Digital overload: Why women are doing a hidden form of work

My phone pings and it's the school chat group reminding us that it's a dress-up day. I scramble to fashion an outfit together for our children to wear. I do this without thinking about it, before my partner has a chance to help.

This is a common occurrence in many households, because despite men taking a more active role in parenting than in recent history, women still tend to be seen as the household organisers.

It's now been well established that in heterosexual relationships, women also do more of the hidden labour – the anticipating, planning and organising of the tasks that helps family life function. It creates a substantial mental workload at the intersection of cognitive and emotional labour. Less obvious is the fact that technology is exacerbating this, putting women at risk of digital overload and even burnout.

Women are more likely to be exposed to the double burden of digital communication in both work and family life – Yang Hu

Clearly technology can help us be more productive in many areas of our lives. But at home, it is evident that technology is adding to women's already busy mental workloads. A recent cross-national study analysed data from the European Social Survey of more than 6,600 parents from 29 countries who had at least one child and one living parent. It found that the mental load on women, especially mothers, is exacerbated by technology. There appears to be a gender division of labour when it comes to digital communication regarding work and family life. 

The research team looked at technology use among the respondents. Men tended to use technology most at work but women used technology both at work and home. "We find that women are more likely to be exposed to the double burden of digital communication in both work and family life," says lead author of the study Yang Hu from Lancaster University in the UK, who conducted the study alongside Yue Qian from the University of British Columbia in Canada. Women who worked from home also experienced more of this double burden.

It is an issue that has worsened as we conduct more of our lives online, and as working from home has become more common following the Covid-19 pandemic. Women are 1.6 times more likely than men to juggle dual-high digital communication both at work and at home, the researchers found.

Examples of what this means in practice aren't hard to find. My local mum's group is more active than the dad's group, and has many more participants (several hundred). This is where mums chat about events, rashes and parenting concerns. Even if a group is labelled as a parent's group, the most vocal participants, I find, are usually women.

One mum I know told me that she divides some of this digital communication with her partner, with her on the class chats and him on the emails – but unfortunately emails are a lot quieter than the instant chatter of texts. Household groceries, clothes and school supplies can all be bought digitally too, a digital extension of tasks women tend to do more of.

Many couples set out to be egalitarian but gendered patterns often creep in. That's why it's important to recognise the role technology plays when attempting to better share the load at home. We tend to use our digital devices for leisure as well as work, making it hard to delineate where personal use is recreational versus for the family, meaning it's an under-recognised form of labour. As the late feminist scholar Joan Acker highlighted, to challenge inequality we need to make the invisible visible. If you can't see it, we're not likely going to be aware of it. 

Another contributing factor that leads women to take on more digital work is linked to the fact that they tend to work more flexibly than men, taking on part-time roles for childcare needs. This exposes "the flexibility paradox", which is the idea that flexible working exploits women more than men, as it further emphasises their primary caregiver status. Working from home is often offered as a way for individuals, particularly women to juggle family and work responsibilities, says Hu, but that very flexibility can lead women to taking on more of the childcare organisation, which today is largely organised digitally.

The unfortunate consequence of this is that the more women take on at home, the less mental headspace they have for their professional lives, contributing to the gender pay gap, increased stress and higher relationship dissatisfaction. 

Heejung Chung a sociologist at King's College London in the UK who studies flexibility in the workplace, says flexible working exacerbates all aspects of housework and childcare. "Women who work flexibly or from home tend to do more housework and childcare compared to women who do not, because they have the flexibility to squeeze in as many paid and unpaid hours into their day as possible."

She found that women also feel pressure to do housework and childcare when working from home, whereas a father's boundary is much more respected, even if he's also at home. This is linked to the long history of the male breadwinner norm in heterosexual couples, where a man's work sphere has historically been more protected. It appears to still be the case even if the women are in high-earning managerial positions, says Chung – precisely because of the societal norm for women to be more involved in organising family life.

Despite the invisibility of this technology burden, there is some progress in the division of childcare, as men are taking on more of a share compared to 50 years ago, though still less than women.

There are some ways for couples to share the load more evenly too. If each in a couple completes a housework or childcare task end-to-end, rather than one organising and the other doing, that will also ensure the mental load is not only more shared but more visible. Many household tasks will have a digital element too, which means that aspect will also be shared.

Think of the scenario where one in a couple does the online grocery shopping and the other does the cooking, making this task feel shared. This means the shopper is the one who is most likely to consistently keep a mental tab of what groceries are needed. Cooking is only half the work. 

To fix the mental burden on women, sharing the visible aspects of care is not enough. Chung recommends dividing all aspects of digital communication for family life, whether it's taking on researching and booking extracurricular clubs or being active on community groups. She suggests having an open conversation about what each person does, including discussing all the planning and childcare worries.

One local mum I know says a shared calendar has helped her and her partner both be across their weekly schedule without each having to check in with the other. Another couple of two children organise the extracurricular schedules of one child each, which involves researching, booking and transporting them to it. For this type of organisation to work, they say regular communication is key.

The best advice Chung has is for fathers to take on more childcare on their own, supported by policies such as paid shared parental leave. The idea here being that the more active childcare will in time translate into digital organisation too. "Then you get more of an equal playing field. It's essentially about who is responsible for the child and household in society."

This shines a light on another great contradiction of modern society. We expect women to work and many families rely on dual incomes – but there is still a pervasive assumption that women are the primary carers of young children. As I wrote in my book The Motherhood Complex, women feel judged on how they parent more than fathers, making them feel as though they need to take on more of the organisation too. "Those kinds of assumptions need to be broken for us to have any kind of meaningful discussion or change around these issues," Chung says. This is possible, take Sweden where paid parental leave has also translated into more equitable distribution of care work.

One way we can start to bring this hidden technical load to the forefront is to acknowledge this extra work and explicitly share it from the outset. Simple solutions could be to include the dads in local chat groups, to encourage them to organise more playdates – including all the communication involved – and to ensure we share the technological burden of the numerous school emails, homework tasks and club admin. The more we share in all aspects of the domestic sphere, the more this burden of the technical load will be shared too.   

-BBC