Downloaded from YTS.MX
[Eve] All right, guys, let's go.
-[clapping] -[boy] Mom, [indistinct].
Official YIFY movies site: YTS.MX
[overlapping chatter]
[chatter continues]
All right, you want a few chips now?
Go for it. Go for it.
Chips for breakfast, everybody.
[boy] It's not breakfast.
[Eve] You're getting turkey today, okay?
-No, thank you. -[Eve] And crusts.
Crusts, okay? I can't do it with--
[chatter]
Out, out. Everybody out, out.
I'm late. I'm late. I'm late.
[children chatting]
[footsteps]
[up-tempo music]
I'm gonna tell you a story about blueberries.
♪
This was probably rock bottom.
I had the breast pump in the diaper bag
in the passenger seat of my car.
I had gifts for the newborn baby
to return in the back seat in my car.
I was racing to get Zach
at his toddler transition program.
And I had a client contract in my lap.
The pen that was holding in between my legs
for the contract would stab me in the vagina.
Seth decided to send me a text.
And that text said, "I'm surprised
you didn't get blueberries."
So, I pulled over.
I remember thinking to myself,
"My marriage is ending over off season blueberries?"
My marriage should be ending over my affair
with-- with an NFL player.
Like, that's how my marriage should be ending.
Or some dramatic affair in the Caribbean, right,
where I have, like, my hair blowing back
and I'm really tan.
I was sobbing, sobbing on a side street.
[dramatic music]
That was the day that I woke up.
Thinking like, "How did I get here?"
[energetic music]
All right. So, if-- if I were to put a percentage
on how much I do the household tasks,
I would put it between, like, 30% and 40%.
-Yeah. -Is that right?
I was gonna say, like...
Yeah, yeah, that's go--
-[laughing] -It's worse than that?
I do 70% of the childcare.
Hey, he thinks he does 70%.
I think I do 70%.
I definitely do a lot more in the summer and the winter.
Uh, Maggie does all my laundry
in the spring and the fall, generally.
-[laughing] -And--
-You don't do the laundry-- -I do.
-- in the summer and the winter.
No, I do some, I help.
But, like, when I'm-- when I'm--
When I'm working, like--
-I'm a seasonal laundry girl. -Yeah!
The laundry, I did the cooking, I did the cleaning.
I took Halima to ice skating,
piano, ballet, gymnastics, swimming.
Allergist appointments, dentist appointments.
Um, and she gets allergies
from your side of the family, so...
-So, the p-- there's-- -No, no, no, no, no.
I haven't finished.
No, this is a risky newlywed game.
Forty percent.
I was actually gonna say I do 70% of the domestic work.
Fifty, maybe-- maybe 60% of household, um, but--
You don't do dishes, though.
-And you don't do the laundry. -Give or take, 40/60.
[laughing]
Amir, eating the food doesn't count.
But I'm not saying that.
I would say my first duty
is staying out of my wife's way
and letting her do all of those things
that she does, the way she does them, you know?
I could probably do more, there-- there's no question.
Um, Sometimes, you know,
it's not quite as efficiently done if I do it, anyway.
So, Emily ends up having to redo it
and that causes even more tension.
I would fill in the gaps, you know, wherever she--
There were never any gaps to fill in.
Wh-- whenever she said,
-"Hey, I need--" -I want attention.
What? [laughing]
This is-- this is just so interesting.
We're talking about things that we've never talked about.
This interrogation's fun, isn't it?
-It's really interesting. -Intervention, I should say.
♪
Now, you're gonna meet the expert
who's been called the Marie Kondo
of relationships in her book, Fair Play.
[presenter] Eve Rodsky is the author
of the best-selling book, Fair Play.
Which is all about dividing household labor.
[announcer] No reminders, no nagging and no excuses.
Well, with Fair Play, her goal is
to create the 21st century solution
to this ancient problem.
[blender whirring]
[boy] Yeah.
It's so loud.
Yes, finally.
-Yay! -[Seth] Okay, guys, let's go.
Who wants it first?
[boys] Me.
Every morning, it takes, like, ten hours
for that thing to blend.
Are you gonna drink some smoothie? Or you want some--
It's not like I expected to grow up
and be a gendered division of labor specialist.
It's definitely not what I thought about
when I went to sleep holding a diary
and my lovey when I was seven years old.
But I guess psychologists
would call me a "parental" child.
My father left the family
when my mother was pregnant with my brother, Josh,
and then we all migrated to New York City
and we lived in a rent-stabilized apartment
at Avenue C and 14th Street in the '80s.
It wasn't a physically safe place to grow up.
Everyone was afraid to come to my birthday parties.
I remember my mother started to work nights
because she really wanted to get her Ph.D.
She was doing it all.
And so, she'd often leave me and my brother,
if she could, with a babysitter.
If not, I was putting my brother to sleep on my own.
Very early on, I recognized that he had
pretty severe learning disabilities.
It was just a lot of picking up after my mother
and especially for my brother.
I remember the first eviction notice
that came under our door.
I think it was second grade.
I'd just learned to read and it said something like,
you know, "You have 30 days before you'll be removed
from your home."
I didn't want that notice again.
And so, when my mom admitted to me
that the reason she had gotten that eviction notice
was because she was often late paying our rent,
and a lot of it was because she didn't have
the time to pay our rent,
I thought, "Okay, well, that's a great place for me."
I would take the mail and open her mail for her,
look and make sure
that there was no late utility bills.
And so a lot of that cognitive labor of remembering,
I think, affecting my life later on.
This-- this idea that I could do it all.
I did it all for my whole life.
I don't need anybody.
Never rely on anybody.
I will never rely on a man.
I'll never rely on friends.
Always this attitude that I can do it myself.
[muttering]
Okay.
[birds chirping]
[children chatting]
[child] Mommy!
We got pregnant six months into our marriage with our--
our oldest child.
We said three years, so, you know.
Anybody who says three years, you're kidding yourself,
it's probably gon' be six months, like...
Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Going into marriage, I'm like,
"Okay, so my husband is gonna be the provider
and the protector and-- and I'm going to be this,
you know, '40s housewife and mop the floor
on my hands and knees
and make everything from scratch.
And that's not what real life looks like.
[laughing]
I actually graduated with my MBA a week before
our daughter was born.
When I became a mom,
I felt like my identity completely changed
and it was, um, honestly a little traumatic.
I was really confused and overwhelmed,
and also in love.
I feel like I went from this super ambitious person
to this person that was all about her child.
I was so focused on providing and my career.
I put all of my energy and efforts
outside of the home to bring in an income
to make sure that we were taken care of.
And my expectation was that
she would take care of the rest.
And I really didn't understand, I guess,
the amount of, like, work that she had to endure.
I don't understand what you just said.
Calm down. I'm going to show you, look it.
Mommy!
He was working like 80 hours a week,
and then he would come home
and I'm like, "I need you to be on."
And he's like, "I've been working all day long
to provide for our family and you're not being grateful."
I was so tired. I was so lonely.
While he got to go to work all day
and talk to people and then come home,
eat and watch TV and then go to sleep.
And it was really isolating and really frustrating for me.
He looked at the other people
that were on his path to success in this company
and almost all of them were divorced.
[kids chattering]
And one of his friends came into town
and, um, he was like a step above Christian in the company.
And he was telling him, like,
"Yeah, man, I'm getting divorced."
During the argument, I said, "You know what?
I'm going to go stay at my parents' house
for a little bit."
And he was like, "Absolutely not.
That is the first step to us breaking up."
-You hit record? -[Seth] Yeah.
Hi.
