Eve Rodsky, Author of Fair Play and Unicorn Space, on Gender Equality in the home
Eve Rodsky Eve Rodsky is working to change society one partnership at a time by coming up with a new 21st-century solution to an age-old problem: women shouldering 2/3 or more of the unpaid domestic work and childcare for their homes and families.
Eve Rodsky transformed a “blueberries breakdown” into a catalyst for social change when she applied her Harvard trained background in organizational management to ask the simple yet profound question: What would happen if we treated our homes as our most important organizations? Her New York Times bestselling book and Reese’s Book Club Pick, Fair Play, a gamified life-management system that helps partners rebalance their domestic workload and reimagine their relationship, has elevated the cultural conversation about the value of unpaid labor and care. In her highly anticipated follow-up, Find Your Unicorn Space: Reclaim Your Creative Life in a Too-Busy World, Rodsky explores the cross-section between the science of creativity, productivity, and resilience. Described as the ‘antidote to physical, mental and emotional burnout,’ Rodsky aims to inspire a new narrative around the equality of time and the individual right to personal time choice that influences sustainable and lasting change on a policy level.
Could you share a little bit about the origins of Fair Play and the “Sh-t I Do” list?
They say research is “me-search”, and for me, the research was really understanding what was happening to me when I had a “blueberries breakdown”, as I now like to call it, in my own relationship. When my husband, Seth, sent me that “ I'm surprised you didn't get blueberries” text after my second son, Ben, was born, it basically set off this understanding, and this breakdown around, why was it that I was holding two thirds or more of what it took to run a home and family. That was the statistic I was undeniably living at the time, but I didn't know.
And then, around that same time, I wrote about what it looks like when private lives become public issues, and I started to realize that this was a much bigger issue than just me, after what happened when I was at a Breast Cancer march. I was with nine really powerful women, not every one of them was partnered with a man, but most of them were, and this idea of us being on this girlfriend's getaway where we're honoring a friend who was recently diagnosed with breast cancer and then watching all these women turn to pumpkins at noon with the texts from their partners asking…
When are you coming home from the parade? or
What's the address of the birthday party? or
Where did you leave the gift for the birthday party? or
Where did you put Hudson’s soccer bag?
My real favorite was my friend Kate's husband, who asked, Do the kids need to eat lunch?
I think it was that day, and the recognition that these powerful women who used their voices in so many different contexts, all looked at me and said “we left our partners with too much to do, and we have to go.” So they left me there at the march so that they could go find Hudson’s soccer bag and to feed their kids lunch and to bring a perfectly wrapped gift to a birthday party. My active resistance that day was to count up how many phone calls and texts we had received, and once I realized we had 30 phone calls and 46 texts for 10 women over 30 minutes, I realized that this is still a very, very big problem and we're not tackling it correctly. I began to really understand that we were one crisis away from women leaving the workforce in droves, or being forced out in droves. I was calling it “a time crisis,” and a lot of people call it “the burnout crisis.”
I got to go to Davos and talk about that until finally, a month after I got home from Davos talking about this one crisis away from labor force participation rates dramatically dropping, that happened. This was all in 2011, so this has been a 10 year push for me, and the most important thing I learned was that lists alone don't work because that was the origin of the “I do spreadsheet” - it was reading an article from 1986, a woman named Arlene Kaplan Daniels, who said, “ work in the home will always be invisible cause women do it,” and it was an understanding that until we could tackle that issue head on about what work really, truly should mean in the capitalist society, women will never reach parity in the C-suites or anywhere of importance, like our government and Congress and our Senate. So for me, it was that understanding that I could go out there and start creating an Excel spreadsheet that I called the “Sh-t I Do”, by asking what’s invisible that you do for your partner and kids that takes more than two minutes, and that was my first foray into something going viral before viral was really a thing.
I had communities of women responding saying, “ I see taking kids to the dentist, but I don't see ordering girl scout cookies, that's five hours”, and it just grew and grew until I sent it to Seth, as I wrote in the book, that was my first stopping point. The fact that I knew there was this problem, but a list without a solution, a rant without a solution, is actually more harmful and that's what was happening to me. Realizing that when I sent him that list and got a monkey covering eyes emoji, and wondering what was happening in other homes? This is way before something like Atlas of Motherhood, who has a community that I could have been part of. I didn't have any communities over a decade ago, and so it was figuring this out for myself and I realized that a lot of these women were a part of that too. There were these nascent communities that we were bonding over.
