Hello and welcome to Overthink.

The podcast where two philosophy professors talk about exciting topics of relevance to you and us.

I'm your co-host, Dr. Ellie Anderson.

And I am Dr. David Pena-Uzman.

And today, we are going to be talking about something that I feel like has become a very

hot topic in recent years.

And that is emotional labor.

I think the rise in discourse around this topic has coincided with the most

recent versions of the feminist movement, because so many women have come to see that even in

societies that are purportedly equal on the question of gender, where we have equal voting rights,

equal career opportunities in theory, et cetera, there's a huge asymmetry in romantic and sexual

relationships in the capabilities and levels of emotional work that women do versus men.

Emotional labor is a kind of work that it's very difficult to identify because so much of

it is invisible, not just to third parties, but also to second parties. So the person

that does a lot of emotional work will be aware of that work, but not the recipient and definitely

not any observer of that interaction. And so it's the sort of thing that you don't see unless you're

the producer, because again, even the recipient is not really aware of it.

Of course, until the recipient doesn't get it anymore, and then they become clearly aware

of what had been there in the first place.

Or you see it, but you don't recognize it as the product of labor, which is something

I want to talk about a lot in the episode today, because

as we will discuss later, I have recently published an article on the sexist expectations

...