If You Do the Chores, He Gets the Promotion: The Hidden Economics of Domestic Labor with Eve Rodsky

26:36Apparently in her group, if you don't bring snack twice, you're out. But the home, I have systems engineers telling, systems engineers, telling me that they're waiting to decide who's taking the dog out right when it's about to take a pee on the rug. And when you get into this chaos spiral, we found in our study that not only does fair play work, but that marital satisfaction decreases significantly. And sex drive was one of those ways that women in our study describe marital satisfaction. What's the best way to bring it up with your partner? Because maybe they'll be defensive and they'll say like, no, I am doing mustard chopping and I'm doing - What do you want from me?

27:16Yes, I'm doing more than my dad did. I'm doing the best I can, yeah. That happens all the time. It's definitely the thing that makes me the most reflective about fair play because I think for anybody who's in maybe the health profession, they know that if they have their patients walk more, that they're going to be healthier, but they can't get their patients to walk. It's sort of like that, right? The hardest thing, the biggest barrier to entry for fair play is actually having the conversation. So what I say in that situation, if you are somebody who you have a wonderful open helper in your home right now, then you can absolutely launch into the systems part of the conversation.

28:00Hey, I found this really cool system. It's like an Asana or Trello, and it's here to make our lives more efficient. So I say there's three ways you can enter. That's systems. There's a secret formula though for entry, and there's two other ways. One is boundaries and the other is communication. So I call it like you can take a 20-second assessment. We can ask your listeners to do that. Do I struggle most with communication? Do I struggle most with systems? Do I struggle most with boundaries? And I would say start with the thing that's hardest. And what I mean by that is I struggled with all three when it was my turn to come up and think about how I was going to bring this up to Seth.

28:43But when I was struggling with all three boundary systems and communication, I realized my boundaries for me were the hardest thing to rectify, meaning I kept breaching my boundaries. I would say, I'm going to have Seth do bath tonight, or I'm going to go out with my friends. And then I'd be like, oh, my child wants me and I should just do it. I'll come home. I'll go out after and then I'm tired and then I'm resentment, you know, resentful. And so I really had to think about why it was that I kept breaching my boundaries. And then that's when I started to think about those time things that, wow, you know, I notice that it's not, I'm not really resentful about the mustard.

29:21I'm resentful about the fact that Seth has three hours after our kids go to bed to watch SportsCenter work out and finish a PowerPoint deck where I'm doing things in service of our home till my head hits the pillow. And that's still an hour after Seth goes to bed. And so I think when I finally realized that that was the issue and that I was, and what was the alternative, Nicole? What is it? What is the alternative? What is the alternative to bringing this up? Well, divorce. Right. Right. That's what I kept thinking, right? Which is how I grew up. And I know you and I have talked about our backgrounds, right?

29:57It's not, that's not an easy option. So I kept thinking what, and I would write this in my journal for women who are, don't want to bring this up, who don't want to practice fair play. I kept saying, well, what's the alternative? For me, it was being a gray version of myself and dying inside and parenting my partner. I mean, that sounds terrible. Divorce. I don't know, emotional affairs. I mean, a lot of women, Esther Perel talks about that a lot. Or finally, just having the boundary to say, you know what, Seth, I noticed this phenomenon that you get three hours after our kids go to bed to watch SportsCenter, workout, finish a PowerPoint deck.

30:34And I'm doing things in service of our home until my head hits the pillow. And yes, you make more money than me, but I have a stressful job that's just as impactful to the world. And that's not going to mean everything's going to be 50-50, but I'm no longer willing to live with this time discrepancy. But Nicole, that took a lot of work on myself. And that's why I think sometimes I think the conversation we're having deserves a trigger warning because I think I'm giving you another system, another system like your financial systems. This should just slot into your other types of conversations. But then I realized that because we've been conditioned this way, because we live in a patriarchy, because there's so much pain around relationships, this is actually a very painful conversation for a lot of women.

31:20But maybe if you put it on a spreadsheet or numbers, like it takes some of that out of it. So you say sit down, like open the spreadsheet, potentially play the game. That's how you open the dialogue. I mean, I'm sure you've seen the viral Brene Brown clip where she talks about no marriage is 50-50. So what do you think? At times it's 10-90 or 90-10 or whatever. But over time, it nets out to 50-50. Is that the right framework? Yes. Well, I love equations and you have them again with your other guests. So I'm going to give you an equation where I think to me, the equation is ownership, communication.

