Mental Load: Women’s Invisible Workload

Manuel Oliveira

You are probably familiar with the term gender care gap, but are you familiar with the term “mental load”?

 

Over the past few years, the subject of mental load (sometimes also known as cognitive load) has garnered more and more interest. Especially since the French comic artist Emma published her now-famous comic about women and mental load in the Guardian.

 

Mental load can be defined as all the work that keeps a household running but stays invisible – and in heterosexual couples it’s often women taking on this mental load. Studies have found that women spend more time on tasks like childcare and domestic chores than men.

 

In this article, we take a closer look at what the term means and how you can overcome it.