Episode 58: Playing Fair with Eve Rodsky

[Theme music]

Nahanni Rous: Hi, it’s Nahanni Rous. 

Judith Rosenbaum: And Judith Rosenbaum! Welcome to Can We Talk?, the podcast of the Jewish Women’s Archive, where gender, history, and Jewish culture meet. 

Eve Rodsky: So it's just one question that you have to ask to understand the Fair Play system and that's, "How did mustard get into your refrigerator?"

Nahanni: Making sure there’s mustard in the fridge is one of the endless and invisible household tasks that Fair Play author Eve Rodsky writes about. She’s interviewed hundreds of couples about how they divide up domestic responsibilities, and she’s found, surprise surprise, that it’s usually the woman who keeps track of the mustard specs.

Eve: So Judith, this is what I would hear. Oh, yeah. My second son, Johnny likes French's yellow mustard on his hotdog. That's why mustard is in our refrigerator, because he won't eat his protein otherwise. He'll choke if he doesn't gouge it and dip it in mustard. And finally I would hear, "Oh yeah." And then I send my husband to the store for the yellow mustard and the dude, you know he's bringing home a spicy Dijon every fucking time. 

Nahanni: Obviously, it’s not just about the mustard. Eve is a Harvard trained mediator, and she has found that in heterosexual couples, the weight and the toll of being the CEO of home usually falls on women, but unlike CEO’s, that labor is undervalued and taken for granted. 

Judith: I wanted to talk to Eve because even for me, a professional feminist, this balance has been elusive. And it’s humbling, because feminists have been trying to address this for many decades. Nineteenth century feminists created a professional field of home economics to bring value to domestic labor. Second wave feminists tried renegotiating the terms of marriage and coined the phrase "the politics of housework," recognizing that what’s often seen as a personal struggle is part of a whole system that doesn’t value or support caregiving and domestic work.

Nahanni: Today, many women in higher paying jobs outsource childcare and housework… but that work is still being done by other women... in lower paying jobs, who are often women of color. Covid has really laid bare how imperfect and unjust this system is, but as we reemerge and rebuild, that insight may give us an opportunity to renegotiate the terms. 

Judith: Or as Eve Rodsky would say, re-deal the deck. Eve created a system that recognizes the true value of caregiving, and seeks to redistribute it. like all feminist revolutions, it started with a very personal “aha” moment, and that’s where we began our conversation. 

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Eve: I did have a series of experiences that sort of changed the course of my life. And one of those experiences was a text my husband sent me nine years ago that said, “I'm surprised you didn't get blueberries.” On the passenger seat of my car. I had a diaper bag, and a breast pump. I had a newborn baby at home. and amidst all this chaos. As I was racing to get my older son, Zach, at the time he was three, I had a client contract in my lap. And every time I would hit the brakes, the pen would sort of stab me in the vagina, making me completely sob and pull over to the side of the road. I live in LA now. And so we don't take traffic lightly. So for me to pull over and be late to pick up Zach, something was really wrong in my marriage. And that was the fact that I was the fulfiller of his smoothie needs and literally every single other task where my family was seemingly falling in my lap at the time. But more importantly, I did not have the career marriage combo I thought I was going to have. All of those realizations were sort of raining down on me that day when Seth sent me that text. 

Judith: You know, I, I can relate to so much of what you're saying and I'm sure so many people can, and so many of our listeners can, and that's part of why we wanted to have this conversation, but I think one of the things that's so bizarre is that the widespread-ness of the problem that you're talking about actually normalizes it instead of kind of lighting a fire under our butts to fix it, right?

Eve:Yes!

Judith: Like you would think that something that is so pervasive people would be like, what the hell is going on? Like, how did we all end up in this situation? It makes no sense. It's totally not acceptable. We're all bitching about it behind the scenes frequently. And yet that sort of normalizes it instead of fixing it. So you talk in the book so powerfully about some of the costs of not fixing the problem. So can you talk a little bit about that?

Eve: So I like to say private lives are public issues, and that's why we're here. We're here to amplify that this is not a you problem. This is a society problem. We're taught that these are things not to be spoken about, uh, maybe to, again, laugh and complain about, but we've been conditioned since birth. Um, and society has been built upon the backs of the unpaid labor of women and the undervalued labor of women of color. And that has real consequences.

