Earning more doesn’t lighten mothers’ mental loads – they do more regardless
- Written by The Conversation
You work a full day, drive the kids to various after school activities, make a mad dash to the supermarket to pick up something for dinner, check emails … and then remember you need a gift for Aunty June’s birthday tomorrow.
Sound familiar?
Our new research shows the “mental load” of managing a household on daily basis falls disproportionately to mothers. This means all the remembering, planning, anticipating and organising that keeps family life running “sticks” to mothers in partnered, heterosexual couples even when they work full-time, earn high incomes, or are the family breadwinner.
While mothers who earn and work more do less of the physical domestic tasks, the mental load remains unmovable. This reveals a less recognised or seen – but nonetheless enduring – barrier to gender equality at home that persists across different work and income patterns.
What is the domestic mental load?
The domestic mental load is the essential emotional thinking work that keeps family life functioning. We measured it by 21 distinct tasks, ranging from keeping track of when children’s nails need clipping, to ensuring the fridge is stocked for the next meal. We asked more than 2,000 US-based parents living in a heterosexual couple which partner is mostly responsible for each task.
On average, mothers report being mainly responsible for 67% more household management than fathers. As the figure below shows, we observed the largest gaps for “core”, routine tasks that often crop up daily, including family scheduling, managing the cleaning, organising childcare, managing social relationships, and taking care of the food.
While fathers report greater responsibility for cognitive tasks related to household maintenance and finances, these gender gaps are comparatively small. These are also tasks that are typically less urgent and done less frequently.
So, while fathers are contributing to mental labour tasks, they are much less likely to say they are primarily responsible for them. This is an important distinction because primary responsibility means accountability – it’s who gets blamed when things go wrong or are forgotten.
But cognitive labour is only one piece. We also found that, on average, mothers are doing 85% more of the physical childcare and housework, too. These patterns are not just a US parent phenomenon - our interviews with Australian parents demonstrate a similar pattern. Mothers are carrying heavier domestic loads both in their physical labour and in their minds.
Mothers’ ‘sticky’ situation
We know from decades of research and the results from our own survey that mothers who work longer hours spend less time in housework and childcare on average. Earning more money is also a key bargaining tool for mothers to reduce their domestic contributions.
Crucially, though, we do not see these same patterns when it comes to the mental load. Instead, mothers who work and earn more still do significantly more than their fair share of the mental load, even as their physical workloads lighten.
We call this “gendered cognitive stickiness”: once the mental load is socially assigned to mothers – and, given gender expectations of mothers’ role as primary caregivers, it almost always is – it tends to “stick” to them regardless of their employment status or how much they earn.
This reflects how different the mental load is from physical childcare and housework. Cognitive domestic labour is not seen, acknowledged, or discussed in the same way as physical chores. This is precisely because it happens inside our heads — anywhere, anytime — and is usually only visible when something goes wrong, such as a forgotten appointment or a key ingredient missing from the cupboard.
The fact mothers do so much more of this cognitive labour than fathers even as employment and earnings increase reflects how much harder the mental load is to outsource, offload, or devolve to others than physical chores.
Because of this, no amount of money or career success frees mothers from the unseen and constant need to remind, anticipate, and coordinate everything that needs doing for the family.
We do find that when fathers earn more, they take on more of this thinking work. For example, fathers earning more than $100,000 reported 17% more involvement in “core” mental tasks, such as arranging extracurricular activities. We suspect this reflects new norms that expect fathers to be more involved in the primary care of children as well as the flexibility more common in high-paying jobs.
However, fathers’ increased contributions do not offset mothers’ overall burden. Mothers are still shouldering the bulk of the mental load.
These findings indicate a plateau in progress towards gender equality. While women have achieved high rates of education and workforce participation, men’s participation in household work - especially the mental load - has not kept pace.
The enduring domestic mental load helps explain why mothers, including those working and earning healthy incomes, feel stretched thin, stressed, and short on time. They are holding down paid jobs and keeping on top of all the household needs in their heads. This has negative implications for women’s wellbeing, careers, and families.
Equalising the mental load is not just about fairness. It is also about ensuring that families can thrive and that progress toward gender equality continues rather than stalls.