32:02So back to what I said earlier, if you have a boundaries, if you have boundaries, if you can hold your boundaries, your partner says to you, Nicole, I may not be doing everything right, but I do see your time is equal to my time. We both just get 24 hours in a day and I want you to have time choice over how you use that. That's boundaries plus systems. So Fairplay is a system. Most people, I would say, who aren't even using Fairplay, who say they have a system, it ends up looking like Fairplay because it's a system that most organizations use. Like Steve Jobs came up with something called the DRI, the Directly Responsible Individual.

32:38Very similar to Fairplay. A lot of companies use these racy frameworks where someone is responsible for the task. Doesn't mean you can't include other people in the planning, but you hold the responsibility. So it's not new or novel. Fair play is not a new or novel system. It's just bringing these amazing concepts into the home. So that would be the systems. And then communication. So to me, that's the formula where I see, okay, this couple is going to make it. I don't care about 50-50. I want to know that you say my partner's open to me holding my boundaries, to implementing some sort of system so we know what to do in advance and we're not waiting to take the dog out when it's about to take a pee on the rug.

33:21And there is some communication practice in the home. I'll just want to say something because you were asking earlier about coming into these conversations. Typically, if somebody says to me, I can't bring this up, I'll give you an example. This is sort of funny. So I didn't think I would bring this up, but I think it's worth bringing up. There is a Facebook group out of England during the pandemic called the reasons I hate my husband and kids during COVID. And... I love these literal naming conventions, by the way. Yes. So that was the name of the group. I think it had 22 ,000 members in it. And I get a lot of these random things.

34:03People call me after funerals. They call me after, you know, see, I get a lot of data. So someone tagged me or DM in this group saying, Eve, you should check it out. And they tagged me on a comment that a woman wrote in the group that said, if my husband dies during COVID, it's going to be because of me and not the disease. Okay. So I reach out to her on DM and say, I would love to talk to you. I'm a researcher. I would love to talk to you about how you discuss unpaid labor and domestic work with your partner. So the woman got back to me. and said, thank you so much for your reaching out. I'm glad my comment resonated.

34:49I don't discuss, we don't discuss domestic labor. We tried, it doesn't work. I just spent on Facebook. Right. So think about that, right? And I have a lot of empathy for this woman. For her, publicly threatening to murder her partner in a public realm of 22 ,000 people felt safer to her than bringing it up directly with her partner. So that's how hard, if anybody out there is saying this feels hard to bring up, I want you to know that we see you. We know how hard this is. And it is easier sometimes to back off. But like I said, what is the alternative to continue to do that? So this is a long answer to your question about 50-50.

35:35What I'm looking for is boundary systems and communication because when I get people who say they have those things or they're practicing those things, typically I get that they perceive fairness in their home. I don't really actually care about what actual fairness means, but I like to see that both people are perceiving fairness. Well, even having a scorecard of whatever that tally is feels dangerous. Yes. And that's why fair play is a dangerous game if you just use the cards. So the book and the cards are meant to be a system. And the cards, there is a card game that is a tool. But what I say is it's a do no harm in my mind where I say on TikTok, on Facebook, in the book, warnings.

36:18Don't use the cards without having read the book first or even listening to this podcast first. The problem is it becomes a very quick scorekeeping tool to get very angry and resentful if you're just looking at them and saying, I hold all these cards and my partner doesn't hold any. The visual is not for you to say, I hold everything and you do nothing. The visual is to say it's us against the cards. That unpaid labor sucks. It takes time. It requires skills that nobody wants. I don't want to learn to cook ever. If I didn't have kids, it would just be DoorDash forever. But look at these skills that we need to learn, especially after a child comes into the home.

36:59Unfortunately, we add 40 extra cards when a child comes into the home. So now we're playing with 100 in the deck as opposed to 60. And then you're looking at them and saying, this is the unpaid labor of our home. It's never going to be 50-50, but who wants to own what? And how can we do that in a way that feels that there's perceived fairness? And so a lot of, I would say, stay-at-home mothers who work for no pay say to me that they hold about 70 cards and their partner is playing with about 15. But that those 15 cards, their partner is owning. And they perceive fairness. So I don't care how people live, Nicole.

