Predictability Is The New Flexibility

I have always believed that flexibility at work was the most valuable employee perk for me, so I was intrigued when I read a The New York Times article suggesting the opposite. The data shows that workers are willing to give up far more pay to avoid jobs where employers control their hours unpredictably than they are to gain flexibility or remote work.It seems that what parents actually want is predictability. People want to know when work will end. Parents want to be able to plan childcare without worrying that a last-minute meeting will derail their day. Employees want to know when they need to be “on” and when they are truly “off.”

Flexibility sounds progressive, but if I’m honest, when I reflect on my own experience as a working mother, I see how easily flexibility became 24/7 availability. Early morning calls at 7:30 a.m. with the U.S. were normal. Replying to emails at 10 p.m. became the usual practice. Going to bed with unresolved work and open-ended emails began to create anxiety that seeped into the next day.

What I realize now is that flexibility only works when strong boundaries are in place and when organizational culture actively supports those boundaries, rather than relying on unspoken rules and expectations about availability.So maybe the better question is not how we give parents more flexibility. Maybe it is how we design jobs with clear stop times. That could mean approving The Right to Disconnect laws like those in Australia, or (crazy thought incoming) it could just mean companies re-learn how to respect that people have lives outside of work.

Who Does The Invisible Load Impact?

Even when women out-earn their partners, they often remain the household project managers. You can hire help but that does not necessarily equate to outsourcing the planning, anticipation and foresight required to manage a household with multiple stakeholders.

Research shows that mothers earning more than $100,000 report 30% less childcare and 17% less housework than those with lower incomes, but they do no less mental household labour. On average, mothers perform 13.72 mental tasks, while fathers perform 8.2.

As my career progressed and my income increased, some things became a lot easier. We outsourced a much more in our lives. We hired an additional helper. We ordered more food. From the outside, it looked like I was doing less at home. But in reality, not a lot had changed. I’m not saying that my husband wasn’t helpful or that he didn’t do his share.

But there were tasks that I had always done and continued to do, such as planning play dates, meal planning, medical appointments, birthdays, holidays. The physical work was offloaded, but the thinking behind it all, the invisible work, stayed with me. The study calls this “gendered cognitive stickiness.” In simple terms, it means that once women become the person who plans and anticipates, that role sticks. It sticks even when their jobs get bigger. It sticks even when they earn more. It sticks even when they outsource the visible work.

This is what we get wrong when we talk about equality at home. We keep negotiating chores, but we rarely renegotiate ownership. I no longer had to do the laundry, but I still had to know when it needed doing and what was still at the dry cleaners. I could stop organising playdates, but managing the family calendar was still my responsibility.

You can outsource labour, but you cannot outsource responsibility. Mental load only shifts when someone else owns the thinking, not just the doing. Each family dynamic is different and the carrying of the mental load by mothers occurs for a variety of reasons but in my family, I knew that I was the controller and in order for things to change, I had to learn how to let go of some that control and be ok with things being done differently.