The Impact of Invisible Labor on Productivity 💆🏻‍♀️

All the work you cannot see and why women do most of it

You know that I am ALL about helping people reclaim their time, and that I love tools that help us stay focused, organized, and feeling our best. But I also hope you have heard me say — like a broken record — that even the best planner or digital tool on the planet cannot solve the underlying systemic issues that leave people feeling overwhelmed and exhausted.

Invisible labor is one of those systemic issues.

This topic felt especially timely this week, as we enter the busy holiday season. A time where invisible labor often skyrockets for many women (the shopping! the cooking! the cleaning! the creating of holiday magic!).

And that’s why I’ve asked Rachel Wynn, a feminist business coach and invisible labor consultant, to walk us through some practical ways to recognize and address invisible labor so we have more mental bandwidth to dedicate to other aspects of our life. Rachel has provided some incredible resources within her responses to the questions below and I hope you’ll find this topic as interesting and helpful as I do!

Let’s start with who you are and what Invisible Labor is:

I’m Rachel Wynn, a feminist business coach who loves teaching people how to balance invisible household labor — which I define as the unpaid and often unrecognized work that’s essential for maintaining a household.

A longer definition would be: work that is essential but often goes unrecognized, unpaid, and undervalued. It might include tasks such as caregiving (for children, elderly family members, or individuals with disabilities), household chores (cooking, cleaning, organizing), emotional labor (providing emotional support, conflict resolution, maintaining relationships), and other forms of work that contribute to the functioning of a family or community but are not formally acknowledged or compensated in traditional economic frameworks.

Why are women generally more impacted by invisible labor than men?

I think that the biggest factor toward an inequitable division of labor in heterosexual couples stems from societal conditioning that starts as early as toddlerhood. In our western society, traditional gender roles normalize women as primary caregivers and domestic laborers, which creates less opportunities for career development.

But this is amplified when combined with other factors such as the gender wage gap. According to 2022 data from the U.S. Census Bureau, women in the United States earn about .83 cents for every $1 dollar earned by men, representing a 17% gender pay gap. It’s important to acknowledge the term Kimberlé Crenshaw coined in 1989, intersectionality. The wage gap is not just determined by gender, but also race and ethnicity, with women of color experiencing even wider disparities:

83 cents per dollar - White women
70 cents per dollar - Black women
58 cents per dollar - Hispanic women
67 cents per dollar - Native American women

Ok, I could dive into a whole diatribe on intersectional feminism, but getting back to invisible labor, career interruptions from having a child are also a big factor. The U.S. is the only industrialized country in the world to not have a federal paid maternity and family leave policy. It’s truly atrocious.

As an example, I’m self-employed and my take-home pay is less than $50,000 right now. So my family and I made the decision for me to stay home and raise our children since the average cost of daycare for two littles is $48,000 in the District of Columbia. Many American families have been forced to make similar decisions.

When couples face choices about managing work and family life, the lower-earning partner (typically the woman) is more likely to reduce work hours or leave the workforce to handle family care and household management. This creates a cyclical effect: women earn less, so they're more likely to take on unpaid domestic work, which in turn limits their career advancement opportunities and earning potential.

ALL these factors — societal conditioning, unequal pay, lacking childcare — leave women vulnerable to an unfair amount of emotional and physical labor in an effort to keep their homes and families functioning.

What are the primary forms of invisible labor that women typically encounter at home?

Invisible labor can be both mental and physical — and I think it’s the mental load that often overwhelms women — the planning, remembering, monitoring, anticipating.

This might look like: noticing that the milk is almost out. Realizing your kid needs a larger shoe size. Knowing where your luggage or holiday decorations are stored. Remembering allergies, food preferences, and activity schedules for the entire family. Once you start recognizing the mental load, you can’t unsee it!

In the groundbreaking 1989 book The Second Shift, there's a section on Psychological Impact where the author, Arlie Hochschild, says "Many women feel they have to be the family managers, and this takes an enormous psychological toll. They are constantly monitoring, organizing, planning." She additionally argued that, "much of the work women do at home is 'invisible' because it looks like love... but it is actually labor that benefits everyone." While this book is 35 years-old, the arguments she makes and the spotlight on the "second shift," are still so relevant!

There’s also a fantastic illustrator named Emma who made a comic back in 2017 that explains the concept of the mental load really clearly called “You Should’ve Asked”. This is just the first image, but the entire comic is worth reading through:

For many women, invisible labor at home means not only carrying the majority of that mental load but also the management or delegation of all that work — which itself could be a full-time job.