37:35I just want them to use the tool in a way that's helpful to them. I mean, because it's so amorphous. I'm sure you've seen this viral video where men ask women, like, where random things are. Like, where are the scissors? Where's the duct tape? That's one of my favorite ones. Really? I hope they know where the butter is. Well, no, there's a far side cartoon that my, so I have a stereotype of a man that I call, where's the butter? And that came from a, I think it was a far side cartoon where there is an anniversary card where on the front of it, it's just a man opening the refrigerator and literally every single thing says butter, butter, butter, butter, butter, butter.

38:12And then underneath the caption is, honey, where's the butter? I mean, but the point of that is that men are outsourcing brain space for things like where is the kid's winter jacket? Yes. You know, and so how when you start to think of all of that mental load or like the cognitive load that feel is so obviously invisible work, how do you quantify that? Well, the good news is you don't really have to quantify it because you will feel it. You will feel it. I will say that the thing that you feel the most is the communication practice. So what do I mean by that? The thing that's, to me, quantified the most of Fair Play is not how many cards people hold, it's actually how many check-ins people have.

38:58They'll report to me, oh my gosh, we did four check-ins this month. And what I'm asking people to do, Nicole, is to check in similar to a staff meeting. But we actually know this from organizational management. If companies have employees where they have regular check-ins, that employee is more likely to deliver the leader bad news, which is actually a very important thing for leaders to hear that they often don't hear. And so the same thing sort of applies to the home where people are more willing and open to hear bad news, meaning like I need your help this week with a terrible task like, you know, crazy hat day for the kids or whatever.

39:37if you have a cadence of already coming to the table. So that's typically where I see people quantifying it, the practice of fair play the most, where they'll say, we got our weekly check-in done every week this month and it made us feel so good. So that's where I love quantification, but I will say where you don't really need it is you won't need it because you start feeling it. And the conversations that really allow people, if you're afraid to bring these things up, which is very normal, hence our Facebook woman. The way I like to say it is the best time to bring things up is on anniversary, on a birthday, where you just say, for my birthday this year, I really wanna play with these cards.

40:23And what I mean by playing with the Fair Play cards, and you don't have to order them. We have a whole website in the show notes we can link to. We're a nonprofit. We have an institute where we give out all of our resources for free. You know how the podcast should be. Yes, yes. And what we love to say is like if you're playing with the cards, the actual deck, or you're using a spreadsheet version of them. Nothing I want for my birthday more. Right. Sit down with me and let's start talking about what I call in the book, the minimum standard of care. So typically why conversations around fair play don't work is because they will start with, I'm going to give you our daughter's first birthday party and you own it.

41:08So that is an ownership conversation and you can talk through the conception of what that means, the planning, what the execution of that party could be. Is it just pizza and cake? Is it a blowout because it's a party for you? Because that's how I felt. My first birthday parties were blowouts. Full open bar, you know, 100 people because I was celebrating the hardest year of parenting, which to me is the first year. So that's easier, but it often doesn't work that well because you haven't actually come to the core of Fair Play, which is sitting down to discuss how were birthdays celebrated in your home.

41:47So that's what I like to say. If you have a hard time, if you're not those systems people who are just willing to go in and make things more efficient, start with a communication practice, maybe on your birthday, maybe when another time an emotion is low and your cognition is high, and just take three cards. I will assign them to you right now. Take groceries. Let me just pick some that are good, that I love stories. Take groceries, take birthday parties, and take gifts. Pick those three. Those are three of the Fair Play 100 cards. And just ask your partner, who did gifts in your home growing up?

42:21Do you remember getting any gifts that you loved? And then how do you want to do it? Right. But the how do you want to do it is harder because we don't realize how much we've been affected by the way things were in our home. I wanted Seth. I'll give you an example. I wanted – Seth decided to own garbage. But I was his garbage shadow. I just couldn't stop following him around the house. And he's like, listen, I'm not going to own this or play this game. if you're stalking me over garbage. Well, this is, I mean, asking for a friend, taking the marker out of their hand. Right. I have that problem.

42:54Right. So especially in this case, he couldn't really understand what was happening, why I was being so triggered over when he took the garbage out. And then finally, when I realized that skipping the step of the minimum standard of care was actually not helpful. So when I finally sat down, this was years ago when I was developing the rules of the game, I realized, oh, just like the legal system, back to what I said earlier, this is designed similar to behavior design experiment. In our legal system, Nicole, we adjudicate about a trillion dollars a year in something called the tort system. So, I mean, you know that, but for your listeners, right?

