Here’s something that outraged me recently. This comedian was having a little dig at mums and WhatsApp groups, parodying all the messages that are unnecessary and just clog group chats with fluff. I get that it was supposed to be funny and I understand the overwhelm of all the messaging apps we have to keep up with, but all it did for me was solidify how the invisible work women do is constantly dismissed as trivial. Those pesky soft skills that are nice but superfluous. Especially in a group chat when the coach is simply trying to find out who the hell is playing on the weekend.

When someone in the comments challenged this guy on his take, suggesting that women are the ones managing most of what I like to call “life admin” she was accused of being a “Karen”. Dismissed again.

As a woman, and as a parent, I have felt dismissed often. The unseen work we do keeps households running but because it is most often unpaid, it has no clear perceived value.

In lockdown, when things were particularly stressful for everyone, there was one day when I was so frustrated about the prioritisation of paid work over the family’s mental health I made a list of all the things I did that were outside recognised employment. They may have seemed small, but in the fabric of life at that time, they were the fibres holding us together. I won’t include the full list but some of it stands out to me because it comes under unpaid care.

It’s not only the time it takes to do some of these tasks, but also the headspace. I’m not suggesting I do this alone; my husband participates in the running of the house and parenting of children, but these smaller, less significant jobs are all on me. And yes, some of them I do by choice because showing support to my family and friends is a priority. I recognise this is a personal thing and some of you won’t feel the same desire/need/pressure to undertake such tasks. Maybe you’d like to but have made peace with letting certain things slide because there are simply not enough hours in the day.

As it nears the crazy season, a time of huge invisible labour, mainly for women, I was reminded of an argument I had with my husband before the concept of “mental load” was even a thing. I was stressed about finishing Christmas shopping and my husband made an offhand remark about how he could do all the Christmas shopping on Christmas Eve with ease. I was furious. Like most families, we live on a pretty tight budget. All our kids’ birthdays fall in the second half of the year so we need to space out our purchases, particularly as we factor in Christmas too (not to mention the new year costs: school shoes and uniforms, fees, books etc).

But buying the gifts is only half the job. The rest is listening when one child says she’d love a new boogie board, or maybe when another mentions his scooter has broken. That information is squirrelled away, and then we scour for sales and opportunities to save on said items. For me, it also meant clearing out their cupboards each school holidays so I could work out what clothes they’d grown out of and add those items to potential gifts for Christmas. We are out of the Santa years now, but for all those secret years gift-buying involved time disappearing to the shops and hiding presents.

All of this unpaid, invisible, completely ignored labour is not a new vent for me, I wrote about it in 2017. And this now-famous cartoon sums it up accurately (by the way, my husband sent me this cartoon after our argument and that’s when he finally “got” it).

Has much changed in society? Going by that comedian’s post, I’d say not. Maybe you think I am lacking a sense of humour about this topic but it’s not just general life admin where this is a problem. (By the way, I changed my Siri voice to be a man because it irritated me so much that the default admin voice was a woman. It seems small and petty but it was such a big deal that Apple changed it so users had to choose their own default voice, to avoid contributing to gender bias!)

It’s oversimplifying to say that the tasks we fill our days with are insignificant and if causing so much stress, we should cut down on these unnecessary chores. May I propose to anyone who thinks that: how would you feel if you were going for cancer treatment and not one of your friends wished you luck? How about having a baby and no one bothered to send you a gift or a congratulations text. Does that feel okay to you?

If we reduced our lives to simple logistics like Old Mate Comedian suggests, I’m sure it would be a sparse existence. Women are the fecking glue of society and to trivialise us in this way boils my blood. Women don’t need awards, but we would like recognition. Some of us don’t even want that, we just don’t want to be dismissed.

What do you think?

Kx

[Un]reasonably outraged by women’s invisible labour

Non-woo-woo manifesting. Is that a thing?

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