[Music plays: "The Crisper"]

I remember around, again, nine years ago, when I was having this breakdown. I was on this breast cancer march with, uh, nine of my closest friends. And why I think it's important is because this is when I was recognizing it wasn't just a me problem. And it wasn't just us bitching about our partners, but it was watching sort of the toll that invisible work was taking on my friends. We were marching, we were having this beautiful morning, Judith, of solidarity and marching on behalf of one of our friends. And we were carrying signs that said, you know, “not just a women's problem.” And again, I talk about this in Fair Play because of what happened next. What happened next around noon is we became the reverse Cinderella, right? We all sort of turned into pumpkin's with texts from our partners and the substitute women that came in to relieve our partners of watching, babysitting our children for the morning. And the texts coming in were so frequent and so intense and I was watching everybody respond to, you know, “Where did you put Hudson’s soccer bag?” And “What's the address of the birthday party?” And “You didn't leave me a gift.” “When is the babysitter coming?” My favorite, Judith, was my friend Kate's husband, and his text was “Do the kids need to eat lunch?” And it was in that moment of watching how these women reacted, that I knew there was a serious problem. It wasn't that we all turned off our phones and said, "Oh my God, this is a joke." It was that every single woman I was with said, “I can not stay with you for our lunch reservation. I left my partner with too much to do.” And they left me there. They left me there to go find Hudson’s soccer bag. They left me to bring a perfectly wrapped gift to a birthday party. They left me there to go feed their kids lunch. And so I remember that day, I decided to count up how many phone calls and texts we'd received. We had 30 phone calls and 46 texts for ten women over 30 minutes. I can't talk to you about the cost more than I can talk like that, that the interruption gap, the lack of leisure time, uh, having it all, meaning doing it all, keeping all of that information about where's Hudson soccer bag, that where the gift is, setting up for the birthday party, and on and on. It takes its toll in terms of not only our identity loss, but what I found is that it takes a huge toll on our physical health, holding all of the cognitive labor. The number one thing women told me was that they cannot sleep, that they can't shut their mind off. This is hetero, cisgender couples I'm talking about in this survey. And so to me, the costs are obviously mental, the mental load. what is the cost of society for valuing men's time as if it's diamonds and treating and viewing women's time as if it's sand.

Judith: Right. And I think this is so much more clear since Covid, where we see how many women have left jobs, because it falls on them to manage kids in the absence of school or childcare. And that was just the assumption of our social fabric was not to even really notice that to assume that that's just how it would work. And I love that, you know, what you're really talking about is the kind of age old feminist principle that the personal is political and that the things that we think come up in our lives as our own personal either failings or annoyances are actually part of systemic problems.

Eve: And here's the rub. The rub is that is it's women who often, are the most CIYOO: complicit in your own oppression. it's very pervasive. We've been conditioned to devalue our own time. And I'll tell you how that comes up in the home. It comes up because we say things to ourselves that I call toxic time messages. So I'll tell you the four that were most prevalent, in my interviews. one was “why are you the one who picks up the call from the school when your kid is sick? And this is pre-pandemic. Number one answer was “my husband makes more money than me, my job is more flexible.” Okay, so we have to unpack how ridiculous that argument is because a) flexibilities in the eye of the beholder. We have studies that show if a woman is a doctor, a man is a lawyer. The woman says her job is more flexible. You flip it, the woman still says her job is more flexible. what men are paid more. So, if you say that your time is money and that you do more because your husband makes more, that would mean you're relegated to doing more invisible work for the rest of your life.That would mean that I couldn't ask for a change in my marriage, Judith, because I chose philanthropy and my husband chose private equity. It makes no sense. So the next thing I heard was, well, I'm wired differently for care. I'm a better multitasker. So for that one, I went to one of the top neuroscientists in the country. On the record, he gave me a great answer, right? There's no difference in the gender difference in the brain for how we multitask. But off the record, he said something that changed my entire perspective. And that was, Oh, Eve, you're trying to tell women they're not better multitaskers, well, and he was saying, obviously this is a joke, but well, you know, we men have convinced you women that you're better at wiping asses and doing dishes. I'm not sure I want you to dispel that because that's helped my tenure and my leisure time and definitely my pay. So this idea that somehow we're better multitaskers, we're wired differently for care, that's not true. The third one that was the most pervasive was in the time it takes me to tell him/her/they what to do, I should just do this myself. 