43:35If McDonald's serves you coffee that's too hot and you spill it on your leg and you give yourself a third degree burn, is McDonald's responsible. So how do we know if McDonald's is responsible? We use something called the reasonable person test. That's similar to the minimum standard of care and fair play. So when Seth said to me, you're not being reasonable that you want the garbage to go out four times a day because I'm not even home. And so that's not going to, so don't leave like empty milk cartons near my bed and stop being passive aggressive. Understand that in our house, you can restore accountability and trust in me because garbage will go out once a day.

44:10I won't tell you when it's going out, there will be a liner back in the bag, in the bin, and it will go out once a day. And then it was like Moses parting the Red Sea. I mean, it was the most, that was probably the most important conversation in our marriage. Aligning on what that means. What's the expectation? Because for you, you wanted like nobody lived in the house all the time and for him. And then you to say, okay, that's now the expectation. Once a day, if you've done that, it's been done. But no. Unfortunately, it wasn't that easy. I had to actually go back to my childhood. This is why I said, if you've never done this before, do the exercise I just said.

44:54Take three cards, the ones I just gave you, and to your listeners, and just sit down when emotion is low, cognition is high, and ask how it was done in your home. What changed Seth finally, and this is why this, this unfortunately fair play is a practice. It's like exercise guys. Now we're hearing about strength training. We have to practice it. It is not a one and done conversation. It is just like exercise. And one of the big practices was having these minimum standard of care conversations for the cards the other person was going to own, which takes time. So I will say the onboarding, just like in a company, onboarding in a company, the best companies take six months to onboard.

45:35They have a mentor. They really indoctrinate you in the company. The worst, like my law firm, was like figure it out two days and then I was miserable. But in the onboarding of Fair Play, unfortunately, it wasn't, okay, this will be our standard. It was Seth. I may have said this to you off screen before, Nicole. I grew up in a home where I was taking care of my mother starting at seven. There were eviction notices on our door. I wrote out her rent checks. I have a disabled autistic brother who gets a lot of our attention. What didn't get attention was our kitchen. There was garbage pouring out from a takeout bag that sat on a knob.

46:18We never had a garbage can. And it was the same thing every night. If my brother wanted water and my mother was working late, I would help him and get him his water, close my eyes, go into our small kitchen, turn on the light, keep my eyes closed because I knew that was how the cockroaches and water bugs would scatter when the lights turned on. Didn't want to see them. Then went to go get the water and bring it to my brother. So I think Seth had to understand my mother. He feels a lot of empathy for my mother. He feels empathy for me and my brother. And so when he could start feeling empathy for the garbage and what it connoted, it was more than the garbage.

46:55Yeah. Yeah. And I think when it's hysterical, it's historical, right? Yes. Like you had this. I love that. reaction to it like where was that coming from and you uncovered it and a lot of this stuff is not rational right it comes from childhood and there's you know this systemic idea that like the woman is responsible I even noticed that our nanny and we're all in a group thread like she'll come to me and ask me the questions or you know in-laws will ask about like logistics but just to the woman. And so it's generational, but also not like women who are younger than me or my age, will instinctively come to me to ask questions about our daughter.

47:37And schools. Can you imagine what they do to women? I mean, no matter how many men put their names on first, and I asked so many men to do that, they skip over their name and they call women. And what do you do about that? Do you put everybody on a group thread again? I don't pick up when the school calls. I just don't. Do you think? Like did something happen to my kid? But I channel men and I think, okay, if they do this without a stress response, you know, most likely it's, you know, Anna bumped her head or Ben got a detention, which he did last week over not eating grapes in his pocket. Like he kept, you're not allowed to eat in the school and he was like keeping grapes in his pocket.

48:18So typically you pray that that's what it is. knock on wood but yeah I really have had to fight my instinct to do what comes naturally. And what about parents that leave their job to take care of the kids? Do you like the idea of putting a monetary value to a lot of these? Oh absolutely. I do. Chores and labor? I do. I think I have a again back to our non-profit institute we have a guide for post-ups and I think it's really, really important. You've talked about this on your show. The expectation that's set for you in family law is already set for you by the state. So yeah, you have a prenup regardless.

49:02You have a prenup, right? And so I might, you might as well have one that reflects what you do. And so there's a wonderful woman named Neha Roosh, and she talks a lot about what happens when women take a parapause, she calls it, and stay home, or men too. But typically what ultimately happens is that the cards do shift. So you will see the person who's not working take on more labor, but then even in that situation gets very unbalanced and the power dynamic changes in that family. So what I like to say is if you do a post-nup, it helps because it acknowledges there's going to be a power dynamic shift in this relationship and I want you to value unpaid labor if I'm going to take this shift.

