Doing, feeling-and thinking -- The gendered division of cognitive labor -- "It's not a gender thing, it's a me thing" -- Gendered investment, gendered deployment -- Nontraditional paths -- "Which of you is 'the Woman'?"

"Women spend nearly twice as much time on housework and childcare as their male counterparts. But more shocking than that calculation is the reality that that is in fact an underestimate of the true gender gap. Bear with me here; this is best illustrated with an example. Jon and Amy are a proudly egalitarian couple. Both work full-time and they've made it a priority to share the load at home: Jon cooks and Amy cleans; Amy drops the kids off at school and Jon picks them up. But while Jon and Amy appear to spend similar amounts of their time on childcare and housework, their domestic responsibilities occupy different amounts of their mind. Jon prepares dinner, but Amy decides what he should make and ensures that the necessary ingredients are on hand. Jon and Amy share responsibility for transporting their kids, but it's Amy who organizes the extracurricular activities and manages the schedules and finds a back-up driver when scheduling conflicts arise. In this book, Allison Daminger introduces readers to the idea of cognitive labor, a form of work akin to project management and demonstrates that this invisible burden falls disproportionately on women. In the pages of both glossy magazines and sober academic journals, household contributions are primarily measured in minutes and documented through time-use diaries. But Daminger argues that we must consider mind-use alongside time-use; the work of constantly anticipating children's needs, for example, cannot be adequately captured on a time diary. Yet such cognitive labor is a ubiquitous feature of family life, and it represents a burden disproportionately borne by women in different-gender couples-even when those couples aspire to equality. What's On Her Mind provides new language and conceptual tools for readers who may be struggling to understand why they and their partner have wildly divergent experiences of parenting and household life. Yet the book moves beyond mere description to show how cognitive labor inequality emerges in the first place and what forces sustain it"--

"The mental labor that keeps families afloat-and why women do most of it. 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 provides an illuminating look at 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, 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. She 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. 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"--