EVE RODSKY: Creating Better Balance at Home

0:00That's what I'm hoping each partner starts to understand, that when you naturally take ownership, you're going to hold the mental load. Hi, I'm Megan Hyatt Miller. And I'm Joel Miller. And you're listening to The Double Win Show. We're excited to share with you today our recent conversation with Eve Rodsky. You may have noticed we have a new co-host for today. Just temporary. Just temporary. But it's because of who Eve is. Yep. We're really excited, actually, to – I booted my dad out. Actually, it was his idea. But I brought Joel in today, especially because Eve is the author of a book and a system called Fair Play that has been really meaningful in our life, in our partnership at home together.

0:41And it's basically a whole system that she developed for helping husbands and wives to more equally share the totality of the labor that it takes to run a family. To just kind of put it simply, her background is that of a lawyer and an organizational management expert who has advised hundreds of families and organizations. And so she actually used that. It's really fascinating. I didn't know that part of her story until this interview. She used that to inform the system that she created with Fair Play. And, you know, I think she is the originator of the concept, I think, at least for me, of the mental load that women often carry regardless of what their professional role is, the mental load for conceptualizing and planning all the work that it takes to manage a family when normally what we think of is the doing part of that work that needs to be fairly divided.

1:33She's a mom. She is a wife. Her most recent book is called Find Your Unicorn Space on personal fulfillment beyond roles. But I think the big idea here is that winning at work and succeeding at life obviously includes the home. And it's not something that we typically think about. We haven't talked enough about it on the show. Yeah, when we think about winning at work and succeeding at life, it's like professional and personal. And yet the domestic sphere, while it is part of the personal, doesn't actually come into that very much. Right. It's not personal like singular for many of us. You know, we know that most of our listeners are married and many of you have children, certainly not all.

2:10But we don't think a lot about the domestic sphere as being part of the equation of winning at work and succeeding at life and needing to be thought about strategically. and instead we sort of just like default to these sort of implicit archaic notions of how it should work and we're just going to try to figure it out and it doesn't work well. That's what Eve says that there's this tendency to just kind of play it by ear basically. Right. And what that practically means is that women take on an excessive load. Right. Even if men are helping out and it's not something that we set out to do necessarily.

2:43It just kind of defaults to that. what she calls the she-fault parent, the mom or the woman of the house. And what that means is that there's just a burden placed on women that actually works against the ability to flourish, the ability to have work-life balance and all the other things because women are shouldering so much more than men, even at home. So regardless of what happens at work, there's like all the extra that happens at home. I just want to encourage you, if you're a female listener, you're going to feel really validated by this. and I think you're going to have a path forward maybe.

3:16But I also want to say, if you're a male listener, this is not a male bashing episode. This, I think also will be encouraging to you because I think both men and women suffer when there isn't a clear path to finding a way forward that feels fair and equitable and clear, like a setup to win for both parties. I think the clear thing is really important. We talk in the interview about like visible work and invisible work. And the truth is men don't even know a lot of what's going on in their own home in terms of how things get done. Right. And the assumption sort of is, well, I'm doing a lot. Therefore, it must be sort of equal.

3:54And that's not necessarily so because of some of the stuff that he talks about. And not because you're a bad guy, not because you don't want to be helpful. And I think that's really important. We talk about that a lot. So I just want to say that to say, don't tune out. Like, listen to this episode. This is for you too. And what's on the other side of it potentially, I think, is a deeper, richer partnership. with your spouse, whichever end of the equation you're on, and less stress. Right. I want to say one word is patriarchy. It comes up, hear it, and just take it for what it is and listen to the context because the context for this conversation really matters if you want to have a flourishing home life.

4:33So without further ado, here's our conversation with Eve.