49:45And if your partner really is not valuing unpaid labor, then they wouldn't engage in a way that you'll know. You'll know. I have a lot of women say to me, like, I had that conversation, it didn't go well. And then I say, then you can't leave the workplace. Like, it's going to be bad later. We've seen too many stories of women who end up in the family law courts with very little alimony, something called a Gavron warning, Nicole, which is a humiliating document you get from the courts saying that you have a duty to become self-sufficient, even though you have 20 years of, you know, you left marketing 20 years ago and they're telling you to enter the workplace.

50:23I have women, I spoke to a woman who was a marketing executive who became a Mary Kay representative. Again, that's not bad work, but yeah, a lot of these MLM jobs become available because the skills that you had in your job, or women who are nurse practitioners and have to regain their license when their partners want to leave. And so I always say, and this gets back to the core, I think, of why you do what you do. What I love about what you do, what you do is I think you're helping people avoid economic risk and also obviously make money and do some wonderful, powerful things with their capital.

50:59But I love that you have a message that also helps people avoid economic risk. And the biggest economic risk a woman can take is having a child. And once we realize that that's 80 % of our pay gap, it's the reason why Lean In is recently saying they have a study that came out yesterday that said women have no ambition anymore over 40. They have an ambition gap. I mean, it's just total bullshit. It's just that we have care responsibilities. They don't even mention the word mother in their study, which I think is so bizarre. We don't have an ambition gap. We have an exhausting gap. And we need to start talking about the truth of what it is to do unpaid labor.

51:39And until we invite men into their full power in the home, women are really not going to be able to step out into their full power in the world. And so that's why I love that we're having this conversation in these contexts, because the biggest economic risk women will take is becoming a mother. And it's because society assumes they're going to do the unpaid labor of the home. and then they stop paying us because they think we're not going to be as committed to the workplace. And that cycle becomes vicious. It happens in every generation. And look, we're trying to close it. But right now, unfortunately, the pay gap is the worst it's been in about five years.

52:16So even if you have a prenup, having a postnup, depending on the labor that you're doing in the home is important? Well, especially of what you said. If a prenup is if you're in the same financial situation as your prenup is not as important. To me, the only time a postnup is absolutely necessary is if you're both contributing money to the household and work outside the home. And one of the parties says, it's not worth it for me to work anymore because of greedy work. We have a Nobel Prize winning economist named Claudia Golden who says, America thrives on greedy work. And so if, say, your husband is a law firm partner or about to become a law firm partner and he decides he wants to go for it and he sits down with you and says, I care about your unpaid labor.

53:06I see you doing all this work. I need to lean into this partnership. It's gonna be 100-hour weeks for the next two years. So you'll have to handle everything off screen. The economic risk that a woman is taking to do that, to me merits a post-nup because there's no economic risk to the man. He gets the family law system on his side and he gets to leave the marriage with an amazing career. The economic risk is for the person who will give up the paid work because when you re-enter the workplace after a pause, we lose exponential worth over time. So women who've taken an exit, 43 % of women do take a career detour after kids, and they see up to a million dollars or more of value lost in those decisions.

53:59But also, statistically, married men make more than single men. So that's called the marital wage premium. Married women do make more than single women, but it's a much smaller gap. So what do you think came first? This is kind of a chicken or egg situation. Are married men making more money or are men who make more money more likely to be married? And do you make more money in the course of the relationship if you're married? It is chicken the egg. What I think is the men who are married are more likely to be able to do greedy work. So they're more likely to be the men who – and we see this because the men who – I'll give an example.

54:42I have this wonderful, again, people contact me, like I said, in divorce and funerals and lawsuits. There's a man who just reached out to me because he wanted to let me know that he was a high-powered executive at his firm in the tech world. And he decided he sort of – his wife has been listening to me for a long time and they've sort of been in the fair play world. He decided to take his full paternity leave, which is six months on paper. He was the only person to do that in the group and they fired him. So now he's suing them. My point being that men who do what women do will start seeing that they're penalized too.

