A Woman's Place

I was going to do it all. I would have a high-flying career, and so would my husband. We would have an incredible marriage, more substance than romance, but still storybook. We would change the world together and raise beautiful children along the way. Oh, and we would be happy. Very, very happy. We'd have problems, but they wouldn't last for long, and they would only serve one purpose: to make us stronger. Little did I know the problem with fairy tales: they never address logistics.

I was groomed to manage a home for as long as I can remember. My thirteenth birthday card featured a cartoon of a girl rushing into the kitchen with a bag of groceries. Inside was a handwritten note from my parents, thanking me for all my contributions to our family. When I was sixteen, my parents divorced, and my fourteen-year-old sister, Trinity, and I moved in with our dad. Because I was the oldest, I automatically became the woman of the house. While my friends were at the mall, I planned meals and grocery shopped. Once, burned out from juggling my household responsibilities and schoolwork, I announced that we would all share the cooking. I assigned weekend evenings to my dad and Tuesdays and Thursdays to my sister. I was hoping for at least the minimum: a protein, a starch, and a vegetable, preferably from scratch. On my dad's first night, he boiled Top Ramen, toasted bread, and opened a can of pears. The best you could say about my sister's first meal, Hamburger Helper Cheesy Macaroni Beef, was that it was cooked all the way through. Clearly, no one else shared my commitment to well-balanced, nutritious meals. From then on, I abandoned the rotating cooking plan and just did it myself.

Doing it myself became my mantra — and not just doing it myself but doing it perfectly. I changed my fingernail polish each day to match my outfit. I rewrote my college admissions essay eight times. I made my own senior prom dress on the day of the dance because I didn't like the job the seamstress had done on my original dress when I'd picked it up that morning. I was an opinionated, driven girl who loved being given leadership roles at school and in church. My parents always encouraged me to speak my mind, to stand up for what was right. But at the same time, I was clear about my future responsibilities at home. I knew that when I grew up I would be in charge of housekeeping (which included food shopping, cooking, arranging the linen closet, cleaning, and decorating), social coordination (everything from tracking special occasions and buying gifts to making potluck dishes and preparing for houseguests), and child-rearing (the pressure of which I felt long before I ever had children). No one ever told me all these tasks were my future job. When speaking about the future, mostly people told me I would go to college and that I should follow my passion. They never alluded to what eventually hit me unexpectedly — a conflict between fulfilling all these household duties and fulfilling my dreams.

Many women experience a sense of pressure that men rarely do — the pressure to succeed at work and to keep things running smoothly at home, especially when children arrive on the scene. This is not to say that men don't feel the stress of fulfilling household duties. On the contrary, many men today are up to their ears in laundry. But after mentoring, coaching, speaking, and listening to thousands of women, I have observed a deeper anxiety specific to women. In addition to fulfilling our professional responsibilities, we feel we are in charge on the home front — we are the ones primarily responsible for managing child care, household chores, and generally keeping our homes and family lives running smoothly. According to the American Time Use Survey, half of the women in America did some form of housework, like cleaning or laundry, on an average day. Only 20 percent of men can say the same. And even in the homes where we aren't the ones doing all the work, we are the ones thinking about all the work, as Judith Shulevitz pointed out in her 2015 New York Times op-ed, "Mom: The Designated Worrier." "I don't mean to say that she'll be the one to do everything," Shulevitz explained, "just that she'll make sure that most everything gets done."

Although the fact that women do more work than men at home has remained true since the 1950s, women today often feel lucky because, unlike the husbands of yesteryear, ours chip in. Women tend to think we should feel grateful for how far men have come. Indeed, more men are contributing to child care and household management than ever before. But even with these strides, the truth is that men still do not share an equal amount of the work and worry that accompanies managing a home. In her seminal book The Second Shift, sociologist Arlie Hochschild attributed women's appreciation for men who did less at home to their use of the "going rate tool." As long as our husbands are doing relatively more than their peer group or what our society seems to expect of them, then we're happy they've done their fair share. This inequitable division of labor has psychological repercussions: when men change a diaper, they feel like they're helping us out; when we change a diaper, we feel like we're just doing our job.

And it isn't just any job. It's one that carries a lot of emotional freight. No matter what we achieve in our careers, if our home lives aren't taken care of, we experience it as a moral failure. How often have we heard a female colleague, lamenting over missing a school event or not making dinner for her kids, say, "I'm such a bad mom"? Even if the kids are perfectly well fed by someone else, mothers often feel personally accountable in a way that fathers generally don't.

A 2014 Harvard Business Review article detailing interviews conducted with more than four thousand C-suite executives, 44 percent of whom were female, reveals the stark difference in the way men and women view worklife balance. "When you are paid well, you can get all the [practical] help you need," one female respondent explained. "What is the most difficult thing, though — what I see my women friends leave their careers for — is the real emotional guilt of not spending enough time with their children. The guilt of missing out." Overwhelmingly, female respondents spoke of feeling...