4:38Eve, welcome to the show. It's so great to meet you virtually, Megan and Joel. Well, it's so great to meet you. Your name has been invoked many a time in our house over the years. I think it was probably 2020, 2021 that we read your book, Fair Play. We got the cards. I remember distinctly we were at the golf course where one of our kids was at a golf lesson, and we were sorting the cards on the console of the car. Suburban. In the suburban, trying to figure out our life. And it was super helpful, but not everybody knows. So what is fair play and why is it necessary for men and women? Well, first of all, thank you for finding the book.

5:19I always feel like it is sort of this word of mouth movement, even though ironically we are translated and we're in 27 countries. That's amazing. And we now have millions of people who have given us data that they play. So it's actually a lot bigger, even though it's still under the radar, if that makes sense. So I'm still out there every day preaching the gospel because we just have our first big study with USC to show that Fair Play actually works. And so I'm excited as a practice, not if you do it once, but we'll talk through that. So what is it? What are we even talking about? I think it's important to understand what we're talking about by just backing up for a minute.

5:58And if I could just give you a little context of where this came from. So what Fair Play isn't, let's just say I didn't start out to be an expert on the gender division of labor. Like that was not a term I'd ever heard, Megan and Joel. Like I am resolutely Gen X. I was told that Gloria Steinem's generation did everything for us, that women were graduating from college at rates that were ever unknown, that in 1973, women got access to their first credit cards and bank accounts. So that by 2000, when I sort of was in law school, I was told the world was, it was our legally blonde oyster. And so I will say that in third grade, if they asked me, what did I want to be when I grew up?

6:46I didn't say gender division of labor expert. I probably said veterinarian in law school when Elizabeth Warren, who's now a senator, but she was our professor, asked what we wanted to do with our law degree. I absolutely did not say I wanted to be an expert on the gender division of labor. But this is something that, especially after kids, research becomes me-search. And as you may know from reading the book, right, this all stemmed from my husband Seth's text. And it's just the simple text that he sent me that said, I'm surprised you didn't get blueberries. And I'm sure Joel, you've maybe sent some texts like that before, but I think what was happening to me in that time, can I have you picture the scene with me?

7:26So I'm surprised you didn't get blueberries. If it was at any other time, or I was in the Fair Play system and I held the groceries card, that would have been fine. But at the time we had no system for the home. We were using the three most toxic words that anyone can use for a relationship with kids. We were figuring it out. And what figuring it out meant was that by our second child, I ended up with this blueberries breakdown. I ended up crying on the side of the road over this text on my way to my son's toddler transition program. But if you picture the scene with me, I had a newborn baby at home.

8:00I had a breast pump in a diaper bag on the passenger seat of my car. I had gifts for a newborn baby to return in the back of the car. I had a client contract on my lap because I had left the workforce. Now I say I was forced out and I'd started my own law firm. So it was amidst that chaos that Seth sent me that text. And I think the way it hit was instead of, oh, you know, I'm responsible for groceries and I miss an item. The way it hit was, oh, wow. You know, Seth truly believes that I'm not his partner, that I'm the fulfiller of his smoothie needs. Right. Wow. That's how it hit. On top of everything else.

8:39Right. I didn't want to be a smoothie needs fulfiller on top of literally everything else I was doing, which was now I know all the unpaid labor for our home, all of the cognitive labor. We'll talk about that. And then most of the execution labor. So, and losing my career in the process and my identity. So there's too many things going on that nobody, if we're all the ghosts of your Christmas future, we're here to tell you that there's a different way to live. And I think that context is important because what fair play became was an antidote to my own burnout. And really the only two types of women I could see who were not burned out were people either who had a fair division of labor or people who had what I say is like the three opposite words to figure it out.

9:24They had court order to custody and those women were doing really well. And I kept writing that down in my early like iPhone 11 notes or whatever. But remember, this is 2011. And there wasn't podcasts like you. There was not books. There was just what to expect when you're expecting, where I found out my son was a jelly bean size, but nothing about unpaid labor, the mental load. And I think if I just had known that amazing men like Joel, because Fair Play really is a love letter to men. If I knew that amazing men like Joel and my husband, Seth, they did five to 15 hours a week less after kids came, that was just sort of the nature of the patriarchy.

