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019 | The Invisible Tax: What the Messy Room Research Reveals About Women's Hidden Load · Spacious Success

• 0:05
  Hi, it's Christy. Welcome back to Spacious Success. My husband has never understood why I get stressed when the house is messy and a friend drops by unexpectedly. He always says, relax, Christy. No one cares.
• 0:22
  And for years, I thought, well, maybe he's right. Maybe I am overreacting. Maybe this is just a quirk of mine, a slightly embarrassing perfectionism tendency that I should probably work on. But it turns out I'm not overreacting. There's actually research on this very topic. In a study with more than 600 people, they were shown photos of the exact same living room and kitchen, same couch, same clutter, same mess.
• 0:49
  The only thing that changed was the name on the door. Sometimes they were told that the room belonged to John, other times Jane. And people judged it differently. Even when the room was tidy, people assumed that women would be judged more harshly for any imperfection. When it was messy, they believed that she would face stronger social penalties. Same room, different name, different expectations. Okay.
• 1:18
  So when women feel on edge about the state of the house before guests arrive, it's not perfectionism. Well, it may be, but not necessarily. It is anticipation. Because socially, women still carry more of the reputational load for our domestic spaces.
• 1:34
  As one summary of the research put it, men do see the mess. They do. They're just not judged the same way for it. And here is the thing. This does not stay at home. These invisible expectations often follow women into the workplace. They add cognitive load, drain our energy. They add to our emotional load. They contribute to what I call the invisible tax and to the gender well-being gap that we have been exploring in this Spacious Success podcast.
• 2:03
  So next time you start panic cleaning before someone comes over, you can tell your husband that people do care. And I can now say there are peer-reviewed studies that tell us otherwise. Hi, I'm Dr. Christy Goodwin, a neuroperformance scientist, speaker and executive coach who learned the hard way that chasing success...
• 2:25
  can come at a cost. After burnout landed me in hospital, I made it my mission to help ambitious women who are done trading their health and happiness for high performance. On Spacious Success, I share science-backed strategies and real stories to help you flourish as a female at work and beyond so you can stop paying the success tax.
• 3:00
  I want to tell you about a moment that happened in one of my keynotes last year. I was speaking to a mixed audience at a financial services firm. It was a balanced room, plenty of senior women and men, the kind of organisation that genuinely thought itself as fairly progressive on gender equity. They had hit some really good targets with equal pay, and I asked the women in the room to raise their hand if they had, in the past month, organised a colleague's farewell. I'm sorry.
• 3:28
  Booked a birthday gift for a team member. Taken notes during a meeting that they were not asked to take notes in. Stayed back after a meeting to smooth things over with a colleague who left the room feeling frustrated or angry. Absorbed the emotional fallout when a conversation went sideways so that the team could move on. Followed up on an action item that technically belonged to someone else because they knew it would fall through the gaps otherwise.
• 3:55
  offered to help a new colleague settle in, remembered an important date for a client and prompted a senior colleague to acknowledge it. Nearly every woman's hand went up for every item. And then I asked the men the same questions.
• 4:11
  And the contrast, let's just say, was not subtle. This is kinkeeping. It's a sociological term for the relational and administrative work of maintaining human connections in a group. It's maintaining relationships. And research tells us that it still disproportionately falls on women in both families and workplaces, regardless of their seniority or their role.
• 4:35
  The room went quiet at that particular moment. It was an awkward silence. The kind of quiet that happens when people recognise something that they've always known, but they've never heard it named or articulated.
• 4:50
  Let me be neurobiologically precise about why this matters for performance, particularly for women's sustainable performance. Your working memory is the cognitive system responsible for holding and manipulating information in real time. It's basically like the operational layer of your thinking. And it is finite, not metaphorically finite, literally constrained by the capacity of your prefrontal cortex and the glucose that it has available to run.
• 5:20
  When your working memory is constantly occupied, it is exhausting. You cannot simultaneously run a complex strategic analysis and track whether your team's anniversary card has been signed and remember that someone's having a hard week because their partner left them.
• 5:37
  And notice that the client did not respond to that email, except that this is exactly what many high-performing women are doing all day, every single day. Sociologist Ali Hochschild documented the second shift, the reality that women who work full-time outside the home return to a second, largely uncredited shift of domestic and caregiving labour. Okay.
• 6:00
  More recent research by Alison Damager mapped specifically the cognitive dimension of this. Women still disproportionately carry the anticipatory cognitive load of managing the functions within a household. It's not just the tasks, it's thinking about the tasks. It's noticing, tracking, planning, keeping ahead, king-keeping roles that keep families and workplaces together.
