Work we under-count

The failure mode, named

An instrument that is detailed about meal planning and vague about insurance renewals produces a number that one partner is right to reject. And they will reject it — correctly, and for good reasons — and then the whole exercise is over.

This is not a hypothetical risk in this project; it is written into the brief that built the library in the first place. Balance across categories is an integrity requirement, not a nicety, because the headline ratio is partly a property of the library itself. A row that doesn't exist is work that didn't happen.

Where we are most likely to be thin

The research describes an episodic strand of domestic work — irregular, lumpy, often deadline-driven, and in many households held by the partner who does less of the daily grind. Things that arrive all at once and then vanish for a year:

• The house breaking. The boiler, the leak, the tradesperson who has to be found, chased, admitted, checked and paid.
• Money and admin. Insurance renewals, contracts, the tax return, the thing that must be filed by a date nobody set.
• Vehicles, outdoors, seasons. Service intervals, tyres, the gutters, the snow, the garden going into winter.
• The annual deadline generally. A task done once a year that sits in your head for three weeks beforehand is one of the hardest things for any instrument to weigh, and one of the easiest for a library to under-score.

The model does try to catch these — a task's cognitive weight deliberately does not scale with how long it takes, so a four-minute thing carried for a fortnight can outweigh an hour of work that leaves your head the moment it's done. But the weight can only be right if the row exists and its frequency and vigilance are set by somebody who actually carries it.

So: what are we not counting about the work you do?

This is the one question in this project where the person we most need to hear from is the person most likely to be sceptical of the whole thing.

Not do you feel you do enough — that is nobody's business and the app has no opinion. The question is narrower and it is technical: which of the things you actually carry does this instrument fail to see? A category with three rows that should have twelve. A kind of work the categories have no proper place for. A task whose weight assumes it's a five-minute job because whoever scored it has never done it.

Every answer to that makes the number more defensible for every household that uses it afterwards, including yours.

What this page is not

It is not an argument that men are secretly doing more. It is not a balancing gesture, and there is no both sides being performed here. It is a request for the specific expertise of the person who does a kind of work the person building the library does not — which is the only thing that fixes a blind spot in an instrument.

The research finding that motivates it, for anyone who wants to check: employment reduces a mother's physical labour by roughly a fifth and her cognitive labour by nothing at all. That is the finding the model leans hardest on, and it is precisely the kind of claim that needs a library good enough to be tested against.