The following article is from the Spring 2025 issue of Jacobin, “Progress.” Click here to subscribe to receive the entire issue in print and online.
There now exists a small cottage industry designed to expose a vast, seemingly intractable form of gender inequality embedded, we’re told, in nearly every heterosexual relationship: the unequal division of household labor. Women, according to author and entrepreneur Eve Rodsky, are still “shouldering 2/3 or more of the unpaid domestic work and childcare for their homes and families.” And not only are women continuing to do more cooking, cleaning, and childcare than men, but they face additional pressures in the form of the “mental load,” or the invisible cognitive work that goes into maintaining a household — keeping track of which snacks the kids will eat, scheduling doctor’s appointments, remembering relatives’ birthdays and buying thoughtful presents for them.
Rodsky, however, has a solution. In 2019, she created Fair Play, a tool to help couples divide household responsibilities more fairly. Based on her best-selling book of the same title, Fair Play is a set of cards that lists one hundred common household chores. Each card represents not only a physical task, like preparing weekday dinners, but also the conception and planning of that task — for instance, deciding on a menu and procuring the ingredients for said dinners. Fair Play, which is now backed by Reese Witherspoon’s media company Hello Sunshine, has expanded to include a documentary and even an entire Fair Play Policy Institute, which funds research and advocacy related to caregiving and also certifies official Fair Play Facilitators, who coach couples in learning…
Auteur: Jennifer C. Pan
