Kathy and Randall run a home with three teenagers, two dogs, two birds, and two careers. It’s “an all-hands-on-deck kind of operation,” explained Kathy. Both spouses recalled fighting over their division of labor when their children were young but said that in the intervening years they’d found harmony. Kathy explained why: “We both went where our strengths are.” She acts as “the planner” or, as Randall put it, “the foreman.” Whereas Kathy identifies as “a control freak,” she lovingly referred to Randall as “a mess.”
Kathy and Randall’s story is a tale of labor allocation driven not by gender but by finding the right “fit” between person and task. Kathy is a “control freak,” so she manages the family calendar. Randall is “so good at the home repair kind of stuff” that he takes the lead on DIY projects. This arrangement seemed perfectly logical to me as I sat across the dining table from Randall and Kathy in turn.
It was only later, when I reflected on their story and compared it to those I was hearing at countless other tables, that I began to wonder: Are cognitive labor leaders born or made?
Cognitive household labor is a set of mental processes aimed at figuring out what the family requires, what it owes to others, and how best to ensure that both requirements and obligations are fulfilled. Cognitive labor operates as a near-constant “background job” for the spouse who acts as cognitive laborer-in-chief. Most of my interviewees, including Kathy and Randall, argued that the responsibility fell to the spouse who was best equipped to handle it. But I ultimately came to a different conclusion: Cognitive labor leaders are largely made, and in different-gender couples, it’s most often women who undergo this transformation.
Kathy and Randall’s story provides important clues about how and why this happens. Kathy, for example, was the undisputed family scheduler. Until very recently, she even made Randall’s medical appointments for him. Yet one of Randall’s core professional responsibilities as vice principal at a nearby junior high was to manage the calendars of hundreds of middle schoolers. “I do scheduling for the entire [grades] seven to nine,” he explained, along with coordinating parent-teacher meetings and events for the school’s enrichment program. Randall also described himself as a stickler for timeliness, a relic of his old military days. I doubted he would have lasted long as an administrator or a soldier if his organizational skills were as lackluster as he and Kathy implied.
Cognitive labor operates as a near-constant “background job” for the spouse who acts as cognitive laborer-in-chief.
My research shows that the apparently individual “personality traits” said to drive couples’ cognitive labor inequality are better understood as skills. Men and women in different-gender couples tend to deploy the more general capabilities they possess differently across the paid and unpaid spheres of their lives. Individual traits undoubtedly interact with these skills, placing upper and lower bounds on what is possible. Yet context—including gendered judgments about who is to blame when something goes wrong at home—plays a larger role than most couples acknowledge. Over time, it seems, gendered behaviors help create and maintain the very selves they are said to reflect.
The characteristics required to run a household—like being organized, proactive, and a good multitasker—overlap considerably with the set of capacities psychologists call “executive function.” Self-control, working memory, and mental flexibility, among the core components of executive function, are also core to many cognitive tasks.
Though executive function and the abilities required of a cognitive laborer may not be identical, the former is a useful proxy for the latter because researchers have devoted considerable attention to studying whether executive function can be taught and how it differs by gender. The broad consensus is that specific components of executive function can be improved with training and practice. Gender differences are apparent in some individual components of executive functioning, but neither men nor women have a systematic overall advantage. Further, findings of gender differences differ widely across studies and appear to depend heavily on measurement and testing strategies.
This research conflicts with my interviewees’ focus on immutability (“I am who I am”) and individual difference. Indeed, if I looked solely at their domestic activity, men and women did appear to differ systematically in their capacity for planning, problem-solving, and processing complex informational inputs. The catch is that the same men who struggled to anticipate domestic problems or follow a project through to its end frequently described success in occupations requiring the very same skills they were said to lack at home.
Cognitive labor leaders are largely made, and in different-gender couples, it’s most often women who undergo this transformation.
Nina, for example, described her husband, Julian, as temperamentally ill-equipped for the frenetic multitasking and constant forecasting she relied on to juggle home, paid work, and childcare. “If something is broken in the house and Julian gets used to it, he will not consider it a problem,” she explained.
But Julian worked as a surgeon—a position that certainly relies on attention to detail and deadlines. He acknowledged the contrast between his professional and domestic personas. It was “mostly time [availability]” that prevented him from doing more of the cognitive labor at home, he began. “And then also—I mean with the mental stuff I think Nina’s much more attentive to all the things that need to be done . . . I can mostly go a very long time before it hits me that now is the time to deal with it.” Quickly, he clarified: “I mean, in the home life. Not, like, work.”
Nina made a similarly astute observation about this contradiction. “I’m also just, like, more of a detail-oriented person than Julian,” she mused. “Except with regards to his career, where apparently he’s . . . he’s a doctor, so he has to . . .” Nina trailed off, changing the subject rather than dwell on this puzzling inconsistency.
“What do you think is different about your attention to those things in the work side [versus the home side]?” I asked Julian. He thought for a moment before speculating:
“I don’t know. I mean, I think just being in a pretty busy job. I think in my work pretty consistently—I tend to try to prioritize basically all of that, and don’t spend a lot of time with that [home] stuff. [Paid work] comes at the expense of, like, proactive work [at home]. I think I’m likely fairly intellectually exhausted. I don’t come home and think about what needs to be arranged for childcare.”