This one woman said to me, “I received your spreadsheet from the Jewish Federation of Arizona, and I just wanted to let you know that I'm leaving my marriage.” It was a real understanding that putting things out there in the world without really a recognition of how people can take agency in their own life to make things better is not worth it. I had to really think about retracting the “Sh-t I Do” spreadsheet from the world, which I did slowly. I never shared it again, I deleted it and kept it closed and then started to think, “what can I do with this spreadsheet that can be more useful.” That's when I had this idea that our homes are our most important organizations, and I know that lists alone don't work now, but I do know that systems do, and that was what put me on the path to developing Fair Play.
“That’s when I had this idea that our homes are our most important organizations, and I know that lists alone don’t work now, but I do know that systems do, and that was what put me on the path to developing Fair Play. ”
Do you think that with the pandemic things have gotten worse for mothers in the household?
Short term? Yes. Short term we know that women have shouldered this particular pandemic with a lot of grace and burnout. There’s been an 153% increase in invisible work for women. That statistic comes from Pipeline Equity, and it's just the reality that we start to see things that said, inevitably women will shoulder the brunt of this type of home/work invasion. What I have kept saying is that this is not inevitable. It’s f-cking evitable. It's predictable, but it's not inevitable. The problem is when you call it inevitable - there are no systemic or personal solutions, and I know that that's not true.
I know that on an individual level, when you change hearts and minds, things start to change your policy and vice versa, you have to do both. The idea of my book Fair Play was an understanding that what we're doing now is not working for anybody. Late stage capitalism, “greedy work” as professor Claudia Golden calls it, meaning being in a chair for 15 hours and centering your entire life around your career, that's not helpful. Men are burning out, women are already extremely burnt out. It's really more about centering an idea that holding your child's hand in the pediatrician's office is just as valuable as an hour in the boardroom. This is the idea that this culture change has to be built on.
“There’s been an 153% increase in invisible work for women. It’s just the reality that we start to see things that said, inevitably women will shoulder the brunt of this type of home/work invasion. What I have kept saying is that this is not inevitable. It’s f-cking evitable. It’s predictable, but it’s not inevitable. ”
It’s the biggest toxic message of them all: I do more unpaid work because my partner makes more money than me. It perpetuates the cycle. When you have a situation where you believe you do more unpaid work, because your partner makes more money than you, what ends up happening is that you have less time for that work and then continue to specialize in unpaid work, and then it makes sense for you to continue to fill out the school forms because it's in your login, it makes sense for you to communicate on the 25 person text chain because you're already on it, and what ends up happening is that we just keep perpetuating the cycle. I think the only way to break the cycle is to recognize that time is time. And just because your partner works outside the home, it doesn't exempt them from treating your home as your most important organization. Nobody can do all one hundred carts, not even a single mother - we need communities. That's why we need paid leave and childcare. The other problem is that the more we enter this very income unequal society, the more women's capital contributions do matter, but no one is ever saying that as we need our capital, that we're still not doing the other full-time job of the two-thirds or more of what it takes to run a family home. The issue in my books Fair Play and Unicorn Space, is that our society treats our time as if it's infinite. Men's time is treated like diamonds. There's a million ways that this is proven. When women enter male professions, their salaries automatically come down. We say things to mothers like “breastfeeding is free” when it's a 1800 hour a year job. I think the more we can recognize that this is actually a toxic time message meant to keep women small and out of their Unicorn Space and out of positions of power, the more we can push back on these messages that don't serve us.
“So it’s really more about centering an idea that holding your child’s hand in the pediatrician’s office is just as valuable as an hour in the boardroom. This is the idea that this culture change has to be built on. ”
When it comes to the Unicorn Space, do you think that during that postpartum period, even like the first year of your child's birth, it can be quite challenging to carve out that space for yourself, or do you think it's okay to give yourself the grace to say, I might not have time right now?
Of course, there are seasons. This is not to shame people and to say that you have to be interested in your own life at all times. There are seasons. However, what I will say is that at no point should we be allowed to be erased. For me, a lot of the beginning of what happened to me was erasure. The first time I didn't hear my name was in the hospital with my first son where, suddenly the nurses were coming in and saying, “Hi mom”, “Good morning, mom”, “How are you feeling mom?”
