Weekly News Update
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- New York magazine’s Strategist sings the praises of this $100 pair of “grandma” sandals.
- The American Lawyer asks “Tattoos, flip-flops and those ‘revealing’ attires (shorts, spaghetti strap tops, bare midriffs): Are these really the things that drive firm managers batty during the long, hot summer?”
- The New York Times breaks down the environmental impacts of the most common types of fabric.
- The Economist explores how women are finding their groove in podcasting.
- “Dear Lady”: The Atlantic features rejection letters from the Society of Women Engineers archive.
- A Wired opinion piece states: “Tech company recruiters are novice plumbers patting themselves on the back because they found the problem and patched it, except the real pipe burst is a few years down the line, when the women who were just hired leave.”
- CNBC wonders why workers aren’t using all of their vacation and paid time off.
- Medium shares a firsthand account of a man who was sexually harassed in the workplace.
- The New York Times also reports that “Plan B” morning after pills are ineffective for women who weigh more than 176 pounds—even though the average American woman weighs about 166 pounds, according to the CDC.
- This comic by the French artist Emma takes a fresh look at why women tend to be the “manager of household chores.” (We've also talked about the “default parent” problem over on CorporetteMoms quite a bit, from how to ask for help from your partner to how to avoid being the only one thinking about the little things (i.e. share the emotional labor).)
- Bustle suggests 10 dystopian novels to read after watching The Handmaid’s Tale on Hulu.
- Variety reports that Jessica Chastain spoke out at Cannes Film Festival that the depiction of women in film is “quite disturbing.”
- Laugh of the week: The Onion shares a brief but memorable Father’s Day call.
On CorporetteMoms Recently…
- We shared advice from working moms to their pre-mom selves.
- We time-traveled to discussions about daycare, mom hacks, juggling doctor appointments, and working during the first trimester of pregnancy.
- Kat shared some clothes for working moms, including some maternity basics and washable workwear.
Did we miss anything? Add 'em here, or send them to news@corporette.com. Thank you! Also: Are you a mom or mom-to-be? Don’t miss this week’s news update at CorporetteMoms.
Kat, you have sound ads popping up again, just FYI.
can you remember what kind of ad/for what product or company, or what it looked like? thank you!
Sorry, no I turned down my volume immediately. I didn’t see anything, just heard it. It seems to have stopped now.
I just don’t feel the way of that Emma cartoon with my husband, but maybe I’m in the minority. Rather, I remember everything having to do with a couple of areas, but he is the one who remembers when the lawn needs to be mowed, when the filters need to be changed, etc. He does all of our tech stuff; I wouldn’t even know how to begin. So I definitely handle gifts for family members, including his, but I think it all works out in the end.
So he mows the lawn… once a week? And changes the filters… quarterly? And you do everything else… daily? …hourly? I would not consider that to all work out in the end. YMMV I guess.
I posted below, but I agree, the 1x tasks are really not the same as the daily or weekly tasks. Even the daily tasks are not that equal: cooking breakfast vs. cooking dinner, it takes 10 minutes to scramble some eggs, and it takes more like an hour to trim the chicken, chop the veggies, brown the chicken, simmer the soup, make the rice, put the leftovers in the fridge. If he’s home when the laundry needs to be folded, he’ll help fold. But it takes 1.5 hours to take the laundry to the shared unit, set the timer to move it to the dryer, hang the clothes on the rack that can’t go in the dryer, be around to take the clothes out of the dryer immediately, and hang them up before they wrinkle. Happening in during the last few minutes of folding gets annoying. And sure, I can do other things while the laundry is in the wash… like clean the bathroom, mop the kitchen floor, vacuum the living room, etc.
Well, we also cook and clean after dinner together, and we have a maid and a nanny, who does our laundry.
The cartoon also not my personal experience. It was something I definitely considered when looking for my husband. My brothers don’t act that way with their spouses, either. I’m not talking about traditionally male chores, either, but cooking, cleaning, childcare, etc. I’m sure it’s a common experience, but if anyone is getting discouraged out there, there is hope.
I have wondered about this (as a single person). My dad is fairly self-sufficient when it comes to household stuff – he does his own laundry, my parents tended to split cooking/clean-up duty, he’s responsible for many of the outside chores, including mowing the lawn, dealing with the cars, house repair, etc. My mom still expresses frustration about being the household manager sometimes, so I know he isn’t perfect – but the anecdotes I hear here and from some of my friends and colleagues would lead me to believe that even my dad’s contribution to the household is well outside the norm, which worries me. I don’t like household stuff that much myself, so I’m not inclined to take it on for someone who just assumes it’s the woman’s job.
I identify with the cartoon somewhat. I think our division of labor is fine, and much better than in the cartoon.
But besides “his” tasks, my husband will happily do things, but he has to be told what to do — he doesn’t look at a full laundry hamper or a sink full of dirty dishes and think that’s a job that needs to be done. (I tested it once when we first moved in together, and dishes piled up for a week.) He goes to the grocery store for the next meal, but not for the week. He doesn’t receive a birthday party invitation and think he needs to RSVP, calendar it, and buy a gift. He’ll sit by the door “ready to go” instead of packing the diaper bag, unless I specifically ask him.
To some extent, I just accept he’s not going to change. He has many wonderful qualities, we’re equal partners, and I feel like he’s putting in his maximum effort to our marriage and family. And to some extent, he’s getting better in very small, incremental steps.
How are you going to raise your kid so they know to pack a diaper bag and not just sit by the door? That’s what I struggle with how to break this pattern for the next generation.