[Seth] Where are you going?
I'm going to my shower.
Seth and I are getting married.
I wanted a big wedding. I wanted a diamond ring.
I wanted a equal partner in the home.
And I vowed I would have an equal partner in the home.
Seth did the cutest thing for me.
Rose petals.
We were really growing our careers.
We were each other's best friends.
And there was no reason for me to think
that that wasn't going to be what I would always have.
[Seth] This is Eve's supposed due date.
Go to the side. Let me see the side.
Pick up your shirt a little bit.
I had a really traumatic birth experience.
Yup.
I was having a really hard time recovering.
I was having a hard time breastfeeding.
And when Zach was born,
it was the most isolated time my life.
I don't think I slept for another year.
Seth went back to work two days after Zach was born.
No one ever used the word
postpartum depression or anxiety.
I had no words to-- to talk to Seth
about the isolation, the sadness,
um, the physical pain.
Seth started saying things, like,
"There's just not much for me to do."
That divide between Seth and me just kept growing.
[phone ringing]
I remember feeling so excited to get back to work.
I was at J.P. Morgan at the time.
We had this very open office plan
and so I would ask, "Where's the lactation room?"
I ended up pumping in a stairwell.
It sounded like sex.
[imitating breast pump noises]
Everywhere I went,
I was sound like I was fucking somebody.
I'm trying to figure out, "where would I breastfeed?"
Where would I take breaks? What if I want to leave early?
So, I left the corporate workforce
and decided to start my own firm
because somehow I had this idea that working for myself
would somehow give me more time, more flexibility.
When we met, she made a ton more money than I did.
Like, I was trying to figure out, you know, my career.
Um, and she was a very accomplished,
Harvard Law School trained attorney.
You know, as I sort of went down my career path
and started having some success,
I did have somewhat archaic notions of, you know,
"Hey, I'm the breadwinner
and now I'm making more money, and you know,
you should be more responsible for the home."
I think that's whether intentionally
or not ingrained in your head.
Let's just talk about Zach's application.
I can't get him to write his last essay.
Okay, so what do you wanna do about that?
Yeah, well, I feel like you--
There are a few things that were happening to me
that started to wake up my eyes to the fact
that maybe something was wrong in my relationship.
One was a breast cancer march.
I was with ten friends who were a lot like me.
Really powerful women marching for equality
around breast cancer.
My friend had died in law school,
we were honoring her in downtown LA.
So we had this reservation at 12:30 at Dim Sum.
12 o'clock, turns around, our phone started blowing up.
[phones ringing and buzzing]
First text comes in.
"Where'd you put Hudson's soccer bag?"
Okay.
Next text comes in, another friend.
Um, "Where's the gift? You didn't leave me a gift,
if you want me to take Jack to the birthday party."
My friend Kate's husband was my favorite.
It was a text that said,
"Do the kids need to eat lunch?"
What I noticed that day was how the women reacted.
The nine women I was with said to me,
"I left my partner with too much to do. I have to leave."
And so these beautiful, powerful, strong women
said goodbye to me.
And that was the first day
where I had an act of resistance.
And that act of resistance was to count up
every single phone call and text
we received during that time.
30 phone calls, 46 texts for ten women
over 30 minutes.
I became obsessed with a quest to figure out
what was happening to us.
So, I read every single article that had ever been written,
and book on what's called,
the "Gendered Division of Labor."
Um, apparently, it has a couple of names.
It's called the "Second Shift."
It's called "Emotional Labor."
It's called the "Mental Load."
[Pooja] The Mental Load is essentially
the cognitive and emotional,
invisible labor that's going on every single day
when you're managing your household
and you're taking care of a family.
So, it's keeping track of everything
that needs to be done,
everything that's already been done.
Anyone can go to the store to get a pint of milk
or change the baby's diaper.
It's also about knowing that you're out of milk
and that you need a certain amount every morning
and knowing that it's time for the baby to be changed
or the baby to be fed.
So, it's really that executive labor
that keeps the household running.
That's where women often report the most inequity.
That even when their partner is stepping up
and doing a lot of the everyday tasks,
it's still on them
to anticipate and assign those tasks.
And that's something that, you know,
when women are also trying to perform
in the workplace and juggle these multiple roles,
it's that mental load that really starts to chip away
at their ability to accomplish
as much as they could in another domains.
But my favorite term was
written by a sociologist in 1986.
And it was a term called "Invisible Work."
Arlene Kaplan Daniels, a sociologist,
argued that because women do it
and it's in the domestic sphere,
it benefits society if we devalue it,
if we consider it worthless,
because then we don't have to pay for it,
or we can pay and undervalue
women of color to do that work.
♪
Caring and emotional labor,
whether it's somebody doing it for a family member
or it's done as a profession,
it' just never quite seen as real work.
You get paid less if you're taking care of babies
or old people than if you are involved
in the work of people in their prime.
And that's just wrong.
It benefits society to be on the backs
of the unpaid labor of women.
And so that's why it's invisible.
♪
-[girls yelping] -Grab my purse.
All right. Well, did we get everything?
We didn't leave anything in the car, right?
-Yeah. -Okay.
We were married for five years before we had kids.
It was great. We were almost five years
of having fun, being newly married.
So it was-- it was, uh...
relaxing, I would say, relative to now.
[Emily] Ainsley, you got your pencil case back
-Uh-huh -Good.
I'm like a mobile desk here.
Now, let's think about your laptop. Let's go get that.
Okay. I have to work on my laptop.
-Do you want-- -I want fluffy.
Did you look for her upstairs?
So, I saw your notes.
How are you on time? Are you good to, like, 3:30?
I've had a social media marketing business
for ten years now.
Freelancing isn't a new concept,
but it's the whole like investing in yourself, right?
I did work in corporate America.
That was my first taste
of seeing how women would become mothers.
That really lit a fire for me to figure something out
before I became a mother and be able to make choices
of "What does it matter
what time I go to the doctor's office?"
Or "What does it matter if I want to do
a field trip with my kids one day?"
I need to make work fit around my life.
[Niall] I work for an automotive group
here in Detroit
and my role is to handle the relationships we have
with about a dozen of our manufacturers.
You know, we're a traditional company
with both long hours and very traditional values.
Not bad. Could use some [indistinct]
The idea of flex time or family focused stuff
or long paternity leave, maternity leave,
whatever that may be,
that would not be part of our normal culture.
We had our oldest kid at midnight on a Friday
and I was in Monday morning.
We used to joke that either I was dead
or I was on a plane, if I wasn't responding.
Uh, family, I'm going to cook some dinner,
you can get food ready.
[Niall] I thought that's what you were doing.
I'm going to get that going right now.
So, when you guys can, come on in the front
and we'll take off all of our wet clothes.
-[girl] Let's make a snowman. -[Niall] Yeah.
I am shutting this, so I can't hear you.
-[Niall] Yeah. -[girl] Hey.
[Niall] What's the ETA?
What time?
-That's the time it is now? -[Emily] Yeah.
Yeah, I've two phone calls from work already.
[Emily] It's absurd to act like
you don't have people that rely on you
and it's absurd to be judged
for having responsibilities outside of your office.
I literally just gotten home
and promised Emily I'd watch the kids.
Ten minutes, so.
If I don't have to ask anyone for permission
to take my child to the doctor, then that's the easier route.
If Niall has to ask, then it's--
it's-- it's a debit, right?
Like he has taken a favor.
-Hey, Niall. -Yeah?
Uh, after dinner, do you want to do math worksheets?
I could use someone to help me, please, set the table.
The fact that I haven't brought more things
to Niall's attention that I do, that falls on me.