Judith: Right. 

Eve: So for that one, Dan Arielli my good friend, behavioral economists said, that's literally the worst argument he's ever heard for women because it means you're wiping asses and doing dishes forever.

Judith: Right. 

Eve: And we know that from leisure time studies, men get at least twice as much leisure time as women. But it is fundamentally a moral failure of our society to view time as money to view all of these toxic time messages as gospel. They are wrong. Time is time. We all just get 24 hours a day and we deserve as much time choice over how we use that time as men have. 

Judith: It's so important, and I think it's also about the ways that we're trained to think about time. I mean, I remember when I was not working full time and was home with my kids in the afternoon, the expectation was I used that time to also make dinner because my husband was coming home in time for dinner and there should be dinner. When he was home in the afternoon with the kids and I was working full-time and he had a more flexible schedule, the expectation was that I made dinner when I came home because he was spending the afternoon taking care of the kids. And so he was too busy to make dinner. And I was like, wait a second, something here doesn't quite, it doesn't quite add up. And there are ways I think also that, you know, in terms of the question about, um, the time it takes to teach somebody to do something, it's amazing how men who are extremely competent and learn things on the first try in all other aspects of their life, somehow need to be told again. And again, how to do very simple things that they just can't quite grasp. And, uh, therefore it makes it feel like it's easier to do it yourself than to keep explaining something that seems like it should be obvious

Eve: It's because we don't put any value on these tasks. So this gets to a question I asked many people, and this is LGBTQ people as well, not just heterosis gender couples. But do you believe an hour holding your child's hand or the pediatrician's office is just as valuable as an hour in the boardroom? And I can tell you that the demographic that does not believe that the most are hetero, cisgender white men. 

[Music plays: Lancashire]

Judith: I was interested in that question about heteronormativity and what the impact of heterosexual norms are. most, but not all of your examples are of heterosexual couples. And it may be that in same-sex couples, it's easier to create equitable distribution of labor because marriage is already operating outside of traditional norms. And I was curious if you researched that at all, or if you found any of those dynamics in your work? 

Eve: Absolutely. I did. And what I found is that especially for cisgender, same-sex lesbian couples, was this idea that if you make less money, you're the person who takes on more care. 

Eve: I will say the best couples I learned from though, were those non-heteronormative couples who said to me that, because we had such difficult conversations about other things, like who's going to be the genetic material for our kids, we are way more open to having conversations about who does what in the home. So in a lot of ways, I like to say, let's learn from the changing family structure, but we have to center the heteronormative patterns because unfortunately that's where all of our problems lie. Even, um, in my gay interview set, so many couples said to me, “people ask us, who's the man and who's the woman.” So we want to shatter these norms, but to shatter them, we have to center them as problematic. 

Judith: So let's talk a little bit about the Fair Play system and how it works. 

Eve: There's a hundred tasks in the Fair Play system. I call them cards. And so in this game, the goal is to hold cards. And when you hold a card, you're holding it with conception, planning and execution, the full ownership mindset, and you can re-deal those cards at any time. What I'm talking about is you own a task from start to finish when you own it. So whether that's an hour of watching your children, you're not texting your partner, do the kids need to eat lunch? You know what happens in that hour. For Seth and me, it started with extracurricular sports. Once I said to him, the ownership mindset of this one task means surveying our kids for what sports they want to play and setting them up with their friends... conception; and then the planning includes an 85 person text chain to get them to three practices a week for two kids, going on to Amazon buying cleats or whatever, asking friends for equipment and making sure it doesn't get lost every single game; having a minimum standard of care where they go into the game on time and they wear protective equipment and possibly sunscreen. 

Eve: Handing over the ownership mindset of just that one card was six hours of my week back, Judith. Six hours. And that's basically what Fair Play's about it is about. Understanding that the cognitive labor is the hard part. That's where the costs lie.That's the mental load. That's the insomnia. That's the women being twice as likely to be diagnosed for an anxiety disorder as men. It comes from that cognitive labor. 