55:23We need, like I said, right now, because it's not normalized, you're either going to be complicit or fight. So I say to those men, thank you for the fight. I know it's hard to also be penalized like women are because men are not used to that. But what we see is that the men who can do the greedy work often are the ones who rise up in their career. So much so, Nicole, this is my favorite statistic. 80 % of the 1 % in this country are men with stay-at-home wives. 80 % of the 1%. Yeah, I'd love a stay-at-home wife. Yeah, right? Imagine. I would get done. Oh, my gosh. And by the way, my good friend who you should have on too, she's a professor at Wharton.

56:02she just wrote a book called having it all and I love because she has a very complimentary perspective because I have the behavior design legal perspective and she has the economic perspective but her solution so mine was to hold the boundary and say to Seth I'm not living like this anymore other women's solution is court-ordered custody as we talked about her solution was to divorce a man and marry a woman what do you guys do now like how do you guys divvy stuff up because you both also, since you were married, have become so crazy, wildly successful. Thank you for saying that. Seth would say it's easier when I'm gone, which I think it is.

56:41I want to just be completely transparent. We have an amazing nanny. We have, we moved to LA for Seth's parents. We would have, I think we would have been even more successful if we could stay on the East Coast. I feel like everything happens on the East Coast. So we have Seth's parents and our amazing nanny. We have a college UCLA student who helps drive our middle son to all of his practices, which are over an hour and a half away, three times a week for his club basketball. So as parenting has become more intensive, it's harder. And obviously, that's an incredibly privileged position. So we have a lot of amazing executors.

57:22But this is the interesting thing. What Seth used to think was, well, if Eve is so overwhelmed, she should get help. And he now says that was like the most sexist thing ever. Because now he realizes that as much as we love our village, Alexia is not deciding whether our child's adenoids are being taken out. And so what he realized, what I realized when we went through the cards for the 100th time, because we've been practicing fair play for almost a decade now, is that about 50 of the cards, and this is what Seth realized, are not outsourceable. So even if you have a partner who says, oh, if you're so overwhelmed, get help.

57:58I want women especially to know that then start with the non-outsourceable cards. Again, as much as you love Alexia, she's typically not doing your elf on the shelf. She's not doing Santa. She's not replacing the carrot and the cookie with the sparkle dust. You know, I'm Jewish, so I think that happens. or she's not the one who, again, is deciding whether or not your child should go on flonase or whether you're going to do surgery. That person is not deciding to sign your kid up for club basketball or whether they're going to lean into golf or whatever it is. They're not deciding which charter school to put your name in the lottery for.

58:40So there are about 50 cards like that where even if you have this amazing village that I'm talking about, we still have to own. And that's, I think, been the most helpful realization for Seth is to say ownership means a lot of thinking. And so now I would say he probably thinks it's easier when I'm gone because he has a great team to help him execute on his mental load. But the mental load is smoother. Like dinner is on the table between six and seven. The kids aren't up watching Survivor till 11 because I decide it's like Survivor night. There's a vegetable on the plate because my minimum standard of care has always been like a green on the plate would be like, I don't know, a Lucky Charms, like Shamrock, not like something that's like what he meant by green.

59:22So yeah, I think, but again, this is 10 years in of doing a practice of something. So it's like looking at somebody who's been doing CrossFit for 10 years and being like, I want to do as many pull-ups as them. Like, I can't even hold onto a bar. I have like no grip strength, you know? So you're going from no grip strength where you fall off the bar to doing 10 pull-ups, as we know, it's a chip away situation. It's a practice. Every one of those quantified check-ins that we talked about is where I would start. It's having some of these amazing conversations about what happened to you as a kid. Tonight, I want you just to talk about birthdays.

59:58What did birthday parties look like for you and your partner when you were kids? Do you have, can you give me that? Can we practice? Like what is, what did they look like to you? I mean, I have so many traumatic memories. So it's like never a flood day to go down memory lane. Yeah, I didn't have a lot of birthdays growing up. And then when I was in my 20s, I had a lot of birthdays on like non-zero or five birthdays to make up for that. Right, right. And I kind of discovered that through therapy that I was like reliving that. And so, oof. So my point is that may be something that happens with your child's first birthday because that happened to me.

1:00:40Back to you and I bonded over sort of similar or similar seeming childhoods. When I was helping my mother pay her rent checks starting at seven, I also – there was a New York magazine. We would get a subscription and the back were personal ads. And there were things like birthdays and Gardner, whatever it was. And I would always pick like the clown and like literally pick up the phone and be like, hi, clown. Can you come to my birthday party this Saturday? So I was always planning my own parties. And so birthdays mean a lot to me. And as I said to you, they're blowout parties. And I never got to tell Seth that with Zach because I just started to throw these like circus themed giant parties.