10:05and expectation. If I had just known that, then I think I would have been able to write that imbalance earlier. And that's what Fair Play was. It was an attempt to rewrite that imbalance. Wow. When you talk about what Fair Play isn't, let's shift into what Fair Play is, because that was not something intuitive for me at all when we first started talking about this book. Like we both have boomer parents, right? Right. So like we're Gen Xers, but we have boomer parents. So this is like not a concept that we certainly witnessed in our own families of origin, really. Maybe you a little more than me because both your parents worked growing up.

10:45Mine, both mine did not. My mom stayed at, both of them worked, but my mom is a stay at home mom. But like, this is like a totally foreign concept. And here, here I am, you know, at this point, a CEO, we have five kids, three of our kids have special needs. Like, it's just kind of a hot mess. You know, there's a lot going on. And I think, yeah, like a lot of people, we didn't know that there was an alternative to, we're just trying to figure it out. Let me just hear you describe what you mean by fair play. I think what made me different was I was looking at this with not just a researcher hat on, but I'm not a sociologist.

11:20I'm not a therapist. I'm a lawyer. And why I think that made it different is because I'm a lawyer that works for families that look like the HBO show Succession. and Megan and Jill, you should feel bad for me because it's as bad as it looks on TV. But I think what I did for those families was I had, I'm trained as a lawyer, but I'm also trained in a very special type of governance. That's about complex organizations and how they make decisions. What I remember was when court order custody felt like I wasn't ready to go there. And I grew up with a single mother and divorce was really hard on our family and all the things that came with it.

11:56And I thought, okay, let me do one thing. Let me become my own client. Yeah. Because a family is a complex organization. Exactly. If every man understood that, then there would be no 2000 years of religious patriarchy. I'm serious. Because it is a very simple insight, but it's also, like you said, not anything we've ever thought of before, right? We're used to figure it out. We're used to expectation. We're used to hearing the home is love. But once you understand and you believe me, which it sounds like Joel does, that the home is a complex organization, then it became so easy because I could use the 50 years of organizational scholarship before me that I'd used for my complex families that I work for, and I could use it for my own home.

12:44That was the beauty of it. What I realized was that it was going to be hard to get people to the table because let me explain something that is not maybe as clear in terms of this. What is fair play? What is fair play? It looks like a game. It looks like an organizational system for the home. But really what it is, is it's teaching you to rebuild the two most important things that most organizations, family organizations have lost, especially ones where there's a woman and a man. And that is accountability and trust. Fair Play is a system to restore accountability and trust. And the way you do that is by using very, very simple organizational principles.

13:24I use a card game because it helped me. Gamification has always helped with very complex patriarchs in my business. And so I realized this card game was an easy way to introduce the concept of the home as an organization. And so really what it is, it's a card game, that's a system. But a successful organization actually has three things to restore accountability and trust. It has boundaries, systems, and communication. So the system to me is a no-brainer. We can go into that. But I think what was really hard was why, duh, this is a Trello, it's in the sauna. It's like the best system for the home.

14:03But why weren't people coming to the table? It's ultimately because women don't have boundaries. we have different expectations society punishes us for different things and also couples have lost the ability to communicate because the figure it out type of style the opposite of fair play that figure it out style leads to only communication when emotion is high and cognition is low and that's what I was trying to avoid I think that's really true I mean I think that that was our experience is like the times that we previously the times that we had conversations about this, you know, who's, who's responsible for what at home, how is it all getting done?

14:41And with five kids and special needs and business and blah, blah, blah, like there's a lot of things to get done. Usually that stuff comes up when, when something didn't get done, something breaks down, something has a, it's a breakdown. And then you get in a conversation and the other person feels attacked. And then it's just like a, you know, it's a, it's a full meltdown of, of anything productive at that point, you know, then it's just like defend, defend your own, you know, yourself at that point. And I think what I love about what you're, what you're doing is saying, like, what would it look like to think about this in a different way and have both people partner together?