Where else might women encounter invisible labor?

Women might come across it anywhere! In volunteer roles, within their friendship groups, and in their workplace. Go to most offices and ask who arranges the birthday gifts, plans the holiday parties, or remembers to print out certificates and it’ll almost always be a woman or group of women.

How does invisible labor impact women’s mental and physical health and, in turn, their ability to focus and be productive?

The constant demand for this emotional and physical labor can lead to chronic stress, burnout, and negative health outcomes, including anxiety, depression, sleep deprivation, and potentially cardiovascular issues.

The strain of managing multiple roles without recognition or compensation undermines women's ability to focus on their professional work, limiting career advancement opportunities and contributing to a persistent gender gap in the workplace.

Additionally, the “invisible” aspect of this labor, along with it being undervalued, means it’s rarely factored into policies related to work-life balance or health — leaving many women without support systems.

And of course — when the majority of our mental bandwidth is being occupied by the mental load or the stress that comes with it, we have less bandwidth for things like sleep, exercise, leisure, self-care, networking, and socializing — the things that help us create a meaningful life that feels fulfilling. It can all snowball pretty quickly and leave us feeling overwhelmed.

What strategies can couples implement to recognize and mitigate the effects of invisible labor?

Make it visible. Do a brain dump of all of the possible household tasks you can think of, including visible chores like taking out the trash and invisible chores like noticing and remembering to buy more toilet paper, and then take a look with your partner and divvy them up.

A great resource I direct people to is Fair Play! Eve Rodsky has written a book on the topic of the mental load and now has a system for couples to make the division of household labor, both seen and invisible, more equitable. 

Basically, there’s a deck of cards and every household responsibility on the card has three components: Conception, Planning, and Execution (CPE) and if you are responsible for a particular job in your household, you need to do all three parts. Once you’ve identified the tasks that are applicable to your home, you divide them in an equitable, not equal, manner. 

In heterosexual relationships, men are typically surprised to see how many more cards the women have, hence, making the invisible, visible. Fair Play also offers consulting with Fair Play trained facilitators, which can be really helpful for some couples. For those who want a preview of the system, check out the documentary FAIR PLAY (available on AppleTV, Prime Video, Hulu, YouTube, and Google Play — learn more here, and watch the trailer below.)

For those raising children, we can also make adjustments that help break this cycle. For example, many women complain that their husbands don’t seem to “see” what needs to be done around the house. With my three-year-old at cleanup time, I would tell him what needs to be put away.

Then one day it hit me, this is not going to help him be a functional adult. I began asking “Let’s use your eyes to look around and see what needs to be picked up! What do you see?” so that he’d learn how to independently look around, assess the mess, and pick up toys. This may seem small, but I think these subtle shifts are how we raise children that are capable of being both self-reliant AND an equal partner.

What is one thing you wish people knew about managing invisible labor?

It’s an exhausting way to live, and it takes a lot of work to de-program stereotypical gender roles. Also, that it takes a lot of time and patience to get more equity in the home. Since 2018, I’ve spoken at conferences, conducted trainings, and been interviewed by podcasters, bloggers, and media outlets on the topics of invisible labor and paid family leave.

And is the distribution of labor in my home perfect? Of course not. But we at least have a shared Google spreadsheet of our assigned household tasks that we can reference and adjust when life events occur, like having a baby, new jobs, etc. By the way, I highly recommend having certain chores permanently assigned since rotating chores can end up with more fights and disorder.

(Note from Dani: We started integrating the Fair Play method in our relationship/household around the same time — 2019ish. We both use the Microsoft To-Do App for personal and work projects, so we also have a couple of shared lists that we can both access. One for groceries allows either of us to easily add things and shop when its convenient — which has been helpful. My partner also keeps a list of the chores he’s responsible for before guests visit, and he’s able to check items off but then recycle the list when needed. This prevents me from having to delegate that work repeatedly. Explore To-Do here.)

How do you help people navigate invisible labor?

I offer consulting on invisible labor that has a feminist lens and digs into how we got to such an inequitable place and how to fairly assess and assign the division of housework and the mental load. You can learn more about my work and services on my website.

---

That’s a wrap! I hope you have at least a few takeaways after reading through this, and that as the holidays approach you feel equipped to have a conversation with your partner or entire family about how the mental load is impacting you and utilize some of these tools to find a better balance.

The Fair Play book and card game that Rachel mentioned is truly a great place to start working through this, and can also make a great gift — especially for young couples in your life who might be starting to navigate life in a shared household. You can find both of them available on the Fair Play website or online marketplaces like Amazon.