What’s on Her Mind: The Mental Workload of Family Life

Mar 12, 2026

Dr. Allison Daminger, assistant professor of sociology at UW–Madison and author of What’s On Her Mind, studies gender, family life, and household labor. She explores cognitive labor—anticipating, researching, deciding, and monitoring—and shows why women in different-gender couples shoulder most of it. The conversation covers research methods, decision diaries, how skills and accountability shape labor, and paths toward fairer arrangements.

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ANECDOTE

Decision Logs Revealed Invisible Home Decisions

Daminger used a 24-hour decision log asking participants to record decisions they made or considered before the interview.
The log surfaced small and large decisions (dinner choices to offers on houses) and anchored interviews in concrete examples.

ANECDOTE

Home Interviews Gave Ethnographic Clues

Daminger often interviewed participants in their homes, which revealed artifacts like fridge calendars and grocery lists.
Casual interruptions and household cues provided ethnographic detail that clarified how families organized cognitive work.

INSIGHT

Cognitive Labor Is A Four Step Process

Cognitive labor is a four-step process: anticipate, identify options, decide, and monitor.
Everyday examples range from choosing dinner to exhaustive school-choice research with spreadsheets and lotteries illustrating scale and repetition.

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Mothers and fathers use their time differently, with women spending roughly twice as many hours on family labor as men. But what about the gendered differences in the ways women and men think? What’s on Her Mind examines the cognitive labor that families depend on, and reveals why this essential aspect of family life is disproportionately handled by women—even in couples that aspire to practice equality. While most accounts of household labor center on how people use their time, Dr. Allison Daminger focuses on a less visible and less easily quantifiable aspect of family life. She introduces readers to the concept of cognitive labor—anticipating, researching, deciding, and following up—and shows how women in different-gender couples do most of this critical work.

Dr. Daminger argues that cognitive labor has less to do with personality traits—for example, she’s type A while he’s laid-back—and more to do with learned skills that men and women deploy in distinct ways. Yet not all couples fall into the personality trap. Dr. Daminger looks at different-gender couples who achieve a more balanced cognitive allocation while also exploring how queer couples carve out unique relationships to the gender binary. Drawing on original, in-depth interviews with members of different- and same-gender couples, What’s on Her Mind points to new ways of understanding the interplay between who we are as individuals and the cognitive work we do on behalf of our families.

Our guest is: Dr. Allison Daminger, who is assistant professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She’s the author of What’s On Her Mind; her work has also been featured in publications such as the New York Times, the Guardian, Psychology Today, and the Atlantic.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is an academic writing coach and editor. She is the producer and show host of the Academic Life podcast.

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