Sit on your bottom.
Claire? What are you going to say?
Say our prayer.
But yeah, it goes back to the twisted notion of,
"Well, you just got to ask for their help."
I don't want to ask.
This is not the first time
our children have needed a meal.
This is not the first time
that our children have to go to bed at a certain time.
And so, the fact that I have to bring it
to your attention like it's the first time
you've ever heard it and that I'm getting a favor
out of asking for this help is exhausting to me.
So then, I just go back to just keep doing the work
because it's quicker than asking for the help,
it's quicker than "training,"
but yet it doesn't solve the problem.
I still have some work stuff to wrap up
after they go to bed.
[Amy] At least once a day,
I feel like the worst mom in the world.
And I cry in my car. [crying]
Asking for help in America really is seen as a weakness.
There is a sense of shame that comes up
that you're going to be burdening other people
and it's not their responsibility
to be taking care of you.
It's rooted in long standing bias and stereotype.
It's rooted in public policy.
And this sense of rugged individualism.
Individual and personal responsibility
are part and parcel of American society.
But, it can also be really detrimental
when we think about what the flipside
of this looks like in the context of families.
It takes so little to be considered a great dad,
and it also takes so little to be considered a shitty mom.
Oh my God, I can't believe he comes
to all your doctor's appointments.
He is so supportive.
He's the hero for playing Candy Crush
while I get my blood drawn.
For mothers, it really comes from these unrealistic,
contradictory expectations.
You've been gone for 300 hours.
I know, I work a full-time job now,
you all know that.
And I see this phenomenon where mom is doing everything
and helping everybody else.
But she's suffering so much.
-[screaming] -[baby crying]
-Hey, Mom, can we talk now? -No!
It starts really young.
[Nicole] Teenage girls spend more time than
their counterparts on care-taking responsibilities.
And it doesn't get better.
It gets worse as they, uh, enter the workforce,
have families of their own.
When I was starting my career, there were three stories
that we told ourselves effectively
about how to have it all.
How to have career and family together.
And one was, you just have to work hard enough.
You just put in the hours,
you buy ten more books on time management
and squeeze every second out of the day.
The second was, you know, if you married the right person
and they would share the work
of having both career and family.
And the third was you-- you-- you can have it all,
but just not all at the same time.
The problem with all these stories
we tell ourselves is that they blame individual women.
They say it's up to individual women to make it,
rather than recognizing the systemic
and structural bias against women
who are trying to make it on the same terms as men.
[pan sizzling]
I remember thinking to myself,
"Oh my God, I'm the default."
Or now I call it the "Shefault"
for literally every single household
and domestic task for my family.
I became obsessed with invisible work
and visible work, because there's a modicum
of a solution in there.
How can you value what you don't see?
And so, I had this brilliant idea in my mind
to make the invisible visible.
I called up all those women
from the breast cancer march and I said to them,
"I'm counting up every single thing that women do
that takes more than two minutes of our time.
So could you please text me anything
that you can think of?"
[phone beeping and buzzing]
Making school lunches: ten minutes.
Attending doctor's appointments, one hour.
Picking up the kids from the school if they're sick.
But then things I didn't even think about
started coming in from people I didn't even know.
So, the spreadsheet started growing.
It was an Excel spreadsheet,
which I named "The Shit I Do Spreadsheet."
Then another woman I didn't know said,
"I received your spreadsheet,
you know, I see you wrote two minutes for sunscreen,
um, but what about the 30 minutes for the chase?"
[indistinct murmuring] health insurance, homework...
And the list kept on growing and growing and growing.
So finally, I had 98 tabs,
and about 2,000 items of invisible work
on this giant 19-million-megabyte spreadsheet
that I decided to send to Seth with zero context.
Just a subject line, an email that says,
"Can't wait to discuss!"
I don't know the difference
between megabytes and gigabytes,
but it's like crashed my computer
when she sent me the attachment
and I sort of said, "Holy shit."
I didn't get the reaction
that I thought I-- I was going to get.
I got that-- The monkey, you know,
the one that's covering its eyes like I didn't--
He didn't even give me the courtesy
of the three monkey trio.
I got it, right? See no evil.
I-- I don't give a shit about this.
I don't want to see this.
I started to think about the Pandora's Box.
What if you unleash consciousness,
but there's no solution?
I said to him, "I'm going to make a Shit I Do list.
And you know what? It's going to be so long.
My running checklist through my brain,
it's just-- It's always going.
I'm the one who is like vacuuming regularly,
dusting things off, cleaning up the bathroom.
I gotta do this, I have to be here.
I have a grocery pickup, then I've got to be at the school.
You know that-- that never goes away.
I'm trying to pick my words very carefully right now.
-Um... -You won't hurt my feelings.
There's a lot of pressure on women
to be doing it all
professionally in their careers,
at home, within their marriages,
within their communities at large, like volunteering.
The emotional part of it so intense
that from the moment that I wake up,
for example, I wake up at 5:00,
she wakes up with me and throughout the day
I'm talking to her,
I'm sending her pictures and videos.
[indistinct] throughout the day,
even though I'm super busy.
A lot of times, I don't automatically
recognize things that need to be done.
And so, we went for a long time where I didn't recognize them
and Charisma would just do them and then she'd be upset with me
for not doing them when I didn't even recognize that
-it was supposed to be done. -Mm-hm.
♪
[Katie] When we ask men and women
about how they divide the work
of taking care of children and running a household,
Men over-report.
They're actually doing about 35% of the work.
They think they're doing half.
Women undersell what they're doing.
In fact, they're doing about two-thirds of the work.
The dominant household configuration
in the United States right now
is the dual-earner couple with kids.
You essentially have two full-time jobs
and then another full-time job, right?
Running a household and raising kids
is a full-time job.
We found that in couples
where wives were doing more housework,
their cortisol levels weren't showing
a stress system recovery
at the end of the day that we would expect to see.
[Ai-jen] It definitely feels like at times
the walls are closing in on you because there's so many demands
and so many needs financially,
emotionally and otherwise.
Often when we think about stress,
we think about big life events, right?
Like an earthquake or losing your home.
But there's increasing evidence
that it's really sort of small, everyday,
chronic stressors that can create wear and tear,
that chip away at our health.
Our immune pathways, our sleep health,
risk of heart attacks, stroke, cholesterol.
So stress can really accumulate over time
to damage our well-being.
Married men live longer than single men.
That's a really well-established finding.
But there's evidence that unhappily married women
actually live less long than single women.
♪
Women's work, family conflict,
stress and exhaustion and burnout are not new,
and it also is not something they can fix all by themselves.
Guys, it's time to eat.
[children] Okay.
Thank you.
Wash your hands.
[indistinct] Wash hands quickly. Thank you.
[speaking Spanish]
[indistinct], what do you need?
[speaking Spanish]
-I miss you much, baby. -[indistinct]
[Katie] What else do we need? Forks?
Paul, did you put the salt and pepper on?
Oh, yeah. I was supposed to do that.
Um, Betsy, do you want to bring me the dinner bell?
-Yeah. -[bell ringing]
[indistinct] all the way downstairs.
That's not how you do it.
Have I ever felt at the end of my rope as a working mom?
Hell, yes. And if you interview someone
who doesn't say that they have felt
at the end of the rope as a working mom,
they should come get one of my children
because they'll drive them straight to it.
What do you mean,
you don't like the regular rice? It's just rice.
It's not. It's like weird and stringy.
I'm a single mom, and I know firsthand
that we have a child care crisis in this country.
In only one state is child care considered affordable.
Let that sink in.