The “manager of household chores.” cartoon rings so true in my marriage. Both my husband and I recognize this. In fact he sent it to me being like -” gah I know this is us.”We talk about it all the time, and problem solve on it all the time, but its such a hard cycle to change.
I might bring this up on the weekend thread, but how are y’all approaching this? Because I feel like this is pretty true in my marriage, and I’ve mentioned it a few times to DH, and he just doesn’t get it. He does our taxes, which is great and time consuming, and I don’t want to do it. He handles the car registration. He obsesses about our finances and investments, so while for him, that’s a daily task or a “mental load”, that’s more about his personality than me bugging him to micro-tweak our money. He does the dishes pretty regularly, and he generally cooks our breakfast. But most of his tasks are 1x per year, or when he remembers. When I mention that hey, maybe it’s his turn to do some chores, he is genuinely confused that I don’t think he does his fair share around the house. Similar to the finances, he doesn’t think that the bathroom needs to be cleaned weekly. Or that the floor needs to be mopped regularly, at least if he’s the one that would have to do it. When I complain, he suggests getting a maid service. I really don’t want to do that, we’re two adults with no kids and no pets, and we’re barely home between work, hobbies, and social engagements! He’s a good husband and wants to do his share, but he legitimately doesn’t understand that “working on his motorcycle all day to get it ready to take to the track” is not actually contributing to the household chores.
Bring it up on the weekend thread because I would love to see people’s responses!
One thing we have done is that if he says he will clean the kitchen after dinner and if I say I will clean the kitchen after dinner…it used to look very different. So we discussed what a clean kitchen looks like after dinner and he typed up a list and refers to it when its his time to clean the kitchen.
We have done the same thing with other zones in the house so if he has a few minutes before work he will go look at the bathroom and see if it matches the description we agreed upon in the zone description.
Some tasks like laundry are much easier for him because there is a clear start point – the laundry basket is full and clear end point. Same with dishwasher.
I would say if you have it in your budget – get someone to clean and make it your husband’s job to find the person and schedule the person. Life is too short to take on all this logistics.
Another thing is he has access to my to do list and so he will look it over and volunteer to take things on. He will just send me a text “Don’t worry about picking up the dry cleaning, I have that.”
A lot of our conversations also are about the fact we don’t have kids now, but when we do have kids we want these skills to be passed down equally to our children – ie if we have a son we want him to recognize how to clean something or cook a dinner or tidy a room, not just a daughter. So how do we do that when he doesn’t have this skill set.
I married him knowing he is the type of person who will never naturally be like “WOAH those windows look really dirty I should wash it!” however he is always willing to do a task if I ask him. No complaints ever, which is amazing. I don’t expect him to ever wake up in the morning and be the type of person that goes “I should pick out a bottle of rose to put in the fridge for this evening when our guests come over” But that is how my brain works. So yah we are still working out a good balance of appropriate expectations while not leaving me as the chore manager. Also his job is more demanding…so its hard to come up with a good balance!
Ohhh, the zone descriptions sound like a great idea! When we first got married, we literally made a spreadsheet to make sure things were “equal”. This worked pretty well in the beginning, and we got into a good groove, so we eventually stopped tracking. Somehow over the last year or two, we’ve ended up back to the place where I’m doing all the “small” tasks, and he’s doing a few “big” tasks. But the big tasks just don’t take up the same amount of time. And the realization that I do A LOT of emotional labor was huge for me, that it’s not just about physically cooking the dinner, it’s about the fact that I have to THINK about the dinner. My husband is generally a smart, helpful guy, but sometimes he’s just clueless. He complained one week that we didn’t have vegetables, and I finally just told him that he has money and multiple modes of transportation… he should go buy his own vegetables, it’s not my job to buy the vegetables! He was pretty embarrassed about that one, but similar to the comic (pulls out only the bottle or just clears the table), he now realizes that relying on me to always buy the vegetables is ridiculous, but doesn’t realize that relying on me to do the laundry is also ridiculous.
We might be married to similar people. My husband is brilliant but he has significant blind spots when it comes to household stuff.
I feel so fortunate because my husband lived alone in his big house all by himself for 12 years before I moved in so he has all his systems in place from watering the plants to dealing with the cleaning lady to cooking and shopping and of course all the projecty stuff. He is really and truly a swear-to-God at-least-equal partner and I keep pinching myself because things will get done without my even knowing about it. Living the dream, man.
I really think that most of it is just choosing a partner who is tuned in to this kind of thing, or at the very least is willing to learn that, for example, vegetables are readily obtainable at a variety of retail establishments (love that story!).
There are men who don’t know they can purchase vegetables at a variety of places?
This terrifies me…
Don’t be terrified :) He knows full well that there’s a variety of places to buy vegetables. Our normal routine is to do the grocery shopping together on the weekend, at which time, we normally buy vegetables. The example above was from a weekend when we were out of town, so we didn’t go to the store together. I picked up some eggs and milk, but no vegetables, because I didn’t realize we were out of vegetables. So husband basically kept mentioning that we needed vegetables in passing, instead of just going to buy the vegetables himself. When I pointed this out to him, he was embarrassed, and then bought vegetables on his way home from the office the next day. This is one of those times that he was just being completely clueless and not realizing that he was complaining about something that was 100% within his control, and that while I frequently solve this problem, it is not, in fact 100% my problem to solve 100% of the time. (Note that we don’t have “assigned” chores, so it’s not like groceries are “my” job and I didn’t do it one week)
I think this is hilarious and adorable and I love a man who learns!