The stepmom spying watching me sex videosidea that the men who manage complicated projects at work are incapable of attending to the details of domestic life has always been bullshit.
In treating everyone’s capability as a given and building on it accordingly, lawyer and mediator Eve Rodsky has created a subversively brilliant playbook for managing domestic work. In Fair Play: A Game-Changing Solution for When You Have Too Much to Do (and More Life to Live), she brings the tenets of organizational management into the home and makes them work for everyone. The book can be ordered with a physical deck of cards, and together, they help partners divide and conquer caregiving and housework.
Thanks to decades of work by scholars, organizers, and everyday women, invisible laboris starting to get its due. The term refers to work that occurs outside the bounds of formal employment and therefore isn’t recognized as labor, such as grocery shopping or cooking.
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Compounding the situation, women in particular also face the added stress of carrying the “mental load.” This term refers to the cognitive effort that undergirds the execution of domestic tasks such as housework and caregiving (which are often themselves invisible). It’s the difference between being fully autonomously responsible for a task and executing someone else’s orders. If you went to the grocery store using a list someone else compiled, then you outsourced some of the grocery shopping.
But as couples, especially cisgender heterosexual couples, attempt to better balancethe work in their home lives, they may run into a problem: Once the invisible labor is identified and acknowledged, how can it be managed and equitably shared in a way that everyone can live with?
"The upshot ... is the time and freedom for partners (often women) to disengage from tasks they’re not responsible for"
It’s this secondary problem – the step that comes after the acceptance of the existence of invisible labor – that Harvard-trained lawyer and family values mediator Rodsky wants to help people solve. Her book is part self-help guide, part mediation manual. She advocates for creating systems for managing domestic labor — first by laying out all there is to do, and then cooperatively delegating it between partners or among family members. The key though is that the mental effort of a task — what usually becomes “the mental load” — also gets handed off. This is the “conception” phase of her framework, where each task is composed of “Conception, Planning, and Execution,” and has a “Directly Responsible Individual” who accomplishes the task according to a “Minimum Standard of Care.” Partners review the deck and keep in play only those cards with responsibilities that apply to them.
Beneath the intimidating jargon are concepts that come from the world of organizational management familiar to many white-collar knowledge workers. If you’re in charge of a task at work, you figure out how and when to complete it, with input from your boss or colleagues, and then you do it. Just like your boss shouldn’t need to remind you to file your weekly report on Fridays, you should proactively get out the kid's toothbrush and start the bedtime routine (if that’s your task).
“People think systems are not fun – systems are everything,” Rodsky explained. “Systems allow for fun. What systems do, is they allow you to customize your defaults, the same way our law does.” She uses the example of stop signs, which allow pedestrians to walk across streets with the general confidence that a car must, by law, stop at the signs. “What systems do is they create accountability and trust, whether it's in a home, an organization, a county, a federal government,” she said.
The upshot of this system, according to Rodsky, is the time and freedom for partners (often women) to disengage from tasks they’re not responsible for, with the knowledge and confidence that they’re being handled. Whereas at work this translates into an improved bottom line, at home it can translate into leisure time.
There already is a system in place, just an inequitable one.
“It's a huge reset of how we look at things,” Rodsky says, “because we've never looked at our home as an organization.”
Creating and maintaining a system for organizing any project is time consuming, and it can feel weird and tedious to have a discussion about how often the garbage should go out, or the steps needed to get a child ready for school. But that’s the point, Rodsky says — to bring the same “respect and rigor” that you apply to your work projects to your domestic life. If you want to have an equal partnership where either parent can get a child ready for school, then you actually dohave to clarify what being “ready for school” involves.
“That's the idea of treating your home with some respect and rigor, where garbage actually deserves a conversation. And when Seth [Rodsky’s husband] and I said ‘garbage actually deserves a conversation just as much as our workplace,’ we realized that all of a sudden housework was elevated,” said Rodsky.
Putting a system like this into place istime-intensive, but that observation overlooks the fact that someone had already been spending time on the work, but usually without acknowledgement. There was already a system in place, just an inequitable one.
“This requires a total mindset set shift ... the finding in Fair Play was that as a society, we were viewing men's time as finite, like diamonds. And we're viewing and treating women's time as infinite like sand…,” Rodsky said. “It's so important because it affects everything. The way we view time in our society affects everything.”
One immediate thing you’ll notice about the physical Fair Play cards, which will be released later this month, is that not all the cards take the same amount of time. Some are occasional tasks, others are daily. That’s intentional.
“You'll see a little coffee cup amongst the cards,” Rodsky explained. “And those were what I call the daily grind. Those were the cards that are the hardest to do that take the most time... And so we noted those, because if women are doing all the daily grinds and men are taking other tasks, it’s not going to really solve any of our division of labor issues.”
As a way to sidestep the different expectations that partners might have for a given task, Rodsky borrows from the legal tradition, asking “what would a reasonable person do?” “Partners use the prompt to create a shared definition for what it means to do a task, something Rodsky refers to as the “minimum standard of care.” It’s through this process that a household decides that “doing the laundry” includes putting it away at the end. She also suggests couples connect to their values to ensure that a given task is actually important to them. If it’s not important to your family to buy holiday gifts, then don’t do it, but if it is, then it needs to be shared, or at least adjusted for in each person’s total workload.
In practice, this can look like each person compromising in service of a bigger ideal. If you and your spouse decide that you value a tidy bedroom, then you discuss what “tidy” means. It could be that the bed is made every day, and the laundry is off the floor. If that’s the standard, then you also agree on the deadline, perhaps that by 4 pm every weekday the bed is made and the floor is clear, and you’ll trade off this responsibility daily, with the weekends off. Yes, it’s highly detailed, but it’s also clear and both parties can presumably live with the arrangement.
Women traditionally have been at a disadvantage in trying to convince their male partners to more equitably share domestic labor, since the system that exploits and burns out women has in turn granted autonomy and leisure time for men. The book implies that if you want change in your relationship and your spouse isn’t interested, you might need to decide if you want to stay in the relationship at all. The goal of creating Fair Play, Rodsky said, was to create a third option for women who didn’t want to (or couldn’t) abandon the lives they’d created with their partners, or become martyrs on the altar of domesticity. Rodsky’s belief that if you build it, your spouse will come around is reminiscent of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s optimism that if she could just explain to a hostile Supreme Court how laws aimed at protecting women actually hurt them, they would come down. While this can sound naive to modern feminists, there’s no denying that it can be effective.
Having tried the system with both the book and the physical cards, I’d say it’s best-suited to couples with a pre-existing desire for an equal partnership who need scaffolding to manage domestic work in a new way, especially after becoming parents.
“So many people in my data set, told me that ‘Well I did my laundry.’ So Dad did his laundry before kids, Mom did her own laundry before kids, but because there was no communal philosophy, nobody knew who was doing baby’s laundry,” Rodsky said, explaining how the system breaks down. “And ‘I do my dishes; she did her dishes,’ well that doesn't work when there's a third party that is neither one of you. So that's why I always love this idea of doing everything for everybody.”
Also like Ginsburg, there’s an eye toward the long game in Fair Play. Rodsky acknowledged that her efforts to teach her sons the value of these life skills is part of a push to elevate the status of this work and make sure society as a whole values it for generations to come.
“The communication practice, the investment in our home is really going to...pay off in the humans we live [with] in this world. I mean, think about our president. We don't want narcissistic people who can't complete tasks. We want people who are holistically understanding the value of executive function and soft skills and being able to connect with others and that's really what the communal philosophy of Fair Play is about.”
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