So I remember, you know,
saying things to leadership in Washington, you know.
"What time are we going to be done this week?
"Am I going to be flying home on a Thursday or on a Friday?"
And one of the things I keep hearing when I would raise
these concerns is, "Well, you know, your situation
is just so unique. We can't all work around you."
But to be honest, my situation isn't that unique.
There are millions and millions
and millions of single parents in this country.
They are more pressed to try to figure out
how to make childcare arrangements.
They have less flexibility.
They don't necessarily have a backup.
And so in that sense, my situation isn't unique.
It's actually a lot of the people
in Congress who are older, whiter and wealthier.
They're actually the unique ones when you look at the--
the overall population of the United States.
[jazz music]
[crowd cheering]
Last I checked, it was mainly men
who are running workplaces.
They might have assumptions
that don't even include the realities
of looking after kids.
Maybe they never had to be the ones
rushing from work to pick up the kid at school.
[jazz music]
The proverbial straw finally hit the camel's back
after Ben was born
and I was going to Seattle for just one day.
God forbid I would spend the night away
from my newborn baby.
I have my extra clothes
because I'm going to leak through my shirt.
Legal documents for the client that I work with.
Breast pump again.
And as I'm right about to go to Departures,
I get another text from Seth, and that text said,
"Some guy left his beer bottle and jacket on our lawn."
Okay.
So the fuck am I supposed to do about that?
I ignored the text and I got on the plane.
Arrive in my client's boardroom,
facilitate this really amazing meeting.
I ended up pumping in a dark stairwell,
ran back to the airplane, pumped again.
Eleven o'clock at night, I pull up
feeling really excited and empowered by my day.
And then out of the corner of my eye,
I see a shattered beer bottle and a wet jacket.
It was still there.
And so I decided to give Seth the benefit of the doubt
because I figured, you know, "What if he's dead?"
And it turns out he wasn't dead.
But he was outstretched on the bed.
And he actually nicely,
and really enthusiastically told me
that he had three hours after our kids went to bed
to watch SportsCenter, to finish a PowerPoint deck
and to work out, right? So, plenty of time.
Um...
So, yeah. So...
Yes, the truth is I walked by it multiple times
without picking it up because I was that guy.
And I was expecting somebody besides myself to pick it up.
The sociologist I remember from college,
C. Wright Mills said something like
"Private lives are public issues."
And so when I start to see patterns,
I realized this is why the home is dangerous,
because it presents so small.
My quest was to start stopping men and women in airports,
anybody I could get my hands on,
to just collect data to ask them,
"How do you do division of labor in your home?"
You're not fighting over blueberries.
You're fighting over bigger systemic issues
around inequities in the home.
And it was this idea that as a society,
we view and value men's time as finite,
like diamonds.
And we view and value women's time as infinite,
like sand.
And there were three reasons
which I now call Toxic Time Messages.
Reason number one was my job is more flexible
and my husband makes more money than me.
But still, because I make less money,
I have to do all the housework and childcare
in addition to my job.
But the other two were even more insidious.
Argument two was I'm a better multi-tasker.
Women are not better multi-taskers.
There's no gender difference in the brain.
When I was interviewing neuroscientists,
this guy in a lab coat says to me,
"Imagine, Eve, that we, men,
could convince you, women,
that you're better at wiping asses and doing dishes.
How great for my tenure? How great for my golf game?"
I ended up crying in his office that day.
And then finally, the third saying,
"Well, in the time it takes me to tell him, her, they,
what to do, I should just do it myself."
Of course you invest now in teaching someone
how to wipe asses and do dishes.
You'll devalue all those future hours
of wiping asses and doing dishes
by thinking about how you save time now.
This is it. This was my ah-ha moment.
I can finally look at Seth and sit him down and say,
"I don't think you value my time the same as yours."
And we give you so much time choice over how you get
to use your day, however you want to use your day.
And we treat my time like it's never going to run out.
But what if I'm here to tell you, Seth,
that I only get 24 hours in a day?
And it was the first time
in our life where I felt like he could hear me
because he saw the pain, like the deep pain that I had.
Because I felt like every hour
was already pre-decided for me by society.
God forbid you're not working, it better be
in service of your housework or childcare.
We have gymnastics run.
I have to put that in the calendar.
[narrator] All America salutes its women of steel.
Isn't this pretty hot for you, Miss [indistinct]?
Well, I hear it gets kind of hot
around the kitchen stove, too.
As everyone probably knows the Rosie the Riveter imagery,
women were called into the workforce
in unprecedented numbers in World War II
to take the place of men going off to war.
There is this dilemma.
Who's taking care of the children?
[narrator] Shipyard working Momma, put that baby down.
The big solution was to provide child care at work.
And so in 1942, all of these child care
centers started popping up across the country.
It was government subsidized, and U.S. was spending
at the height of the war about a billion dollars a day
on child care out of necessity.
But when those men came back, women are summarily dismissed.
♪ I wish my living room were all redone ♪
We see in the '50s this kind of drop
in women's labor force participation.
And we have this period of the classic
Leave it to Beaver family.
The stay-at-home mom, the husband who goes off
to work, the two kids.
But starting in the '60s, we start seeing
more and more women going to work and we start seeing women
trying to combine motherhood and work
in ways that we hadn't in the past.
[upbeat funky music]
There is this idea that women were largely
working to have, like, something fun in their pocket,
and maybe so they have a tiny bit of independence.
The truth of the matter is, for many women in this country,
that was never the case.
Women always were working to support their families.
The majority of working women fit that category.
What happened was, "okay, you can work,
but you're still going to have
to meet all of your care-taking demands at home."
It was a set up for women.
[crowd chanting]
Women started to advocate and really push for
government-funded childcare.
We were hoping for a childcare revolution,
but in 1971, Nixon vetoed that.
Saying that providing such care would be a fiscal waste
and also would weaken the family.
From that point on, pretty much women entering
the workforce had to really figure out care on their own.
♪ I can bring home the bacon (Enjoli) ♪
♪ Fry it up in a pan (Enjoli) ♪
♪ And never, never, never let you forget ♪
♪ You're a man ♪
[woman] Despite the barriers, women are entering
more of these male dominated fields,
like law and medicine and business
that had effectively been firmly closed to women.
But if they're going to be successful
or ambitious, they have to behave
and act like men in the workplace.
Women would go to job interviews
and take off their wedding ring.
But fatherhood was a benefit for your career.
Oh, you have a family to take care of now?
You're going to get that raise.
You give that promotion to Bob Enright instead of me?
I've got five years seniority over him.
I know that. He does have a family to support.
[Violet] And I don't?
Then toward the end of the 20th century,
women's labor force participation
appeared to be plateauing.
Why is this going on?
We saw that the rise
in the skill premium or the returns health education
was significantly faster for male workers
than for female workers.
And there's a real speed-up to what we call
Overwork Environment.
50, 60, 70 hours a week.
Thanks to the wonders of technology,
you really don't have those boundaries
around your traditional work time.
At the same time that we see the shrinkage
of traditional extended family
and community networks that provide support.
Some women opt out. Very few do.
Most are pushed out.
Pushed out by husbands who feel entitled to be ideal workers
and think their wives should pick up the pieces.
Or they're pushed out by employers
who assume that the women are less competent and committed,
so stop giving them good work.
And so the women leave for lack of opportunity.
They step back or they try to juggle a lower-paid job
so they can make it work, and it doesn't work.
And it has consequences for everybody.
At this moment in the US, the average woman
is more educated than the average man.
But still, the average earnings of women are much lower
than the average earnings of men.
