that question, and her research says something most of us already feel in our bones: earning more money does not make the mental load lighter.
Allison started this work as a first-year PhD student at Harvard, reading through the data on how much housework and childcare men and women were doing. The gap was roughly double for women, and it had barely moved in thirty years. But what stuck with her was something the time-use studies could not measure. When she interviewed Boston parents about choosing a school for their kid, moms would say "we decided to send her to Briar Academy." Push a little further and "we" turned into "I." I built the spreadsheet. I emailed the tours. I tracked the deadlines. That gap between "we" and "I" became her research question, and eventually her book, What's on Her Mind: The Mental Workload of Family Life.
So what is the mental load, exactly? Allison calls it cognitive labor, the anticipating, planning, deciding, and following up that has to happen before anyone ever executes a task. It's different from doing the dishes or driving carpool. It's the thing that pings in your head at a quiet dinner table because you suddenly remembered you and your husband still haven't finalized a will. A 2025 study from the University of Bath and the University of Melbourne found exactly what Allison sees in her own data: mothers report handling 67% more household mental load tasks than fathers, and that gap does not close when she out-earns him. Mothers making over $100,000 a year do 30% less childcare and 17% less housework than lower-earning moms, but carry the same cognitive load regardless.
Allison's research backs up something Erica has said for years: this doesn't fix itself until men get the same shot women do at learning a newborn's needs from day one. Federal data backs that instinct up too. Only 27% of private-sector workers in the US have access to paid family leave, which means most new dads never get the extended, solo stretch of caregiving that turns "I'm not a planner" into a learned skill. Allison's favorite finding cuts through the excuse either way: the men she calls "bumblers" are often surgeons and management consultants, people who plan complex systems for a living at work every day. The skill is already there. It just hasn't been asked of them at home yet. If you've ever been told your partner's brain "just doesn't work that way," this episode is your permission to stop believing that, and your blueprint for renegotiating the load instead.
TRANSCRIPT:
Erica: Hey, girl. By now, you know I have Her Collective, my online community for ambitious women who are done doing it alone. Her Collective is for the women who are smart, capable, and driven, but they find themselves stuck on the sticky floors like self doubt, burnout, and waiting for permission that quite honestly never comes. Inside HER, you get more than motivation. You get real support, real strategies, and real momentum.
Erica: We work on things like clarifying what you want now and what's coming next, building confidence without burning yourself out, navigating hard conversations, career moves, and leadership moments with clarity, and surrounding yourself with women who actually get it. This isn't about hustling harder. It's about moving intentionally with the right tools and the right people in your corner. If you're ready to stop spinning, start choosing yourself, and build a career and life that actually feels aligned, I'd love to welcome you inside her collective. You can learn more and join us at www.joinhercollective.com.
Erica: Because honestly, girl, you were never meant to do this alone. Welcome to the Glass Ceilings and Sticky Floor podcast, the podcast where we get real about the challenges that women face in work, life, and leadership. I'm your host, Erica Rooney, HR executive, keynote speaker, and executive coach, and I'm on a mission to get more women into positions of power and keep them there. This is the space where we call it the paradoxes, being told to lean in but not too far, to speak up but not too loudly, to be ambitious but not too ambitious. Does that sound familiar?
Erica: Yeah. We're over all that. Here, we break down the sticky floors that keep us stuck from imposter syndrome and perfectionism to burnout and fear, and we give you real strategies to shatter those glass ceilings once and for all. So if you're ready to rewrite the rules, own your power, and take your career and life to the next level, you're in the right place. And y'all, today's guest, oh, oh, oh, she is a groundbreaking sociologist and a writer who is making the invisible labor of women visible.
Erica: Allison Daminger's research shines a light on the hidden work that disproportionately falls on women. And y'all, we call that the mental load. So we are gonna talk about not just the doing, not just the executing of the thing, but the planning, the anticipating, and the managing of all the things that must happen in your home all the time. Her book, it's called What's on Her Mind? The Mental Workload of Family Life is a guide to understanding and addressing this issue head on.
Erica: Not to mention, it's gonna make you feel deeply seen and deeply heard, and it's a great conversation starter for anyone who wants to create a more equitable partnership. Allison, welcome to the podcast. How are you?
Allison: Thanks so much for having me, Erica. I am doing well. Speaking of mental load, I'm sort of juggling childcare while I'm on the East Coast for a book tour, and it is a lot. But I'm happy to have this time with you to talk about these issues I'm really passionate about.