15:16I mean, when we get married, like we say, you know, we're partnering in our life, but we don't really have, like, no one tells you, how do you partner? How do you actually partner in your life? Not just big decisions, but like, how do you partner in the work of your life, especially if you're raising children and there's just so much to manage with that. Even without children, there's a lot to manage. But like, how are you going to partner and divide up all the work that there is to do? And I think we're sort of given this implicit script, you know, that like, especially if you're a Gen X or millennial, you know, and you kind of inherited this from your parents in a more maybe traditional dynamic or whatever.

15:51And if you're both, especially if you're both working, like it just, it just doesn't work. You know, like it literally, like there's not enough hours in the day. and I was telling Joel before we got on, I said, Eve is the first person that I ever heard explain the concept of the mental load. Like I didn't know how to put words to why I felt and still sometimes feel burned out and exhausted. It's not just the work you can see. It's also the work you can't see. So when you talk about the mental load, the invisible work, like those kind, those two concepts, because I think they're foundational to, to the rest of our conversation.

16:29I think Joel and Megan, given that you are business owners, to me, the mental load is having employees in your home. Like imagine just every employee you ever hired the nightmare that they came into your office every single day and said, Hey, what should I be doing today? I'm going to wait here to tell me what to do. I wouldn't wish those employees on anybody, literally. I'm my worst enemy. Hi, it's Tuesday. What should I be doing today? I'll just wait here to tell me what to do. Hi guys, it's Wednesday. I'm just going to wait here till you tell me what to do. That type of person is often what happens to men in the home.

17:06And it's not necessarily their fault. And I'll explain this. But what happens when you have someone in your home that's supposed to be your partner and they start to say things like, if you're so overwhelmed, just tell me what to do. Then what happens is the person who has to tell the person what to do is highly resentful, but the person being told what to do loses psychological safety and they don't want to do anymore because there's zero context. And we call that in fair play, the rat. I don't like the word nagging. It's too gendered, but the idea is you don't want your home infested with rats.

17:39When you get random assignments of a task as a man, which we saw over and over again in all these countries. Men said to me, it's not that I don't want to be a partner, but I wouldn't even know where to step in. So how do you fix that dynamic of somebody who's overwhelmed and somebody who's lost psychological safety in the home? There's only one way, and it's ownership. That's it. You restore accountability and trust through ownership. So because I knew that, I started to ask people an important question. As you may know from the book, and I'll say this to your listeners, I didn't have the insight that the home was an organization right away.

18:14My insight was from my therapist, who was toxic at the time, who said, if you're so overwhelmed, make a list. So I soon learned that lists don't work. Lists alone don't work. I did make this amazing spreadsheet. It was 98 tabs. It was 2 ,000 items, invisible work. It was how Bear Play started. And it was a salvation to me because in 2011, after the blueberries breakdown, just being able to talk to women, that I wasn't alone, that I wasn't the only one shouldering two thirds or more of what it takes to run a home and family, which is the statistic that we all know. I felt better, but I wasn't content with just taking the spreadsheet.

18:51And I did send it to Seth. He did not react in any, you know, great way. He sent me a monkey emoji, like the pixelated emoji with that monkey covering its eyes. And so when I realized like, No matter how great your lists are, unfortunately, it's just not how organizations are run. We don't do things by just sending people random lists, right? We do it through onboarding and ownership. So I think what I did was I took this spreadsheet and I realized I wasn't getting accurate data. And I'm only telling you about this because you've played before. So I wouldn't necessarily introduce. This is like Fair Play 201.

19:31one. But the data I was getting from Joel, I would say, Joel, are you involved in the family meal planning or groceries? And men would say, yes, I am. Or, you know, do you help get the kids to sports and to school? Yes, I am. So I wasn't really getting accurate data because both of the couple was saying that they do things. So instead, this gets back to the mental load. The premise of fair play was just one question that changed my life because instead of asking who handles groceries and I'm just looking at some of the fair play cards, there are a hundred of them, who handles bedtime routine, who handles the dentist for kids.