This is where I started to lose my name. Then I remember proudly starting to wear Zach's initials and the little charm that said “mom” around my neck (which I do not recommend anybody doing anymore.) I remember sitting in a preschool circle (because back to those toxic time messages that God forbid, I would ever ask Seth to go to one of those circles because my time's infinite), and I end up in a circle with all women and a couple of gay fathers and I remember the preschool teacher looking around and saying, “Look around guys, these are going to be your best friends of the night for the next 10 years. You're going to know them better than anybody.” And I remember looking down simultaneously at the name tag I was wearing that said, “Zach's mom,” I was like, know me better than anyone's ever known me? They don't even know my name.
So I think if you don't have the time to claim your unicorn space, at least wear your own initial on your neck. That's what I tell women. Just the symbolism of remembering the “return to yourself” that will happen eventually is what I'm asking women to do. We don’t need the unicorn space at all times. It becomes this umbrella to shoulder you from the more mundane. But in times when you can’t have it, at least grab some costume jewelry and put your initial around your neck so that you remember the return.
“We don’t need the unicorn space at all times. It becomes this umbrella to shoulder you from the more mundane. But in times when you can’t have it, at least grab some costume jewelry and put your initial around your neck so that you remember the return. ”
Is it true that even before we become mothers, as women, when we enter a relationship, we take on more of the mental load?
Yes. We created a whole Fair Play: Your Way to the Wedding Cards because it starts way earlier than that, but somehow the same way that we've learned to take pride in wiping asses and doing dishes and hear that we're better multitaskers. We take pride in selecting a florist. I don’t know where this idea of multitasking - well I do know where it comes from it, it comes from a capitalist patriarchy), but we've really done a number on women, right? We've become extremely what I call CIYIO “complicit in your own oppression” because we start believing these cultural messages that we should be taking pride in picking the florist for our weddings or sending that birthday gift to your in-laws, and for eventually wiping asses and doing all the dishes. That quote came from a neuroscientist. One of the hardest interviews I ever did was early on, when I sat down with one of the top neuroscientists in the country and just hearing him when I said, “Is there really no gender difference in the brain for how we multitask?” And he just looked at me like I was crazy or I had two heads. He's asked, you mean gender difference in how we multitask culturally or neurologically. I said,”Obviously I'm here for the neuroscience”. He said, “No there’s no gender difference in how we multitask. Multitasking is bad for everybody. But culturally men have convinced you that you're better at wiping asses and doing dishes so how great for my leisure time and career.” That day was really hard for me. I ended up tearing up in his office.
For a while, I really wanted the Fair Play Card Game to sit on a shelf with Cards Against Humanity. However, both of my books ended up being somewhat polarizing because the first hundred pages is not what I promise. It's not the system right away, it goes into context. I have to honor my data, and I have a lot of people say to me, just get to the program. But for me, I can’t do that. I have to honor my data. So for unicorn space, it was really important to talk about the reasons why people don't find it: time, guilt and shame, and the ability to use your voice and to voice what you need. The same way for Fair Play. I'm not going to just go into who does what without really understanding the cultural context that I can’t even get people to the table to talk about who does what, because of these gender assumptions about women's time. So my books always become hybrid. They're like a feminist manifesto in the beginning and then practical solutions in the end. And that's just always been how I needed to contextualize what I'm saying.
I think that's the beauty of storytelling. Obviously, I don’t have everybody's lived experience, but I do feel like through research and being able to access stories you can get to these themes that are common and part of our joining humanity as women across the world. And now that I've interviewed people in 17 countries, I realize that there's a lot that is actually universal and especially in the fact that for women all across the world, at some point we'll all have been defined by our roles. And I think that's both liberating and sad and triggering and all the things, but at least it gives us like a joint community to understand that this is not something that's just afflicting you. It's happening to all of us.
“After interviewing people in 17 countries, I realize that there’s a lot that is actually universal and especially in the fact that for women all across the world, at some point we’ll all have been defined by our roles. And I think that’s both liberating and sad and triggering and all the things, but at least it gives us like a joint community to understand that this is not something that’s just afflicting you. It’s happening to all of us.”
In Fair Play, you say “when you hold a card or a responsibility and are dividing roles, you give away the whole task, which includes the conceptualization, planning and execution.”
Yes, you give the whole task away which is not rocket science. It's how people do things in the workplace and in organizational management. We know the ownership mindset is a system, and all a system is, is the ability to know how you're making decisions before you make that decision. And so, as one man said to me, “In my house we wait to decide, who's taking the dog out right when it's about to pee on the rug.” And I said, “Exactly like that, but the opposite.” But that's how most people are living. I think the three most toxic words that have ever been uttered in regard to the home are ‘figure it out’, and the other most toxic is ‘we both do it’.