We're making it way, way too hard for women
to work and have kids.
[upbeat music]
Ow...
I did everything I could.
I spent nine months on this-- this "Shit I do" spreadsheet.
But I've learned that lists alone don't work.
So my choices were divorce.
Eat, pray, love my life and just blow everything up.
Start over. But I have children.
And I saw how that worked out for my mother; not so well.
And I really loved Seth.
I didn't want to break up my family.
My choice number two was to just
resign myself to doing it all.
Or the third option was to get my ass in gear
and become my own client.
What makes a good, healthy organization?
I'm a philanthropic advisor.
What it means is that I work for families
that look like the HBO show Succession.
Ladies and gentlemen, the first fucking thing
my son's ever done right in his life.
Now, we're really going through
some of the harder things around--
But what I do for those families
is I help them create systems around shared values
to make their most complex organizational
and financial decisions.
And so I thought, what if I decide
to create a system for me?
Now, early on in my mediation practice,
what I would do is tell these families,
"You're already communicating."
I'd start with a family, we'd be in our first meeting.
The second son would start to speak
and Dad would walk out of the room.
Just walk out.
So a lot of passive aggressive communication
happens in my practice, but also in the home.
I sat down with a very high-powered woman who said
that she doesn't communicate about domestic life.
And then 20 minutes later, she says,
"Well, every time my husband forgets to put
the laundry in the dryer,
I dump the wet clothes on his pillow."
The biggest vulnerability I found
for families was giving feedback in the moment.
Whether it's passive aggressive feedback or me saying to Seth,
"Why don't you log Zach onto his Zoom?
Why is the sponge in the sink?
You left the car keys in the car again."
It just-- it's this feedback in the moment
and you feel like you have to get it off your chest.
What? No, really, what's the issue?
Why would you let him eat sugar?
Because people who don't get sugar when they're a kid,
they end up eating gluttonous amount of sugar
when they're adults, like all of your friends.
But when I realized that I could say to myself
the same way I said to my clients
that feedback in the moment is toxic.
Feedback in the moment is toxic.
That practice of communicating
when emotion is low and cognition is high
was literally life changing for Seth and me.
We started with just this idea of what would it look like
if we spent ten minutes a day walking around the block,
get that ten minutes a day in, like,
we would exercise where we're connecting?
That was crazy.
So what are we doing this weekend?
Should we do it by child?
-Yeah. -So Zach has...
Peeling the curtain back, I really had no idea.
Like, the amount of thinking and plotting
and planning and having all of that stress
and all of that burden on one person.
And I kind of said to myself, you know, probably have to
do something about this because this definitely
doesn't feel fair nor equal nor equitable.
As long as you have them from 11 to 3,
I really don't care where they are.
All right, I'll take them, not a problem.
Our daily check-ins consist of a walk.
We check in about what's important with the family,
kind of coordinating, you know, who's going to be where
at what time, who has what.
And just kind of resetting and downloading,
kind of entering the next day with some sort of coherence.
All right. Well, it's busy, busy day.
-[Eve] Yeah. -Excited, though.
Really motivated to make our
relation-- relationship much better.
I may be, like, the task master and it's, like...
[Eve] What's been really important to me in my research
is to be rigorous about capturing people
along different parts of their journey.
I'd say I spend half my time on basic
research and talking to researchers
and then half my time reading books.
"The Way We Never Were."
There is this myth of the nuclear family.
"Burnout, burnout, burnout." "Why We Can't Sleep."
And then one of the most important things is that
we learn from people who are in same-sex marriages.
Instead of putting them into our gendered boxes.
What can we learn from you guys?
The aspect of being liberated
from predefined, heavy burden roles,
it frees up space for you to share in duties
that otherwise you somehow-- you don't want your boys,
your friends to see you do X, Y and Z
because sometimes is it too feminine?
Well, with a household of two guys,
ain't no, there's no choice.
Every job is for everyone.
Like, we can all-- we can divvy up the house chores
and we can both have jobs.
It just comes down to talking about the things.
It is not easy.
It is sometimes terrifying to do that with your partner.
There are times when we are good at it
and there are times that we're not.
What we try to do is try to work
at it when it's not working
and try to figure out how to make it work.
The commitment to having the conversation
is sort of like the-- the great starting point.
Nothing-- nothing is assumed.
Just take all those assumptions and set them at the door
because they're-- they're just going to make
the conversation harder.
Our relationship started out in a very interesting way
because soon after we met,
there were a few people involved
in his professional life who told him basically,
you know, you can't really be an out gay man.
And because of that, I think we had to have
a lot of the hard conversations first.
Our son is adopted.
So beginning the adoption process,
we did a lot of planning
and thinking because we had to.
We had answered all of the tough questions.
We had talked about everything from division of labor
to finances ten years out and our plan,
and it really helped us be partners, um...
in those first few days
that are really scary raising a newborn.
Ultimately, you are becoming a better
version of yourself and that's going to make
you a better partner and a better, you know,
in a better relationship in the end.
-Right? -Yes. Yep.
[laughs]
I am not a licensed therapist,
even though I did interview many of them for Fair Play.
What I am is a mediator.
What you're doing is you're giving people tools.
Tools to have difficult conversations.
If I don't take it up, no one will.
So you're being a good helper to me.
Emily, so good to see you.
-You too, Eve. -So picture a time
when maybe emotion was high and cognition was low.
Yeah, I can tell you, it always happens at night
after I've come downstairs from putting the kids to bed.
It's the first free window without kids
and it's the last hour of the day before we go to bed.
So it definitely always happens at the same time.
-How interesting. -It's a pressure cooker.
It builds up, it builds up,
then it happens, and then we repeat.
It's doing the same thing over and over again
and expecting different results.
Like, I'm going insane.
[Emily] Are you gonna hang out down here,
Niall, and get some work done?
No, I was gonna read the story. --Ow!
-Okay. -[Niall] Hello?
Hey, Niall. My-- my assumption, please correct me
any time that's not true is that
you don't necessarily think about your relationship
in the context of being some problem. That you probably...
I was thankful that Niall was willing to speak
to a complete stranger, and a man,
because men don't really talk about these things.
You probably feel a sense of contentment.
And-- and maybe the biggest problem
is the suggestion that there is one.
I mean, to be totally honest, I don't know a lot of that.
I mean, I-- I do get home from work and I am sometimes
absolutely emotionally wiped. I just wanna veg out.
You know, that can be, I think,
a little bit frustrating for Emily.
Does she verbalize it much?
Not a ton, other than, you know,
a couple of snide comments here and there
about, well, "It'd be nice if you did the bath tonight"
or "It'd be nice if you did this tonight."
In a situation like that,
do you remember what was Niall's reaction
to a boiling-over moment?
He asked me if I was acting in a local theater.
He's like, "What, like, what is all this?
Are you trying out for something?
Because what is that?" I was dumbfounded.
He shut down and then added insult to injury.
Right, so completely sort of dismissed--
dismissed the blow up, but also said you're
-over-dramatic, basically. -Yes.
I love you.
They're ready. Do you wanna say goodnight?
I understand you put in 10 hours
of solving other people's problems
and now you're trying to recharge at home.
And Emily may desire connection and support,
but she would rather do it herself
and stay silent than upset you or come off as--
as particularly harsh or critical.
Yeah. Do I think she probably holds back
on saying some stuff? I'm sure.
Well, has there ever been periods where you've had
a consistent, we're sitting down
with tacos and tequila or cookie dough
and just a ritual around communication?
No. I don't know if I've conditioned him to--
It's like the "Okay,
what do you wanna talk about?" Bracing.