1:01:24And he's like, what's happening here? Like this child's one. Like I thought we were getting like pizza and having like three of our family members over. And it became like a really big point of contention. So I wish I had had fair play with Zach because I would have sat Seth down and said, do you remember what I told you about my mom's eviction notices? Well, here's what happened to me when I had to plan my own birthdays and birthdays matter. And so those are the things I think humanize us. And if we can humanize this work so that it's not seen as just like women's housework and chores, but it's actually like our humanity, Nicole.

1:01:59It's like all of our memories are these things. Yeah. Like I love learning that about you. I want to now know more about these non-zero and five birthdays. They were. I'm sure they were epic. Yeah. They were just delayed gratification, I thought. And it was weird. Like I had an ex that was like, you're so weird. Why are you doing this blowout for like 28? Who cares? You'll be over it. And so I discovered that in the process. But, you know, having a child, even though she's one, like I'm seeing so much of my own childhood play out and the mother-daughter relationship. Well, the good news is you get a beautiful chance, right, to break all those cycles.

1:02:40But you also have a chance for some of that joy. How do you talk to your kids now about invisible work? You have two sons, one daughter. It's really for my sons. I would say. I think it's appropriate, obviously. Yeah. Yeah. My sons are the ones, unfortunately, who have to hear it day in and day out. My older son, Zach, he's taking gender studies, which I'm very, and that was as a gift to me. I didn't even ask him to do it. He just was noticing that his school has a new, newly formed gender studies elective. And a lot of his friends were taking media. And then he was sort of mad because the media kids got to maybe be announcers for the basketball team.

1:03:23And he wanted to do that. But anyway, he ended up in gender studies. He's the only boy in the class. And I'd say he comes to it with this really an understanding of how to care for his younger sister. My middle son is my intellectual, more of my thought partner. And all day long, he just sends me TikToks of people who hate fair play. So that's his favorite thing to do. He says, you need to understand criticism. A lot of it comes from the Christian right. And there are some really interesting critiques of fairness, saying that fairness is not a great value to aspire to. But to those people, I always with my son when I say, oh, that's the critique.

1:04:05Well, let's put, is fairness important to society? And to chat GBT. And that's always a fun answer because it's like fairness is the basis for every single legal system in the world. So I would say that, you know, the critiques aren't so – they're more vibes-y than data-driven. But I think it's funny that that's how Ben wants to – he's very aware of fair play. He's very aware of who talks about fair play. He Googled – he tells me the most Google search about me is, is Eve Rodsky still married? So he's very involved but in more of a thought partner way and he loves to send me any videos of critiques.

1:04:41But it's interesting that you use fair, not equal or equality or equity. Fair. But it gets bastardized, it sounds like. Correct. Well, I think what's strange is that there's this new, as we know, a trad wife trend that has sort of emerged. And it's sort of same shit, different decade, Nicole. It's coming up. And a lot of men are the ones who are actually engaging in the trad wife content. It's not just the women. and it's sort of interesting because to them, fairness is really not the value that they would look at first. They look at like servership. There is a concept in Mormonism called the help meat.

1:05:24I didn't know this until I started, since Seth started sending me the critiques. Women are supposed to be help meats to men in their home. And so fairness is really not what God has chosen for women. That's not the path. So I hear a lot of arguments like that, where religious theory comes into the discussion. What's interesting about that is I'll just say that, oh, I can't combat religious theory and what your beliefs are, but all I can say is that considering I come from a very Orthodox Jewish family where I understand that thinking, one thing I will know from a sociological perspective is that female seclusion is something that has been around since the beginning of time.

1:06:05The ultimate tool of the patriarchy is keeping women in the home. Well, what do you think about this new resurgence? of trad wives and this sort of anti, I mean, I was part of the boss bitch movement, literally wrote the book and now it's flipped. Well, I think if we argue, Nicole, that we are arguing for a hard life, we're not going to win. I think the beauty of the trad wife movement is that it shows a soft life. But here's the beauty of the trad wife movement. If you compare it, I'm having a graduate student do this, I'm having him look at TradWife content and asking which cards it falls into.

