A Timely Reminder: ‘Invisible Labor’ Is Still Work

There’s no trade union for invisible labor. There’s no holiday pay, no sick leave, no promotion, and no time off in lieu either. And by invisible labor, I’m talking here about the thousands of unnoticed, unregulated, and unappreciated tasks undertaken every day that keep households not just alive but functioning. Buying and cooking food, remembering to get toilet paper, arranging someone to pick your child up on Thursdays, noticing that your daughter is nervous at breakfast, making breakfast, putting away the laundry, sending birthday cards, knowing which doctor you saw last time, cleaning the toilet, phoning school, knowing the names of your children’s friends, your friends’ children, and which of your friends is trying to have children.

The term “invisible work” was first coined by the sociologist and writer Arlene Kaplan Daniels back in—wait for it—1987, more than 30 years ago. It refers to the kind of activity, largely undertaken by women, that largely happens in private and is almost always unpaid. The kind of activity that takes planning, skill, experience, knowledge, physical action, or mental agility but somehow isn’t considered work.

Quite obviously, invisible labor isn’t a historical phenomenon. It didn’t disappear at the end of the 1980s. Rather, as middle-class women more firmly established their place in the paid workplace, the amount of invisible labor they did actually increased. A pre-pandemic study, undertaken by an organization called Bright Horizons, found that when women were the primary breadwinners in a family they actually did more invisible, domestic, unpaid work than their male partners. They were even doing more invisible labor than women who don’t earn money outside the home.

In short, the more a woman earns, the more socks she’s picking up off the floor, the more meals she’s cooking, and the more bedsheets she’s washing. Is this out of guilt? A result of early conditioning? To assuage male egos or to feel more in touch with family life? How you interpret the data is up to you, but the data is there.

Now, there is another term that you might have come across recently: “emotional labor.” This, again, was defined in the ’80s, but this time by the American sociologist Arlie Hochschild in her book The Managed Heart. Hochschild wrote that emotional labor was the need to “induce or suppress feeling in order to sustain the outward countenance that produces the proper state of mind in others”—i.e., to put your feelings to one side in order to manage other people’s emotions. As a parent or caregiver, the amount of invisible labor you are expected to do, including emotional labor, can feel vast. Reading the emails from school, remembering to pack snacks, buying bigger tops before the old ones get too tight, arranging playdates, vacuuming, supervising homework, potty training, waking in the night to the moans of someone in their cot.

If you are in a heterosexual couple, you might think that you are splitting the work 50-50. You are probably more likely to think that—dare I say it—if you are a man. But I would argue that while we have made great strides towards visible equality in child-rearing—shared parental leave, men at the school gates, parenting books for men—we have perhaps fallen behind with the invisible labor. I am delighted to see more men cycling their children to school, making pasta, and pushing swings. They should be celebrated, as should the women and non-binary people who do the same thing. But women are still, largely, expected to be the ones remembering the appointments, learning which toy is most soothing at bedtime, noticing when yet another sock has gone missing in the park. We are told, in subtle and not-so-subtle ways, that women are naturally inclined towards this kind of work, that they are better at organization, more nurturing, better communicators. All of which is pure horseshit.

In his book The Equal Parent, Paul Morgan-Bentley shows again and again, through scientific evidence and personal anecdote, that these definitions and distinctions are social constructs, not biological facts. Yes, new mothers’ amygdalas are larger than their male partners, but, actually, when a man identifies as the primary carer his brain will do exactly the same thing. Parenting isn’t just about who has what body parts and hormones, it’s about who is doing the work. As a gay man raising his son with his husband, Morgan-Bentley approaches weaning, parental leave, night waking, and all the other fun jobs involved in keeping a child alive away from traditional gender stereotypes. And, as a result, the work is divided more fairly.

When it comes to invisible labor, heterosexual, cisgendered, two-parent families could benefit enormously from looking to other family groups for inspiration and solutions. There are better, fairer ways of doing things, if we can just stop telling ourselves that men are better at earning money and women are better at hanging up towels.