Judith: Say a little bit about what the categories are of the cards so that people get a sense of how you're dividing up tasks and helping people to organize their responsibilities. 

Eve: The way I broke it out was that there are four suits, plus what I call wildcards. So there are the home suits or those are things that happen in your home. There's the out suit. So those are things that happen outside your home. Uh, then there's something called the caregiving suit and then there's something called magic. So magical beings. That's under the magic suit, uh, dishes, that would be a typical task under the home suit. Carpooling, that's a typical one for the out suit. Calling your in-laws, that's a typical one for the caregiving suit. So I'll give an example. So I had one couple and they decided to start with magical beings, which I think is a really hard card to start with, because I think there's a lot of emotion packed up in somebody saying I'm going to become the tooth fairy, because if you don't follow through, there's a lot of, I think psychological damage, but okay, they decided to do this. And in this couple they were classic. He has no executive function, um, I have to do everything. So they decided to hand over the magical beings card. To do that, the first thing that I recommend people do right, is to get buy-in by talking through your why. So instead of just saying, you have to do this, you sit down and say, what was your experience with magical beings in your home? I know that for me, magical beings have a lot of pain associated with it because as a Jew, and being a product of a single mother, I would write a letter to Santa every year and put it on our rubber tree plans and Santa would never bring anything, right? So having conversations, taking a new vow where you're discussing what your experience with magical beings were. Um, nobody does that. I know that Judith, because I asked thousands of thousands of people, people do not tell their own stories to their partners. They assume that they just know what their childhood was like. So once you tell those stories... and this couple did that, they talked about what the tooth very meant to both of them and what they wanted the minimum standard of care to be, which was that, you know, money got under the pillow. And so then, her husband takes it over and he forgets. He forgets to put money under the pillow the first time that his child is under his purview of a tooth. And it was really traumatic. And she knows from Fair Play, right. That you're supposed to give your partner room to make mistakes. So what happened was, um, this amazing man emailed toothfairy@gmail.com and this is super creepy, but I guess he got a response and said I'm sorry that, you know, Chloe didn't get her, her money. I'm really backlogged. So this man printed out that email showed it to his daughter and said, “look, you know, the tooth fairy is completely backed up. And um, if she comes late, she gives double the money.” And then money was under the pillow that night.  And that's a small story, but I love that story so much because that couple, I was bursting with joy because if that's the dynamic of a partnership, that you give someone room to make mistakes and that they own it, then we're changing the world. One, one partnership at a time. 

Judith: Right. 

[Music plays: Loopy]

Were there any surprises for you in developing this? I mean, like, I can tell you one of the surprises I had in reading it was to learn that actually for people to feel like there was equitable distribution did not mean actually a 50/50 split of the cards. That actually 21 out of 100 was the magic number of cards for your partner to hold for you to feel good about the way the system was working. That kind of blew my mind.

Eve: Yes. It may be not the traditional feminist message that life has to be 50/50, but we tried that in the nineties. where everything had to be equal. You take a turn doing dishes today. I have to do it tomorrow. But it was such a bizarre, um, 50/50 split that I realized I needed to just sort of be surprised by what I was finding. So what I would ask is, “do you perceive your relationship to be fair?” And this was LGBTQIA couples, as well as heterosis gender couples. I was seeing it over and over again that even if there was not a 50/50 split, if one person who is quote unquote, the person doing the “less” in the home, was holding, with ownership, 21 tasks or cards, there was perceived fairness by both parties. And then I started to look into the data around perceived fairness, and I found that perceived fairness is actually a really great indicator of relationship health. It doesn't have to be actual fairness.

Judith: Well, also each card is not equally weighted. What for me feels like a very heavy card might to somebody else feel like a light card. 

Eve: A hundred percent.

Judith: One of the things I love also is the notion of unicorn space. What, what is a unicorn space and why is it so important? And as an add on to that, what has happened to unicorn space in the time of Covid?