20:10That wasn't helpful. The question that was being the most helpful was instead of who handles groceries, it became, how does mustard get in your refrigerator? Because when I finally asked that and it was cool because and again, I think why men also appreciate fair play is because it's data driven, right? It's not just me giving you my rant, even though the beginning of the book is angry, but the system is really based out of anybody whose kids play sports, understand systems, any military person understands systems. We understand why systems are important, but to get to a system, you have to ask the right question.

20:48So once I understood that in the 27 countries, women married to men were the ones telling me that they had yellow mustard that was in the refrigerator because the doctor told them their son was iron deficient and their son only eats protein if they douse it in mustard and yellow only. That conception, if you map that onto a RACI framework or a project management framework, conception, planning, and execution is pretty standard, a version of that. so I could understand, oh, the conception is with women. And then I was hearing from women that they get the stakeholder buy-in from what Joel and the family needs for the grocery list.

21:29And they monitor the mustard for when it runs low. They didn't actually say stakeholder buy-in, but this is what I was listening for. And then I said, oh, I can map planning also on women. And then men were saying, right, I'm the one who actually goes to the store. I bring home spicy Dijon every time. and my wife hates me. And now she won't let me work on our living will. And so it's made me really mad and sad for men because I felt like all these men were trying and getting everything wrong because they had no conception and planning. They were just coming in at execution. The way to solve that in an organization, whether it's the home or workplace, is by putting the C and the P and the E together.

22:12So that's really the premise of Fair Play. It's an ownership framework where there's a hundred cards. I don't care who holds what, as long as there's perceived fairness between both parties. It's not rocket science, but it is a very different way of thinking about that.

22:33I think what I found surprising about it for myself is I had no concept of the mental load part of it, the cognitive labor that you talked about earlier. I just knew I helped out around the house. And like way more than your own dad did. You know what I mean? Like, I think if you look generationally, like my mom will say to me sometimes, I can't believe all the things that Joel does. Like, it's amazing. Like, she's just like so impressed, you know, like he puts our daughter, youngest daughter to bed every night, for example. And she's just like, wow, you know, because like that was not a thing in her generation.

23:05My dad's great, but like he wasn't doing nearly as much stuff as Joel was. Like that was just not the expectation back in the early 80s, you know? Question for you. Did you, yeah. So when, when you heard, or when you listened to the book or when Megan explained to you the idea of a conception planning execution framework, was that intuitive to you? Like, did you understand it from other areas of your life? Or I'm just curious how it landed for you. It was tricky to tell you the truth, because I think on top of the gender dynamics, there are personality differences at play here. I am much more laissez-faire than Megan is, which is a fancy way of saying that I don't think about anything.

23:44And Megan is hyper aware of all the needs of our family. And so it's easy for me to just kind of let her handle all the worrying and I can handle the doing. And I just kind of default to that position. But of course, like you talk about, there's a she fault happening there too, which is that I'm kind of passing off everything else to Megan without even thinking about it. And I think one of the things that happens in that scenario, if you're listening and you're like thinking about your own dynamics in your relationship, when you're measuring fairness, like when the, when the conversation about fairness comes up, you know, I feel like you're not doing enough, say, for example, you know, this is a dynamic of people will recognize, right?

24:26You're measuring against what you see me do versus what you see you do. Right. Right. It's the visual. The doing that is visible. It's the doing versus the doing. What you can't see is that I'm up at night sending emails to people or making lists or thinking, or I can't sleep because I'm three weeks ahead. We've got ACT coming up. We've gotten this and that done and whatever. And we've got the football recruiting trip coming up and who's going to take him? We're out of town. And those kinds of things, those are invisible. And so in the balancing of the scales between men and women, I think often men are measuring what I can see that I do versus what I can see that you do.