"Oh, this isn't going to go well."
So-- so who wants to keep inviting someone
to that when that's the-- the-- right?
What you get back, so I've just given up.
Sometimes Seth and I in our check-in,
we sit there, we just say, "I fucking hate your face."
Like "I'm so sick of looking at you," you know?
Like, "Go-- go trim your nose hairs."
Like, whatever it is, but I don't care about duration.
We're just there. We're there for each other.
And so that's what I want to ask of you.
-Okay. -Yeah.
That I mean, that resonates.
I think the really, really common way
we respond to our partners is to simply defend ourselves.
To try to convince my wife that whatever
she said happened, didn't happen.
Or "Why are you making such a big deal out of this?"
-Yeah. -The thing that does happen
in all of these default response patterns
is our wives, our partners, anybody
we're talking to experience invalidation.
They experience a human being deciding for them
whether what they think, what they feel, what they believe
-is justified or not. -Yeah.
The accumulation of those when the pile gets big enough,
trust goes away and then safety goes away.
Yeah, I mean, I will-- I have found myself saying at times,
"Dude, you're making a mountain out of a molehill here.
You don't have to make such a big--" So I do get that.
-Yeah. -What my goal might be,
I think, is the expression
"Happy wife, happy life" might apply here.
Maybe so that it doesn't get
to some sort of breaking point where, um...
you know, the dishes become more than the dishes.
-All right. I love you ladies. -[Niall] Love you girls.
[relaxing piano music]
[whimsical music]
[interviewer] What grade is your daughter going in to?
Ninth grade.
[buzzer]
[interviewer] What color are your daughter's eyes?
Brown.
[interviewer] All right, let's look.
-That is incorrect. -[buzzer]
They're blue.
Men aren't bad or evil or just self-interested.
They feel themselves legitimately constrained
by society not to engage in the kind of roles
that would involve them in care.
Excuse me. She's been like crying for hours.
Sorry, but this is a group for new mothers.
On that sign out there it says, "Parents."
I'm a parent and I don't know what the hell I'm doing.
Constrained by what other men think.
I think one of your children's just walked in.
I mean, shifting, shifting...
[Andrew] Constrained by their social obligations
or professional obligations.
And constrained by women's ideal
of what an attractive man is.
Many of us are operating, you know,
like on remote control from a subconscious,
from a place of tradition,
not any negotiated deal,
just the way things always have been.
Men grow up feeling, "I've got to prove myself,
I've got to show I'm a man."
It's one of the reasons why men
don't go to the doctor as much as women.
Don't go to psychologist as much as women.
Men are scared to say, "Yeah, I need help.
I need physical help. I need emotional help."
The expectations for men in our society,
they're destructive of caring relationships
and the kinds of things that make life
meaningful and worthwhile.
-Will everybody just shut up? -I'm sorry.
We have a few special years with our children
when they're the ones that want us around.
The expectation for fathers is that you're the person
who is continually available to work and that to be invested
in your children's growth and development,
is to be less than committed to your work.
I liked helping the school today
and I think the kids like having me there too.
I want ways of doing this more.
Many of us as men, we don't want to fit into this box
and be held hostage to these rigid notions of manhood.
But we're afraid to get out of this box
because then we're held accountable by other men.
Pete Buttigieg Judge has been on leave
from his job since August after adopting a child.
Paternity leave, they call it, trying to figure out
how to breastfeed, no word on how that went.
I'm the king of this tree.
Respect our boy.
And we love this tree.
[baby] Dad.
Dad.
No, that's not, that's not the case.
Or do you expect me to drive cross-country
with a newborn by myself?
I will come and get you. I don't think it's fair that
you're so salty at me when I'm trying to do what's best.
I don't think it's fair that you're trying to make
decisions for our family without consulting me first.
I looked at where my relationship was with
my wife and I had to make a choice.
You know, I could be very well sacrificing
the very thing that I'm working so hard to provide for,
which is my family, for this position, for this status.
And ultimately, I decided that I was
going to take a salary cut, go with another company
where I was able to have more of a balance.
Dad!
My parents called and they're like,
"Would you guys consider coming out to California
and taking care of your grandmother?"
We found out she had Stage 4 breast cancer
that metastasized to the bone.
Her memory started declining and it was just-- it was a lot.
I'm just trying to figure out how to make everybody happy,
how to keep my grandmother alive.
I really became the person that paid
attention to the squeaky wheel.
Now, she's not just my wife or you know, my kid's mother.
She's now a sister.
She's now a granddaughter.
She's now a daughter.
I felt like, you know, I wasn't really being appreciated,
you know, like, I'm sacrificing all this stuff for my family.
And I come home and it's like--
it doesn't feel like it's enough.
We weren't really able to hear one another.
We weren't really able to see one another because
we were so focused on our hurts,
our pains and the way that we felt.
Well, listen, why don't you want to have the conversation?
Because it's stressful.
My parents, they would just say little
things like, "Is Christian okay?
Do you guys need some, like, time away?
Do you guys need to talk?"
And so those little questions made me start
to look at him like, "Well, I mean, is he okay?"
Having them point that out made it easier
to be able to open up that communication
to talk about some of the hard things.
So we created some rules for communicating.
You're going to have to help me with these.
-Mm-hmm. -Um...
The first rule is we don't yell at each other.
Which is a struggle for me, because
if I'm passionate, my voice gets-- gets loud.
Another thing is I couldn't say
-that she was crazy. -Mm-hmm.
and she couldn't tell me to-- to a shut up, right?
-Or dismiss you. -Or dismiss me.
We don't say never or always.
Like "You never do this or you always do that."
I say it and she corrects me.
Yes. But that's a rule.
Having the rules as a foundation for us
has really helped frame our conversations
to always be loving, respectful.
You can't ever take your words back.
You can't ever take back the way
your words made somebody else feel.
Yeah, I got that.
I like that.
[gentle music]
Okay, so last where we left off,
I remember, is that we were going
to start doing a ten-minute a night check in.
And then I know you've had a lot of things,
life has happened, to anything you can tell me.
Oh, well, first of all, we started off
doing pretty evenly, but then there was some times
where somebody had a great day or a bad day, whatever,
so somebody would bleed into somebody else's time.
And so it's easy to find excuses not to do it,
-especially if you're tired. -It's like an exercise, right?
As soon as you stop going to the gym,
it's hard to get back into it.
Ten minutes can feel really long.
Sometimes it's hard to come up stuff
to talk about, at least about myself.
So, I talked about the weather so much.
Emily, what about you?
Um... Gosh, I thought it--
So I hope you really--
I hope you really didn't find it hard
to talk to me for ten minutes a day.
I said it's hard to find the time to sit down to do it.
It wasn't that it was hard to talk to you necessarily.
It's ten minutes. Like, if we can't talk for ten minutes,
then we've got bigger problems ahead.
I have not completely figured out if I'm repeating
the same patterns that I saw growing up.
I go in these waves of thinking "Well, everyone has a choice."
And just because you grew up one way doesn't mean that
you can't choose to do things differently."
My parents didn't communicate very much at all,
and when they did, it certainly wasn't in a functional manner.
I saw my mom do so much and then she would
all of a sudden just blow up.
And now, as a parent, I realized that it's just,
you know, a human reaction to being overwhelmed.
And if there was more fairness in the first place,
then that wouldn't have happened.
My parents got divorced when I was in college.
My own childhood and my own background
we were progressive in the sense that both my parents
worked in a very male-dominated industry,
the medical profession.
The concept of my dad coming home from work late,
having dinner with us and then going
to his study to work, that was just normal.
