Interview with Allison Daminger, Assistant Professor of Sociology at UW-Madison. Allison is a sociologist and researcher whose work focuses on inequality, gender, family dynamics, and decision-making, particularly within the context of households.
How do you define cognitive labor? In the simplest sense, I think of it as project management for your home life. There are four main types of cognitive labor. Anticipation means figuring out what needs to be handled: what needs are coming up, or problems to solve? Next is identifying options: what are the ways you could meet those needs or solve those problems? Third is decision-making: how are you going to move forward, and what actions will you take? Finally there’s monitoring: did whatever you decided on actually address the need or solve the problem successfully?
How did you come up with the idea of dealing with cognitive labor in your research? That’s a long story, but the short answer is that I was conducting interviews with parents about how they made decisions about their children’s education, and I quickly realized that they were expending a ton of effort on the decision process. But that effort was unlikely to show up in studies of household labor, because it was hard to measure or observe. I wanted to understand more about what the decision work they were doing entailed, and how that might be related to gender inequality in couples.
Are there any steps in the process which are especially crucial? All four steps are important, but I think the easiest parts to overlook are anticipation and monitoring. These are processes that typically happen mostly in one person’s head, so they’re less likely to get credit from their partner for handling them. Plus, they’re less likely to give themselves credit, since these tasks don’t necessarily fit our normal conceptions of „work“! Unfortunately, anticipation and monitoring are also the steps in the process most likely to be handled primarily by women.
Could you name an example in daily life which shows this process? Let’s say the school year is winding to a close, and a parent remembers that they need to figure out what to do for childcare during the summer (anticipation). They might research local camps and look into whether there are any babysitters available (identifying options). Perhaps they decide they’ll enroll their child in a day camp that runs for most of the summer (decision-making). After they submit the paperwork, they’ll try to remember to follow up with the camp director if they haven’t heard anything about whether their application was successful (monitoring).
What were the most important results of your research? Are there differences between men and women, how they feel and deal with mental load? I’ll answer these two questions together, since I think they are related. I found that in couples comprised of a man and a woman, women are far more likely to be the ones carrying a much heavier cognitive load. That’s probably not surprising to many of your readers, but what I think is more interesting is that when I asked couples about their division of cognitive labor, most of them told me that they would like for things to be more equal. They had trouble achieving that goal, they said, because their „personalities“ were too different: she was more type-A, and he was more laidback. In my forthcoming book, What’s on Her Mind, I argue that this personality explanation is more myth than reality. There are lots of factors that contribute to women carrying a heavier cognitive load, but personality is not the main culprit!