I Believed in a Fair Division of Household Labor. Until My Partner and I Tried to Make It Work.

When I gave birth to my son last March, my wife and I had a plan for getting through the next year. (You’d expect that, from two people who met while working at a think tank studying caregiving.) She’d take the first four weeks of her paid leave after he was born, so she could care for both me and our son as I physically recovered and figured out breastfeeding. As a freelancer, I had no access to paid maternity leave, so any time off I needed would be coming from our savings. We’d scrimped and saved so I could take three months to recover—about half the time medical experts recommend, according to a literature review my wife co-wrote before we met.

When I got back to work in July, my wife would take her remaining 10 weeks of leave, so I could start bringing in income again. In the fall, when her leave ended, we’d hire a nanny to come to our house so we could both return to full-time, remote work, and I could keep breastfeeding during the workday. If everything went according to plan, we’d be making ends meet, providing a loving home for our son, continuing the careers we both found fulfilling, and sharing caregiving responsibilities equally, something the majority of couples say they value.

A complication with feeding the baby, a few unanticipated medical expenses, and the unprecedented inflation of food and care costs pushed us completely off track. As my son’s first birthday approaches, we can only afford part-time child care, and since I freelance and have flexibility, I’m the one making up the difference.

My wife’s job is full time, and it comes with a salary, retirement benefits, and our more-needed-than-ever health benefits. Making sure she’s doing well at her job has become our family’s most important financial priority. Despite our values and all our planning, our queer, feminist household is looking more and more like our own parents’ when it comes to dividing work and care.

Household dynamics like ours are among the greatest barriers to women’s economic equality with men today. Last year the economist Claudia Goldin won a Nobel Prize for her work to understand the causes of women’s changing rates of participation in the labor force throughout history. In the past, differing levels of educational attainment and the different jobs men and women entered (what economists call occupational segregation) were major factors in women earning less than men, on average.

Her more recent research has shown the wage gap is affecting men and women who have the same jobs, with the biggest discrepancies coming after women give birth to their first child, when they often sacrifice greater earnings for unpaid care (and face stigmas that come with motherhood but not with fatherhood). Goldin told reporters upon receiving the award that, “We’re never going to have gender equality until we also have couple equity.”

But just how to achieve “couple equity” in an economy that makes parenting and full-time work so difficult is not as simple as it may sound. As part of my work with the D.C.-based think tank New America, I design interventions for families who are trying to share the load at home more fairly. It’s part of a first wave of solutions in an emerging field, as consensus grows around the idea Goldin has put forth, that domestic equality is the next big step toward political and economic equality.

There’ve been books—Eve Rodsky’s Fair Play (2019) comes with a deck of cards representing the everyday tasks of running a household couples can use to better understand and distribute their labor. The book was anointed a Reese Witherspoon book club pick, demonstrating how salient this issue has become in mainstream conversation. (Rodsky is a member of the advisory council at New America’s Better Life Lab, where I am a research fellow.) And there are apps—former Shopify product director Michael Perry’s Maple integrates calendars, meal plans, shopping lists, and more in the hopes of becoming “the back office of every family.”

It’s not that we aren’t finding audiences for these ideas that promise a less overwhelming approach to contemporary family life. Parents are overwhelmed; moms in particular find parenting tiring and stressful, according to recent polling from Pew. I often interview moms who are looking for help and happy to have found it in these places, even if these solutions take even more work and time from them to implement.

In her new book This American Ex-Wife, writer Lyz Lenz criticizes these emerging solutions as a new kind of self-help industry that asks women to do more work to make an arrangement not built for their happiness work for them. So what’s the alternative, you might ask? What worked for her, she proclaims, is “court-ordered 50/50 custody.”

I understand why women find power in Lenz’s pro-divorce sentiment, particularly in a society where marriage is treated as a panacea to every social and economic ill we face, with little regard for women’s well-being and happiness. Lenz points to queer friends and intentional community-building as a different way of doing family, while eschewing heterosexual marriage. But let my experience show that queerness and community don’t solve the problem. I’ve got both in spades, and I’m still struggling to get through each day with my pre-motherhood identity intact.

The truth is we’re all tinkering around the edges of a problem with deep, structural roots. None of our solutions—my interventions, the cards, the apps, or a divorce—can offer affordable child care, equal parental leave for both partners, or flexible workplaces with living wages and benefits, all of which are the foundation for equality between couples regarding our time, money, and labor. Emphasizing those limitations isn’t just a matter of full disclosure; it may be critical to helping us actually do better.

In interviews with couples just before they became parents and again soon after their children were born, researchers Katherine Twamley and Charlotte Faircloth have found those with the most rigid sense of equality end up less happy with their circumstances than couples who acknowledge their lives as parents will not be equal. That is, if we understand equality as most researchers of household equality mean it: as “symmetrical,” equal time spent on the same types of tasks by both partners.

“As soon as the baby is born we’re going to start taking note of how many nights or days of leisure time Henry uses and to make sure that I also get that same time,” said Helen, a pregnant mother and librarian in an interview Twamley and Faircloth analyze in their recent article.

“[T]he only reason that I said, ‘yes, I’ll come off the pill’,” said another pregnant woman, “the main reason was because we had a conversation where Anthony said, ‘I will do 50%,’ other than the maternity leave, which we can’t do anything about. … So, he’s going down to four days a week and I’ll go down to four days a week,” said Claudia.

Other couples in the study talked about their goals for equality differently, as breaking stereotypes or an overall sense of fairness or respect for each other, for example. The symmetry approach to equality was the most fragile, because it was easiest to see when it was failing.

When the researchers checked back in with the couples who sought symmetry after their children were born, things hadn’t worked out as planned: “[W]hen Anthony enquired with his boss about working on a 4-days-a-week contract he was made redundant, his boss citing ‘lack of commitment’ from him. When he managed to secure another job (on a 5-days-a-week basis) he did not enquire about the possibility of changing his hours, admitting that this suited him better.”

Eventually, Faircloth and Twamley told me, that failure to make their vision of equality their reality created such great resentment and disappointment for Claudia, who saw herself as a devoted feminist, that it led to them breaking up.

Twamley and Faircloth believe it’s important for researchers who emphasize domestic equality to understand how couples who believe in gender equality actually interact with the world.

“We think it is important to take a contextualized understanding of the differing positions of men and women,” said Twamley. They observed that couples in their research who acknowledged social and cultural forces that made symmetry difficult or impossible for them—for instance, that women have much greater access to parental leave in the U.K.—tended to have greater satisfaction with their circumstances when the messiness of working parenthood caught up with them.

My wife and I have quickly pivoted to new ways of thinking about what equality means in our household, since our previous vision is untenable at the moment. Fairness has quickly become paramount. Knowing how conflicted I feel as I take our baby to story time at the library while work piles up in my inbox, my wife looks for opportunities to give me more time to work whenever she can—taking on dinner and bedtime, so I can keep working after the nanny leaves, or taking him out of the house all Sunday afternoon so I can write. But I don’t want to spend all the evenings I could share with my family working, and I don’t want my wife to feel she can never have leisure time because she’s in some sort of never-ending debt to me for my child care, so I don’t take as much as she offers.

Is it equal? For my own sanity, I haven’t run the numbers, but I’d guess it’s not equal—I’m still doing more solo parenting than she is, and she’s doing more paid work than I am. But acknowledging and accepting that reality, and then doing what we can to make it more fair for each of us, is healthier for us than fighting against it every day.

For now, that leaves me firmly on the mommy track. But at least I know it’s not my partner who put me here.