Literally, his parents were peers.
Same job, same hospital system,
same accolades, except that his mom
had the three children in the household to take care of.
I think Niall feels like if he comes home,
has dinner, plays with the children
and is involved with some of their evening,
he's already checking more boxes than his dad did.
I feel like we can do better.
[Niall] Last page.
[birds chirping]
-Seth? -[Seth] Yeah.
Hi, first of all.
[Seth] How are you doing?
So when Seth and I started to connect,
I started to ask to go to the second tier of my journey,
which was what if we started to treat our home
as our most important organization?
What would that look like?
Dad. That was a bad throw.
I wanted to bring to Seth the ownership mindset
where you own the task from start to finish
because that alleviates the mental load
and it allows men to own something,
to have more autonomy and to know their role.
First up was garbage.
I was still Seth's garbage shadow.
So when I tell you that this is Seth sort
of walking around the house on weekends
and this is Eve walking behind him,
just-- he'd turn and be like, "Hey, what's going on?"
I go, "Nothing, just seeing what you're
doing in the kitchen," right?
He said to me, "So what's the deal with the garbage?
You know, you're stalking me over garbage."
One night during our check in, I said to Seth,
"You know, I grew up in a single mom household."
I remember walking to our little apartment kitchen
and our feet would sort of stick to the floor.
And more importantly, my mother started working nights
and she asked me to put my disabled brother
to bed and he would ask for water
and I'd go into our kitchen after dark.
I'd turn on the lights and there'd be cockroaches
and water bugs everywhere.
And so actually, when I see a banana peel
that's about to overflow our garbage,
I'm a latchkey kid again
and I don't want to be that again.
I can't live like that again.
What happens when you're so divergent over something
that has to get done every single day?
Well, what I found out is that 25% of people
divorce over these things.
We're divorcing over that discrepancy over garbage
or that sponge in the sink.
We come into our relationships with all of this baggage
that we never fucking address.
We never fucking address this baggage.
And so for me, thinking about myself as a child,
getting really vulnerable, tearing up about it, which
I still do today, thinking about that time in my life,
Seth could at least understand why it mattered to me.
Garbage went out with an ownership mindset once a day.
I never had to mention the word garbage ever again.
It was a fucking miracle.
It was like Moses parting the Red Sea.
It was the first time in my life where Seth
was handling a full task for us
from start to finish with no reminders.
When you start with the buy in with your why,
everything changes.
Seth and I were in a great rhythm.
And then COVID happens.
The World Health Organization
has now officially declared a pandemic.
Daily life, the way we know it, is on hold.
Schools across the country are closed.
At the onset of COVID, we asked women to do something
that I couldn't have imagined we would
ever ask anyone to do, right? We asked them to work
and at the same time engage in care-giving.
The pandemic exposed things to the larger public
that have long been known to people
who study these issues of work and family.
The pandemic has shown us this--
this second shift on steroids.
It highlighted how fragile our entire
care infrastructure actually is.
Overnight, our whole child care system eroded.
[dramatic music]
Schools closed, daycares closed
and women had to make a difficult choice.
Within a matter of two months more than 2 million
women dropped out of the workforce,
four times as many women as men.
What that's done is set us back almost two generations
in terms of women's participation in the workforce.
Women that we as a society have invested
in training, in internships, in college.
So it's really, really important that we understand
that if we do nothing, the result
is that we will have permanently lost
very talented women from our workforce.
We are in a, not inevitable, it's fricking evitable,
very predictable scenario where once we have a crisis,
women become our social safety net.
Your world kept moving.
Yeah, my world didn't change a lot.
Mine stopped, and I was in the middle
of three projects, and I had kids home.
I could not focus on-- I could not do both,
I couldn't work and home school.
And I had a hard-- and that was really hard for me.
One of the biggest impacts that COVID had on our family
and on me specifically is the loss of our community,
of our village.
Not having those people daily to be like,
"It's okay, your kids aren't going to die.
You're doing a good job."
And it just-- yeah, it was hard.
It's-- it's-- it's a valuable thing to have
those people in your life that you are rooting you on.
Our son, Carter, he has a rare disease
called Sanfilippo Syndrome, which is like
a childhood version of Alzheimer's, and currently,
there's no cure or treatment option for these kids.
I've had to become his occupational therapist,
his speech therapist. I had to become his teacher.
And I'm not qualified in any of this stuff.
We have the most family hostile public policy
in the developed world.
The United States is one of very few countries
on the planet with no mention
of the word family in our Constitution.
We have no federal minimum standard
for vacation or sick days.
We have no universal health care.
We have no universal child care.
The federal minimum wage hasn't been raised since 2009.
We have no paid parental leave at a federal level.
The United States and Papua New Guinea
are the only two countries
that have no federal paid maternity leave.
That's insane.
And it's quite embarrassing when you think about it.
We hold ourselves out as a model
in terms of democracy, in terms of our economy.
And the fact of the matter is, when it comes to care,
we're so far behind.
[dramatic music]
Our social structures, our institutions
and our systems are still kind of built around the expectation
that there's going to be a stay-at-home parent.
So whether it's banks that are only
open during the workday
or the post office or the fact that
schools are out for the day at 2:30,
there's just that missing gap of time
in which parents are scrambling to kind
of find private solutions
for what's really a public problem.
Why does America shit on moms?
I mean, sexism is the obvious answer.
Every time we press on expanding
support for things, like child care
the very first thing we hear back is it's so expensive,
It costs so much.
But there are lots of things that
we do in government that cost a lot.
There's a hidden message there,
which is it's just too expensive to support women.
Wouldn't it be cheaper if we just let
women keep doing it all for free?
We're saying we value work in the workplace
and we value capitalism
more than we value our families.
And I don't think that's how we actually feel as a society,
but because we haven't valued this core
infrastructure for what it is,
we are putting capitalism above our families.
This stuff makes me so mad.
I've been saying this for 40 years
and it still makes me so mad.
[sighs] Okay.
So tomorrow, they each have soccer.
Different field, same time.
You take one, I'll take the other.
What do you have going tomorrow afternoon?
Nothing. The fair play journey.
I mean, I definitely didn't know what I was getting into.
Bye.
I would have friends that would run for the hills from this.
This is not the kind of thing you talk about at happy hour.
So I think it takes some level of confidence in yourself
and confidence in your relationship
to take a look in the mirror and realize the reality.
Okay, great. So I want to start with you, Niall.
I want to go into "I'm proud of my partner because..."
Um... all right. So I just-- ouf. Um...
Great mom. Great wife.
[choking up]
[gentle piano music]
And it takes a certain kind of person to be
[sighs] that good of a mom, that good of a wife.
Um, and which is why I agreed to do this.
And for my kids as well.
[laughs]
I'm crying now, too.
So, I have these sheets, right?
We're just going to be behind our sheets for a minute.
I have no idea what had happened.
Uh, hardworking, ambitious.
Uh... [sighs]
Oh, my God. You're so sweet.
-Um, courageous and brave. -Oh, thank you.
I think this is beautiful.
I think this is so beautiful because to me,
this is about the why, you know?
Like, you guys have so much in common
and you fought so hard to, like,
get out of these boxes
and you don't give each other that credit.
I took my first business trip
since 2019 by myself, on an airplane by myself.
In a hotel by myself.
I had some moments leading up to it
that I thought, "This is going to be impossible."
But I am so proud that I didn't give up on it,
like, lighting the fire again of what self-care feels like.
You don't want to waste these years and look back and say,
"Shit, why did I spend all those hours
working on God knows what
when you could be out doing more
beneficial things for the whole family?"