Eve: What unicorn space is, is a, um, I like to say like the mythical equine that inspired the name, it doesn't fucking exist unless you create it or reclaim it. And that is the space for you. And it's not adult friendships, and it's not self care. So it is not a bubble bath. It is the active pursuit of what makes you you and how do you share that with the world? That's the definition of unicorn space. And so that is the contagion that I want for the world. The reason why women stop doing it is because it's highly subversive for women to have a permission to be unavailable. It is highly subversive for us to spend time on unpaid tasks or tasks that the world finds unnecessary. And so what I'm here to say is that unicorn space, the active pursuit of what makes you, you is highly important. It is the antidote to what's been happening to us. It’s your knitting group, the grief group you started. It's a way to share yourself with the world that's active. And if you don't have it, that's totally fine because we just unpacked for you why. It's because your time is sand and no longer. Are we going to allow you to accept that your time is now diamonds going forward.

Judith: you know, I think, I think it's so important to have that distinction between unicorn space and self care, and the idea that unicorn space is something that, um, you know, that connects you to the wider world. And in some ways I felt like that connected back to that question that we talked about at the beginning about the relationship between individual and structural change. And, you know, the Fair Play system is based on change within the individual family unit. But of course, because the personal is political, I wanted to get back to that piece about the difference between individual and structural change and sort of where you see Fair Play’s role in that nexus.

Eve: Fair Play was never meant to stop at the home. It was meant to ignite a conversation and the most, um, the last frontier of feminism, ironically, the place closest to us, which causes the most angst and uncomfortability to deal with it head-on in your own partnership. But 100 percent the, the taking agency in your own home is, can only be a piece of the bigger puzzle. And it's why to me, Fair Play is a political movement to value care. So in Earth 2.0, as we rebuild, the beauty is that we've started to all come together. And so what that means is we have the people who are developing the most amazing childcare portfolio proposals for Massachusetts, Neighborhood Villages. We have Elliot Haspel who has been screaming for years that childcare needs to be free, that it makes no sense that we just decide children are a collective obligation at 5, and that they're a personal obligation at 0 to 5. It makes no sense, that distinction. We have people like Anne-Marie Slaughter who are taking the charge and how to bring corporations along. And the way we're going to do that is by bringing the silos down so that we're not just single issue people, but that we say that we are dreaming of a world where we center care, where an hour holding your child's hand at the pediatrician's office is really just as valuable as an hour in the boardroom. And that we don't need another global pandemic to recognize how important a care infrastructure is to a vibrant and functioning society. 

[Theme music]

Judith: Thank you for joining us for Can We Talk?, the podcast of the Jewish Women’s Archive. 

Nahanni: And thanks Judith, for this thought provoking, and surprisingly fun, interview with Eve Rodsky, the author of Fair Play. By the way, I lent the Fair Play deck to my friends Emily and Ari Kahan… and here’s what happened.

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[Music plays: Lancashire]

Ari Kahan: One of the cards is watch the kids. That’s probably a thousand hours a week.

Emily Kahan: Are there a thousand hours in a week?

Ari: Not anywhere near.

Emily: No. [laughs]

Ari: Laundry. Do we do laundry?

Emily: We do laundry. We do. [laughs]

Ari: [laughs] I was unaware.

Emily: Like, does anyone watch the kids? I don’t watch them.

Ari: Do not share this task. Who doesn’t share watching the kids?

Emily: I would say this is more my task currently because—

Ari: Are you kidding me?

Emily: During the day you are less accessible.

Ari: We both watch the kids—

Emily/Ari unison: All the time.

Emily: Because we’re always home together.

Ari: How do you win?

Emily: You don’t win.

Ari: Then why do you play?

[laughter]

Emily: I don’t know. I think we both win when we have a happy marriage.

[Music fades]

Judith: Ok, so maybe the card game, just like a partnership, takes a little practice!

Nahanni: Doesn’t everything worthwhile take practice? 

[Theme music plays]

Nahanni: This episode of Can We Talk? was produced by Asal Ehsanipour. Our team also includes Becky Long. Our theme music is by Girls in Trouble. You also heard Loopy, the Crisper, and Lancashire from Blue Dot Sessions. I’m Nahanni Rous.

Judith: And I’m Judith Rosenbaum. Until next time!

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