“I don’t have a magical vagina that tells me what Doug’s mother wants for Christmas!” These heartfelt words of my friend Christy began my conversations with her and Doug, her partner. Meet Christy – growing up, Christmas was a very big deal in her family. Three generations crammed around the dining-room table with Christy’s father at the head, the omniscient Santa and chief turkey carver. Meet Doug – he grew up in a blended family of Jews and atheists, so Christmas was not valued in his household. Given their seemingly conflicting upbringings, how do you imagine Christy and Doug’s first holiday, post-pandemic, will unfold as they attempt to host parents and in-laws who are travelling in from opposite ends of the country while also juggling their two elementary school-age kids, and still both trying to work remotely until Christmas Eve? “Challenging,” is what I told them when they asked me for advice. “Unless,” I said, “you give yourselves the gift of structured decision-making.”
To Christy and Doug, I’m their outspoken friend from law school, but since our years at Harvard, I’ve interviewed thousands of people, including childless couples, working and stay-at-home parents, co-parents, blended families, and same-sex families, whose candid data became the basis for my book Fair Play – a time- and sanity-saving home management system that aims to create more equity and fairness within families and domestic partnerships. The 2019 statistics regarding inequity, which showed women performing two-thirds or more of the household tasks whether they worked outside the home or not, were the reason I wanted to tackle this issue. But recent analysis by the Brookings Institution shows that, since the book was published, the pandemic has widened the childcare gap in homes. Mothers with kids under 13 reported they spent eight hours a day on childcare while working six-hour days for their employers. Another study by the Pew Research Center found that mothers working remotely were more likely than fathers to say their parenting responsibilities interfered with their work, including promotions and the ability to raise their hand for important assignments. In homes without structured decision-making, women continue to shoulder the weight of the extra workload waiting for them underneath the mistletoe.
