Carrying Mental Load
String shopping bag, toilet paper, gift tags, safety pins, lead sinkers
Mental load refers to the scheduling, planning, and organising required to support the smooth operating of a household. This type of work ranges from planning dinner and scheduling home maintenance to helping find lost items of clothing. Usually, one partner carries the bulk of this work in heterosexual couples. The emotional response to doing this work is defined as the “load”.
In heterosexual couples with children, women still do 21 hours more unpaid work at home than men. Women feel more time stressed than men. Since 2001, the proportion of women who feel time stressed “often” or “almost always” has stayed constant at around 38%, while men feel similarly stressed has fallen from 34 to 29% [HILDA, Melbourne Institute, 2021].
Another recent study reports that “enforced restrictions during COVID-19 were associated with increases in fathers’ time with children. [At the same time,] mothers’ unpaid work time went up even more.”
“With everyone’s workload higher, more fathers…reported what women have long felt: high levels of subjective time stress, unfairness, and dissatisfaction with actively juggling paid work and unpaid domestic labour and care”.
“We have so far to go! Quiet work - maybe we need to be not so quiet!”
Design
I wanted the simple task of carrying a shopping bag to express the full weight of the mental load for women. A tall order! Even the choice of shopping bag is gender-stereotyped in our society. This bag is beautifully neutral and un-branded, so nothing extra can be read into its aesthetic. The contrast of the lightweight paper tags and heavy lead sinkers are perfect symbols for the delicate navigation of household responsibilities between couples. They also signify the weight of the household labour it represents. The safety pin stands for the objective of the interaction – to provide a safe, sustainable connection to the work of a shared household.
Materials
All the materials are everyday items. In Australia, toilet paper became scarce during the pandemic. Essentially, it gained extra importance, thanks to panic buying, and added even more weight to the mental load.