All right, Ladies.
[Niall] I think she knows that I'm trying.
We're probably never going to be 50-50,
but she's got, I think, a little bit less tension,
a little bit less emotional stress,
knowing that there is some level
of partnership versus it being completely one-sided.
I got to sleep in.
[indiscernible chatting]
Good morning.
It's not even, Quinn.
Is there a puzzle fest down here?
Oh, Quinn is crushing, but she needs to learn
how to do the corners first.
The most important is working in a team
because José is helping me a lot.
Yeah, he's my lover, my husband, my--
my friend, my everything.
The gas.
[guitar music]
[children mumbling]
When COVID hit, I didn't expect to get laid off, right?
That wasn't something that was necessarily planned.
But when it happened, it was like, "Okay, well,
what's the next step?"
We started a business as we're working together
and now, I'm home most of the time.
All of a sudden, he's at home with four kids all day long.
You know, I say I got the kids one at a time
and he comes in and all of a sudden,
all four want his attention, 24/7.
All done?
[boy] Eggs.
-Eggs? -Eggs.
What about you?
I remember him saying one time,
"I'm not a domesticated husband, like."
[laughs]
"I'm just not-- This is not what I want."
And what's funny is, is that the transition
wasn't necessarily easy for her.
Because, like, when I'm observing things,
you know, I'm like, "Okay, this can run better."
Or if I'm starting to engage more in a particular
area of our life, I'm going to take ownership of it.
So she said to me once, you know,
"Hey, listen, you're entering into my world, right?"
So like-- like this was like her world.
And I'm now just entering, I'm like,
"No, this is our world, okay?" You know what I mean?
I would say Christian does 90% of the domestic work now.
I would say 80, but...
No, I'm going to give you that extra ten.
He does 90% and then I probably do about 10%.
And childcare, I would say we split about 50-50.
Yeah, yeah. I would say that's
that that's probably accurate. Yeah.
I am a lot more relaxed now when it comes to
parenting and domestic work, because my kids are watching.
Like, they're watching how I show up as an example
of how they should move through the world.
Putting away their desires or their hopes or their dreams
to respond to whatever seems loudest at the moment
is not the life that I want for them.
And so I have to model that.
My relationship with the youngest, Windsor,
is drastically different than it was
with the older three at that age.
With Windsor, because I'm here all the time,
her first words was Daddy.
She would come to me if she was hurt.
There's nothing like parenting that
really gets you to-- to look at yourself, you know.
It's allowed me to show up in ways that I didn't even foresee
in other areas of my life.
Christian being home,
it's-- it's just-- it's given me so much.
I hope I don't cry. Um...
It's given me so much.
It's meant so much to our family.
Um...
It's given me the freedom to build my passion.
I think that there are moments like that that happen in life
where we have to find our way into ourselves.
And I'm so grateful because I can be an amazing mom
who loves spending time with her kids
and I can be a beast speaking in front
of thousands of people on stage.
But it took me a while to find that it was okay.
It was okay for me to lose my identity and find it again.
One of the biggest lies that we were told
on our wedding day is "Enjoy this,
this is going to be the best day of your marriage."
Absolutely not. Absolutely not.
I see you, all your flaws and all your imperfections.
You see me and all my mess and all my baggage.
And I got you.
-I love you. -I love you, too, babe.
[inspiring music]
I think we're really on the verge
of a paradigm shift here.
Partly because it's so unsustainable to not have
a plan in place for how we're going to care for our families.
I mean, what else could be more important
to making everything else in the economy possible?
We've never said, "Hey, what do women really need
to stay in the workforce?
How might we accommodate them?"
Let me tell you something.
If I worked at a job and there was
child care, I would never leave.
[relaxing music]
It's really about investing in capitalism.
If we made sure there's equal pay for equal job,
if the tax system did not discriminate
against the secondary earner who is usually a woman,
then we could see large progress.
These norms and expectations that
we can't be flexible with work
and people can't spend some time working at home.
That's all been thrown up in the air.
So companies can be much more flexible with work hours
for their employees.
Here's what paid paternity leave does:
it allows men to go home at the point in time
where the chore gap gets exponentially longer.
It allows men to experience things
like, "Is this cry a hungry cry?
Is it a tired cry?"
You build capability in care-giving from the beginning.
And men who do that come back to work energized, grateful.
They come back more inclusive leaders.
It's really important if we are going
to make this into an effective movement
to realize that work-family conflict
it's not even about women.
Women are just the roadkill.
It's about men and gender pressures on men.
It is for men what feminism is for women.
It's a profound change in our ideals
of what it means to be a man.
What my capacities are.
Of what I should strive for, what it should celebrate.
When we poll men at the end of their life,
what they tell us is that their deepest lifetime regret
is not that they didn't get another book written
or make another $10,000.
It's that they did not spend more time
with family and friends.
♪
Men who play an equal or at least a near equal role
in raising their children and housework,
they are healthier.
They are less likely to be on prescription meds
or anti-depressants.
And here's the kicker.
Not only is he happier, but he has sex more often.
I mean, talk about a win-win situation.
♪
Kids need attention.
Kids need more than one parent
giving them attention-- when possible,
I'm not putting down one parent families.
But where possible,
kids need all the attention they can get.
So we need the society supporting it.
Ben, you're playing with your friends at 3:30.
Good luck with school today.
The most important thing that I learned
in my fair play journey
was think about who did laundry in your home.
Who taught you how to ride a bike?
Who put that dollar under your pillow?
We call it unpaid labor.
We dismiss it. We diminish it.
But being allowed to care, being allowed to parent,
being allowed to have the time
to forge relationships with your children,
that's a legacy that we all deserve.
It's our humanity.
I'll do the dishes.
It was about two years ago when I was ten years old.
I started really embracing the housework.
It makes me feel really good when you do the full task
from start to finish.
I'm really proud of my mom for taking a stand
and talking to both woman and men to teach them both
how they should be making it fair.
And my dad has really modeled that for me.
You know, they say sunlight is the biggest disinfectant.
And so she really put a spotlight on it,
she took a megaphone to it.
Coming out the other side, everybody's much happier.
I don't think we have to talk about
it anymore because we just do it.
See you later.
The kids, they've actually seen my transformation.
-See you later. -Bye.
Ultimately, the torch gets passed
and I think you can't, you know,
break this chain unless you model it as a man
and as a husband and-- and as a father.
We're never going to get to gender equality
until traditional women's work is valued
as much as traditional men's work.
And men do it as much
as women are doing traditional men's work.
This really is our moment and we just got to keep going.
[laughs]
Rule one, all time is created equal.
Once you re-frame that to say "My time is equal to yours,"
an hour holding my child's hand in
the pediatrician's office
is as valuable to society, as an hour in the boardroom.
I started seeing men wanting to take on more.
The biggest benefit in implementing Fair Play
was 100% getting time back.
You have to be able to get some of the shit
off your plate to have optimal experiences.
And so when women are interrupted every
3 minutes and 42 seconds--
[children] Mom!
There's very little time to get into your flow state.
And so that idea of time, uninterrupted
attention for things that I love
is what fair play has given me.
[kid] Ready?
-♪ Happy birthday to you ♪ -♪ To me ♪
♪ Happy birthday, dear mom ♪
[laughing]
I really believe honestly that for women
to step into their full power in the world,
it requires men to step into their full power in the home.
[conversation din]
Care matters. It's not all on us.
It is valuable work.
And societies cannot be built
on the backs of the unpaid labor
of women any longer.
[upbeat music]
♪
[relaxed music]
♪