1:06:46It's never middle of the night comfort. It's never medical and healthy living. It's never garbage. So it's never those daily grinds that I was telling you about. It's never a woman saying at the pediatricians struggling with a kid who's screaming that they don't want to get their vaccine. It's never, like I said, garbage overflowing. It's all this work that is non-daily grind work. So it's focusing on non-essential work that ultimately can become commodities that these women can sell. Like sourdough bread. Exactly, right? And garlands and home decor, those are fair play cards. We have a home decor card, but I wouldn't say that any couple is telling me the home decor is what's, you know, ruining their marriage, right?

1:07:29It's that the dishes have been left in the sink. The laundry is piling up. There's a wild card. Someone's lost their job. All the other fair play cards that are really painful are the ones that we don't see the TradWife content engaging with. So what do I think? I think it's a luxury to be able to talk about those non-essential fair play cards. And if you really actually look at what it takes to run a household, then the TradWife content is not even relevant. Well, I also really love how you talk about all the help that you have because I think it's important to not just ask women how they do it all but how much help they have that's right and men too right I think one last thing I can end on I think is important for the men listening I know a lot of men listen to you like I said you're my husband's favorite part podcast thank you so much you and the diary of the ceo those are his two favorite yes but that's your show's better for me because the diary of the CEO has like one woman on every hundred guests.

1:08:27And the morning routine is always like a plunge bath and like some cold ice thing. And I don't know, it's very triggering. But I want to just end this man who really, I think, had good intentions. But this is sort of what how hard it is to break out, I think, of these these roles. And we can really do better. But this wonderful man came to me saying that him and his wife were playing fair play. And again, for them, it was one of those more traditional marriages at the time that we were talking about earlier because he started to travel a lot. And he said, you know, I couldn't do my job without my wife.

1:09:07And I just want to acknowledge that. This is like that post-nup conversation we talked about. She took a step back in her tech role. He's the head of a big tech company. He's on the road all the time. And he said, I fundamentally understand that without her, I couldn't do my job. And then right after that, he tells me he wants to tell me about the two single moms on his team that he's sponsoring. And so what I said to him is, it's probably not that helpful for you to sponsor these two single mothers if you just told me they can't do your job. You just said that you could literally not do your job without your wife handling everything for your children off screen.

1:09:47but you're sponsoring two single mothers who have to do all that work off screen. So then your implicit bias was that those women wouldn't be able to do your job. And I'm not saying that to throw him under the bus. I'm just showing that even somebody who was the best of intentions, trying to say that they wanted to support other types of family life, realizes that his job is something that he couldn't do without somebody doing all the other work off screen. And that's important because the more I say to him and all of those other one percenters who do have stay-at-home partners, I say, that's great, but it doesn't mean that they have to hold all the cards.

1:10:27The more that you can bring in transporting your kids to school, right? Bill Gates did it. Melinda Gates talked about how he took the kids to school every day and how other fathers were like, wait, if Bill is doing this, then we should be doing it. I have brain surgeons who tell me that their wife's a stay-at-home wife, but they're holding 30, 40 cards because they know, they understand brain health. These are literally brain surgeons. One is a head of a huge hospital who says, I studied neuroscience and I know that when I have oxytocin for my kids and I have endorphins and I have dopamine, these are all things I'm getting from my family, I do better in how I conduct my surgeries.

1:11:06So he does the work for the home. There are other values than just, oh, this is so hard, I have to give it over to somebody. It's a village, but it's also in that space in between when you're doing that mental labor. It's very gratifying. I don't hear any men that say to me, I regret it ever. In 10 years, there's never a man who's called me up and said, I regret that you told me to take my kids to school. I regret that I took them to all their vaccine appointments. I regret that I was the tooth fairy and had to get glitter on my hands. You don't see that in men. You see that they are enriched by this labor as well.

1:11:42And I think the more we talk about that, the more we will get more of those Dyer of the CEO routines to say my morning routine is taking my kids to school and playing with them and feeding the baby and wiping a vagina from front to back. Yes. So important, by the way. From front to back. From front to back. Eve, as you know, we end all of our episodes by asking our guests for one final tip that listeners can take straight to the bank, saving, investing, anything? I'll go back to your time as diamonds. Time is a currency. Women have been unfortunately told how to use our time for so long. The more that we can reclaim our time choice, the more that women can understand that our time is diamonds as well, the more that we'll be able to use it to optimize our lives.

1:12:30And that's my goal. My love letter to you, Nicole, is that you always stay in your full power and that you always get to use your time the way that you choose it. Amen, sister. Thank you.