Brace for the Slack Channel Titled #equitabledivisionoflabor (So What, Who Cares, July 11, 2019)
Hello!
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When I was about six months' pregnant, I went to visit one of my very favorite people in the world. Erin was just coming off maternity leave for her own firstborn and at one point in our all-day flow of chatter, she said casually, "The thing about parenting is that it's basically project management."
I can do project management, I thought. So there's no need to reinvent the wheel when I'm parenting -- I'll just figure out the best way to steer those old wheels across new terrain.
So you can see why I was greatly interested in the piece "The Slackification of the American Home." In it, families share how they're using collaboration and project-management services like Trello, Slack and Asana to handle the work of running a safe, sane and sanitary household.
So what? As the story reports:
“The way that we imagine knowledge work and more and more kinds of work is really about coordination and collaboration across distance, across people’s different time commitments, managing attention, figuring out who’s going to do what when,” [Melissa Mazmanian, an informatics professor at UC Irvine] says. “And that style of work … It’s very similar to family life, if you think about it.”
Coordination, collaboration and task management -- domestic life really is project management.
Who cares? Anyone interested in a fairer world. As the article notes, "Without one adult in charge of the professional domain and one in charge of the domestic domain, there’s more coordination of who’s in charge of what—which is something productivity tools can assist with."
Now that household management is getting the masculine makeover with "real" tools -- the same way "Hints from Heloise" became "lifehacking" and "dieting" became "intermittent fasting for performance" -- perhaps more people will stop regarding domestic duties as the type of invisible labor women are expected to do for free on top of whatever paying jobs they also have.
Older readers may be familiar with the phrase "the second shift." Others may be familiar with the spate of articles like "Even Breadwinning Wives Don't Get Equality At Home" and "Married Women Do More Housework Than Single Moms" and "Women Did Everything Right. Then Work Got Greedy" and "Once the Baby Comes, Moms Do More and Dads Do Less Around the House."
All of these point to a few unpleasant truths for women who choose a heterosexual partnership: Not only will they still be doing more domestic work at home -- and perhaps inadvertently perpetuating the gender imbalance with their kids -- they'll be reaping the rewards of lower pay at work and less free time overall. Is it any wonder we've seen articles like "Why Not Getting Married is Smart Economics for Women?" and "Unpaid Domestic Labor Is 'A Hidden, Root Inequality'" and "Young Women Are Convinced Motherhood Is Going To Suck — And They're Right."
Project management software renders visible the previously "hidden" work of maintaining a pleasant family. Instead of putting the burden on one person with "You should have asked! I would have helped..." the software puts everything out where everyone can see.
Before we embrace tech as a solution to domestic inequality, a caveat. As anyone who has ever worked at a deeply borked company knows, there is no workflow process or tool that will overcome dysfunction at the organizational level or toxic leadership. That goes double for families. How well a project-management tool can work for a family depends on the family culture.
And note also that project management systems work only when there is buy-in from all the participants. In other words: You can lead your spouse to Trello, but you cannot make him link.
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