• 6:26
  The research tells us that this happens at home and in the workplace. Women volunteer and are asked to perform administrative and social maintenance tasks at higher rates than men in the workplace. We take notes. We plan team events. We mentor informally. Being the person people bring problems to.
• 6:45
  These tasks are real work. They take up time, emotional bandwidth and energy, but they're never often acknowledged in performance reviews, promotion decisions or publicly recognised. And the messy room research which I shared earlier in this episode, it adds yet another dimension. It's a great idea.
• 7:03
  Multiple studies have documented that women show high cortisol responses to cluttered or unresolved messy domestic environments compared to men. Researchers interpret this function of ownership of attribution. Women have internalized that responsibility for domestic order in a way that men have not. We know that messy rooms create different physiological stress responses depending on who feels they are responsible and will be judged for it.
• 7:33
  put all of this together and what you get is a high-performing woman who arrives at her desk in the morning
• 7:41
  And she's already carried the morning logistics, the family schedule, the awareness of who needs what today. She sits in a meeting and she notices the dynamic in the room is off and she tracks the interpersonal tensions that are playing out. She mentally notes who's not spoken up, who looks withdrawn. She agrees to organise the team lunch because no one else will. She monitors client relationships and relationships that need maintenance.
• 8:06
  She carries the awareness of a colleague who is withdrawn and going through something difficult. All of that emotional and cognitive labor is effort. It's an emotional load and it's consuming our working memory. All of it is reducing the available bandwidth for strategic, creative, high-value work that often gets measured, rewarded and promoted.
• 8:29
  Sometimes I call this the invisible tax. Not a metaphor, neurobiologically measurable. It's costly and it's a burden that women disproportionately carry. And the thing is that's hard to say about this is that women are often judged more harshly when they do not perform it. Research shows that women who decline office housework do not pick up relational maintenance tasks, who set firm boundaries around their attention,
• 8:57
  are often evaluated less favourably than men who do the same. The expectations are built into culture and departing from them can ostracise us and penalise us. So what can you do? Three strategies that you can use to reduce the invisible tax. The first thing is to make the invisible visible. You cannot negotiate, delegate or redesign what you cannot see. Run a two-day invisible labour audit.
• 9:26
  Every time you notice a piece of background cognitive processing, a relational maintenance task, a coordination thought, a domestic logistics task, write it down. Not to catastrophize, not to quantify, not to make it a competition, but just to notice how much of this is mine by necessity. How much could be shared, distributed or not done at all?
• 9:49
  The data will tell you about your true scope of your cognitive load. I'm a huge fan of Eve Radesky's Fair Play book and cards, and the Imperfects have a great podcast on this. The details will be in the show notes.
• 10:04
  The second is to stop volunteering before the ask arrives. And this will be uncomfortable. Many of the invisible tasks women perform begin before anyone else has asked. We see the gap. We know what will probably be done to fill it. And we fill it first. This is the anticipatory labour pattern that Alison Dominga documented. It's not wrong, but it's often genuinely useful. But it's consuming our cognitive resources that we could redirect elsewhere. Okay.
• 10:34
  Wait for the ask. Let the gap exist. See who steps in. You might be surprised. And if you're not surprised, that's just as equally useful information. And the third is to protect your cognitive prime time as the non-negotiable that it is. Your prefrontal cortex runs at its highest capacity within certain windows in the day. This is shaped by your chronotype and your ultradian rhythms.
• 10:59
  Those windows are your most valuable cognitive asset. What is currently occupying them? If your sharpest hours, your peak performance windows are spent on administrative tasks, relational work or coordination work that could happen at other times, can you redistribute it so it's not a tax on your highest value output? Okay.
• 11:20
  Schedule your invisible low energy labor for that time outside your cognitive prime time. Now you can find out how to work with the ideal contours of your chronotype using my chronotype assessment and report tool. Find the link in the show notes to access this.
• 11:38
  This week's power-up is for you to run a two-day invisible labor audit. For two days, just jot down every piece of background cognitive process, every relational or emotional maintenance task that you perform, every bit of anticipatory planning, every bit of office housework that you perform, or you even just consider performing, and then review the list with one question.
• 12:03
  How much being of this list is being counted towards formal contribution? The gap between what you're actually doing and what you want to be formally recognized for is that invisible tax. And it's the first step in changing it.
• 12:18
  My Powered Up Women keynote takes this conversation into organisations and gives leadership teams the frameworks and the data that they need to understand where the invisible tax might be showing up and its impact on women's performance. If you're interested in bringing this to your workplace, please reach out via drchristiegobin.com. I'm Christy. Thank you for listening to Spacious Success.