Several other men acknowledged a similar contrast between paid work and home. Alan described himself as the “ideas guy” in his marriage and his wife as the “project manager” who figures out “what are we going to do and how [would] that actually work and, like, the nitty-gritty.” But this arrangement is “funny,” he admitted, because Alan works full-time as a project manager.
The same men who struggled to anticipate domestic problems or follow a project through to its end frequently described success in occupations requiring the very same skills they were said to lack at home.
Contrasts like these point to a pattern of differential deployment rather than differential ability. It was less that men like Randall, Julian, and Alan were innately laid-back and more that different contexts brought out different sides of them. Why? Men who recognized the discrepancies between their work and home personas argued that by the time they finished with paid work, they had little mental bandwidth left.
This is a logical argument, if we imagine cognitive labor capacity as a tank that refills overnight or a muscle depleted with use. However, when it was a woman who held a more demanding job—in terms of number of hours or schedule (in)flexibility—different logic prevailed. In a handful of cases, women’s cognitively taxing paid work was referenced as further evidence of her inherent managerial prowess. Bridget, for instance, described herself as the “organizer” and her husband, Jimmy, as the “executer” in their relationship. By way of explanation, she added, “My [paid] job is basically to project-manage things . . . the dynamic in our relationship is very clearly a result of that.” Rather than competing with her domestic responsibilities, Bridget argued that the professional skills she’d honed enhanced her domestic capacity.
Still, many women did experience their paid work as intellectually exhausting and a threat to their managerial role at home. But rather than accept this as an unfortunate reality, women viewed their occupational demands as a problem in need of a solution. They typically responded by making professional changes rather than by expecting or asking their husband to pick up the slack at home. This was true even of women who outearned their husband, sometimes by a significant margin. Cassie, a telecommunications executive with an annual income more than twice her husband’s, described herself as “a workaholic” who was formerly “consumed” by her job. Despite her intense career, Cassie did not cut herself much slack at home: “I was literally working [for pay] from, like, 6:00 a.m. ’til 9:30 p.m. and then would get up the next day and do it again. And [my husband] was working ’til 9:30 at night, so I would have to come home and still do everything that needs to be done when you’re a parent.”
Cassie remembered reaching a breaking point one evening when she was giving her six-month-old a bath. “My [work] phone was going off and was buzzing, and it’s always numbers, numbers, numbers. And nothing happened to [my son], but he turned and I wasn’t paying attention. And I was just like, ‘I gotta get out of here, ’cause I’m not paying attention to my child while he’s in the tub.’” Soon after this incident, Cassie switched from the commercial to the government division of her company, where work hours were considerably less intense. Though she had likely lowered the ceiling on her future compensation, Cassie now felt she had sufficient bandwidth to be an attentive parent. Intellectual exhaustion was not, in her mind, a valid reason to neglect her domestic responsibilities.
Cassie’s story suggests the “facts” of partners’ employment—hours, income, schedule flexibility—mattered less than the meaning couples ascribed to those facts. While men’s paid work was allowed to deplete their cognitive reserves, women’s was not. This gender asymmetry meant that women often experienced more obstacles to their career growth than their husband faced.
Men and women are not merely responding to personal differences when allocating cognitive labor. Rather, their choices are creating and sustaining those differences.
It would be easy to dismiss men as bad actors weaponizing their incompetence to shirk responsibility, or women as too willing to give up on their professional ambitions. But this is at best an incomplete explanation—gendered social forces also channel men and women in different directions. Women are held socially accountable for most domestic outcomes, like a messy house or a poorly dressed child. Meanwhile, men are more on the hook for a family’s financial outlook. Men and women alike internalize these gender-specific societal expectations, a fact that helps explain, if not fully excuse, what could sometimes seem like a myopic focus on men’s careers.
Men were also not the only ones who practiced selective deployment of their abilities. Women who demonstrated considerable skill in most other areas of domestic life, for instance, sometimes displayed a curious incapacity when it came to finances. Holly, who described frustration with her husband Tyler’s passive approach to household management, was more laid-back about finances: “He’s a lot better at that than I am. So he’s always running numbers in his head and thinking about finances. I’m just more on the, like, ‘Let’s make sure that [our daughter’s] fed’ and, you know, being a mom, and let him worry about the financial stuff.”
When we link mind-use patterns to innate traits, we miss the critical role learned skills and honed capacities play in shaping how “good” one is at cognitive household labor. Men and women are not merely responding to personal differences when allocating cognitive labor. Rather, their choices are creating and sustaining those differences. When men deploy their problem-solving and planning skills at the office, they fail to recognize how those same skills might be useful at home. Yet these “choices” are only partially individual: men and women alike are responding to a range of social forces that make it easier for women to acquire domestic knowledge and build family-centered relationships and that disincentivize men from using up their limited energy on domestic matters for which they are unlikely to be held accountable.
These forces are not determinants, however. While couples like Kathy and Randall may be the norm, other different-gender couples managed to craft a more balanced division of cognitive labor. And regardless of their actual allocation, the happiest couples were those who believed in their own ability to reshape their patterns as goals and circumstances changed.
Excerpted from What’s on Her Mind: The Mental Workload of Family Life © 2025 by Allison Daminger. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press.