I’m really trying to get under that toxicity because those are things that lead to really poor functioning organizations which was the point of the initial research that I did 10 years ago. I realized that it's really hard to assign responsibilities in the home or in the workplace, as we call it to a directly responsible individual, if you say “we both do it.”
Who does grocery shopping? We both do.
Who picks up the kids from school. We both do.
Who helps with homework? We both do.
It's just mindnumbing because that's a terrible answer. If I go into the hospital and say, “Who's going to do my surgery?” and the response is, “We all are.” That’s a bit unsettling. We want a doctor to be able to be in charge.
It's really important to understand who's in charge. That's a very important piece and doubling up on that is this, we both do idea. I had to really unpack it. And what I realized was that by “both” it often meant women were thinking of the mustard, monitoring the mustard running low in the house, and then sending their partners to the store to purchase the mustard. And when that partner comes home with the wrong type of mustard, then women were willing to say to me, well, I'm not gonna trust him with my living will because the guy can't even bring home the right type of mustard.
You have to have organizations that have accountability and trust. Those are the two most important words in any organization. And the sad part was that there just wasn't that in people’s homes when it came to responsibilities and roles, and people’s relationships were dying because they were losing accountability and trust in these tiny betrayals.
“My wish for women is that we have times in our lives where we get to make our own decisions. That extrinsic milestones are not making our decisions for us, that our partners are not making our decisions for us, that societal expectations are not making our decisions for us, but that we really get to make our own decisions. ”
What do you hope women walk away with after reading Fair Play?
I think what I'd love for them to walk away with is their understanding that they deserve to have permission to be unavailable from their roles. I think as the extrinsic milestones get bigger (I want that house or that bag or that body or that life), my wish is that we have times in our lives where we get to make our own decisions. That extrinsic milestones are not making our decisions for us, that our partners are not making our decisions for us, that societal expectations are not making our decisions for us, but that we really get to make our own decisions. It's not going to happen all of the time, and that’s okay. For example, if my kid gets sick, he's making my decision for me that day, but I do think that there's more agency that we can have, and that's my wish for women.
“You have permission to be unavailable from your role.”
As we become mothers and come out of that postpartum fog, mothers often feel as though they've lost themselves. Do you have any suggestions on re-finding your passions or discovering new passions?
Firstly, I want to retire that word, passion, which I learned through my data because I used it in Fair Play and then I change it to curiosity. Curiosity is a much more powerful word. And it's actually the word that people who are telling me they live creative lives were using as opposed to passion. So we're going to retire the word passion. We're also going to retire the word hobby because that also connoted in my data infrequency. That was one of the words associated with hobbies with infrequency. What I would say is that the most important thing is self talk. What we say to ourselves is important. It goes back to this idea that it's frivolous to spend time on me. The guilt and shame is there, and it's a powerful tool to use against us as a society. So it’s accepting this idea that we are allowed to be unavailable from our roles and when guilt and shame rears it’s ugly head, we address it and we put it into place as just thoughts. They don't have to change or inform our decision making if we don't allow it to.
From the action perspective, the most important thing to do is to return to your values now. I don't mean your caregiving values or being a mother, I mean, when you really look and say, what are the deeply held values that I have today and into the near future, centering those values are really, really important. It means that your Unicorn Space can look very different and that many different things can be part of it, as long as you're aligning it with intrinsic motivation as opposed to these extrinsic milestones.
For me, this idea that I really wanted to put forth in my life at this point, justice, fairness, and community. Those are the values that I'm centering in my life today. That could have looked different in many ways. I could have run for office. I could have sat on the school board to help open schools during the pandemic. But I chose this path around gender division of labor because I felt like that most made me come alive, researching these issues of unpaid labor and invisible work. And look where it’s taken me. I didn’t have gender division of labor expert on my “what do you want to be when you grow up” board when I was in third grade, but I followed curiosity 10 years ago and it's led me here.
“What we say to ourselves is important. It goes back to this idea that it’s frivolous to spend time on me. The guilt and shame is there, it’s a powerful tool to use against us as a society. So this idea that we are allowed to be unavailable from our roles and when guilt and shame rears it’s ugly head, we address it and we put it into place as just thoughts. They don’t have to change or inform our decision making if we don’t allow it to. ”