This is NPR's Life Kit. I'm host, Maryl Segarra here with reporter Andy Tegel. Hey Andy.

Hey Maryl. So I hear you're doing an episode on how to split up Housework.

Yeah. And it's telling you in me a laundry list of things to both work on and think about.

So this episode is about how to tackle household labor, but it's also about why domestic work is so

often unequally divided in the home and what we can do about it. Yeah, I remember reading this story

once where the headline was like, my wife divorced me because I didn't do the dishes or something

like that. And it sounded totally extreme, but it is real, right? Yeah. I read it and many like it.

Yeah. Yeah. It's about the dishes and the time lost when you're the one always doing them and

having to worry about them. And it seems like everything else in the house. But it is also about

respect, you know, feeling like your partner cares about dividing these things evenly and

respects your time as much as their own. Totally, totally. The fight about the dishes is never

just about the dishes. This is something that we know and also something that I found in my research.

The problem more often is there's an uneven burden placed on one person often to be the list keeper

for a home. You know, the event planner for social activities, the team captain for coordinating

schedules and bill paying and just all of the things. Yeah. And that stuff takes a ton of time and

effort and that isn't always acknowledged or accounted for. Absolutely. You said it. So this

phenomenon goes by lots of names that are probably familiar to you, Maryl. We call it the second shift.

We call it emotional labor. We call it the mental load. So that's attorney and activist Yvrautsky,

one of the experts for this piece. And the term she prefers is invisible work because while this

burden is really essential to a functioning society, it's not often seen as quote unquote traditional

work and therefore isn't valued or compensated. That's a big problem. Yvrautsky says we have to shift

our mindset about domestic labor. What if we treated our homes as our most important organizations?

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