Erica: Well, I mean, we're gonna talk about all the time. Right? Because I'm here in North Carolina. We've got year round school, so that means my kids are currently on break. They're 10 and seven. So me too, girl. So if you hear kids screaming, like, hey, we'll have to take a pause, but we'll leave the scream in there for effect. And then we'll just keep it rolling because that's what we do. But I have read your book, which is amazing work. Congratulations. It is spot on to everything every mother has ever felt in her life, but also women. And I really wanna talk about your research on the mental workload of family life. And I just wanna kick it off with, let's talk about what is invisible labor and why is it so different from all of these physical tasks.
Allison: First year PhD student trying to find a dissertation topic. And one of the things I was noticing, I was doing all this reading about gender gaps in the time men and women spend on things like housework and childcare. And, you know, I was shocked and appalled and all of those things. Right? There's some wide gaps. It's roughly two x what women are doing compared to what men are doing. And that hasn't budged a ton over the past thirty years. It's been, to your point, pretty sticky. But one of the things that I was wondering when I was reading these statistics was, what about what men and women are doing for their families in their heads? I knew that decision making was really taxing. It is really hard at the end of the day. Someone asks you, where do you wanna get takeout or what do you want for dinner? And if you've been in it for ten hours at the office, it's like, all I want is for you to decide. I don't want to have to do it. Right? So we often think about decisions as, oh, this is great, we have choice, that's all wonderful. But sometimes it takes a lot out of us, and there can be a real gift when somebody helps you with that decision.
Allison: So that was my entree point to say, okay, what if I did some research, did interviews with couples about how they were making decisions for their families? So I started out looking at decisions about where to send your kid for school. This was in Boston, a context where it's not necessarily that you just send them to the public school down the block. There's a lot more options there. And one of the things I found super interesting that really launched me on this whole thing was the language that moms use to talk about the process of picking a school for their kid. And they would say things like, oh, we toured a bunch of schools, we did a bunch of research, we talked to a bunch of friends, and then ultimately we decided to send our child to Briar Academy. And like any good interviewer, you're taught to probe and to say, okay, tell me more about that, give me specifics. And what quickly happened was that "we" turned into "I." She would tell me, well, actually, I was the one who tracked that these deadlines were coming up. I was the one who put together a spreadsheet of all the possible schools we could send our kids to. I was the one who emailed to set up the tours, and then we went on the tours and made a decision. And I said, whoa, that is not really well accounted for in the existing literature. And so I set out to study what are the decisions people are making, what is the planning and project management work that folks are doing, and mostly, spoiler, women are doing this work for their families. What effect does that have on them? And how can we bring this work that is largely hidden more into the light?
RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:
- Ready to close your mental load gap with real support and real strategies? Join HER Collective, Erica's coaching community for ambitious women who are done doing it alone.
- What's on Her Mind: The Mental Workload of Family Life by Allison Daminger.
- Allison Daminger, assistant professor of sociology at UW-Madison.
- Glass Ceilings and Sticky Floors by Erica Anderson Rooney.
RELATED EPISODES:
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS:
What is the mental load, and how is it different from housework?
The mental load, also called cognitive labor, is the anticipating, planning, deciding, and following up that happens before anyone does a physical task, like remembering a permission slip is due or tracking that the pediatrician needs a callback. Sociologist Allison Daminger's research found this thinking work is largely invisible and falls disproportionately on women, even in couples who share the physical chores fairly evenly.
Does making more money than your partner reduce your mental load?
Not on its own. A 2025 University of Bath and University of Melbourne study found mothers report handling 67% more household mental load tasks than fathers, and that gap holds even for high earners. Mothers making over $100,000 a year do less childcare and less housework than lower-earning moms, but they still carry the same amount of mental load.
What are "bumblers and superhumans" in Allison Daminger's research?
They're the labels couples give themselves to explain an uneven mental load: she's the "superhuman" who is naturally organized, he's the "bumbler" who just isn't a planner. Daminger found the personality gap doesn't hold up. Many "bumblers" plan complex systems all day at work. The real difference is practice, not wiring, which means the skill can be learned and the load can be reallocated.
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Hi, I'm Erica!
In the last 15 years, I climbed to Chief People Officer, 6x'd my income, walked away from a culture that stopped matching my values, wrote two books, and built HER Collective to help thousands of women rise to power and lead in the age of AI. I've learned a thing or two about smashing ceilings and closing gaps, and Glass Ceilings & Sticky Floors is where I open the playbook, the receipts, and the real stories to share it all with you.
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