CALLING HOME with Whitney Goodman, LMFT - Eve Rodsky

Episode Date: September 20, 2023

Whitney talks with Eve Rodsky, creator of a system designed to balance the domestic workload in homes. Eve's system, Fair Play, is based on the idea of treating homes as important organizations, with clearly defined expectations and roles for each member. The system is built on three key principles: boundaries, systems, and communication. Eve emphasizes the importance of each person owning their tasks, from conception to execution, to ensure efficiency and accountability. She also highlights the need for women to value their time as much as men do, and for men to be active participants in domestic life. She believes that for women to fully step into their power outside the home, men must be invited into their full power within the home. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

My guest today is Eve Rodsky, who has created a new 21st century solution to an age-old problem, women shouldering two-thirds or more of the unpaid domestic work and child care for their homes and families. I am Whitney Goodman. Welcome to the Calling Home podcast. I'm glad you're here. I am so excited to talk with Eve because I am a big fan of hers and what she created, a system to even out the workload in the home. Typically women shoulder over two-thirds of the work in the home, even if they have employment outside of the home. And Eve created a system to change that. This is a tool and a system that I discovered after I had my first child, and it's something that I have implemented in my own home. My husband and I both work and both have been

very busy in our careers, and that worked really well when we were married, when we were dating. But once the baby came into the picture, it was like everything kind of got flipped upside down. And all the stuff I was carrying, I wasn't able to carry it anymore. And I started looking for stuff. And when I found your work, I feel like you speak so well to this population of people where it's like, I'm a high achiever. I'm used to being able to handle a lot. And it's difficult to say, I can't do this anymore. I know. It's really hard. I want to just tell women out there that I never really understood that this work needs a trigger warning almost. But it's a very personal deep work. What we're talking about today, it's a 101 to some of these concepts. But I think it's important for you to understand Whitney that I did not set out to be an expert on the gender division of labor. It wasn't on my third grade. what do you want to be when you grew up bored, which said like veterinarian or something.

And it literally wasn't on my radar when I went to law school. And I remember Elizabeth Warren, she was our orientation teacher at Harvard. And she said, what do you want to do with your law degree? And honestly, similar to what you were saying about your life before kids, I genuinely thought that our generation, unresolutely Gen X came up in the workplace in the 2000s. I thought I could be president in the United States while being a senator from New York State, which I wanted to do, plus be a Nick City dancer because I wanted to dance on the iconic Madison Square Garden floor. And so all those dreams felt really within reach in a way that it hadn't felt for our parents' generation or our mother's generation. And so while we were taught to like smash all these glass ceilings, really the only thing I can tell you, if you could.

cut to my life a decade later. The only thing I literally could tell you I was smashing was like peas, peas for my toddler, Zach, while nursing a newborn baby Ben while trying to negotiate going back to work with a corporation that was in 2011 still hostile to the idea of breastfeeding at work where I was told I would get accommodations to breastfeed, but it would be a converted broom closet and it didn't have any power, so I'd have to bring in a breast pump with a battery pack while also negotiating the division of labor in my home, which felt like it was falling resolutely on my shoulders and feeling physically and emotionally abandoned by my partner, by my workplace, and then realizing that in America, because we don't have any social safety

nets, that we're told, you know, our school setting will bring us relief. And I remember around that time I went to school with Zach thinking, these are going to be my social safety net. And looking down at the name tag for that first day and the preschool teacher is saying, these are the people that are going to know you better than anyone's ever known you because it's an intimate relationship with the people you go to school with, especially in preschool. And looking down at my name tag, Whitney, and it said Zach's mom and realizing that these people who are going to know me better than anyone's ever known me, don't even know my fucking name. And so I think that was the confidence for me that made me realize similar to you, how you came to fair play. I came to this work also from a personal perspective of being completely abandoned by America's policies towards and hostility towards mothers,

by my partner's hostility towards me being a mother, by my corporations, hostility towards me being a mother. And when I tell you that I was so unprepared emotionally for that, thank God we have you now. We have people who have done this work, processed this work, can give it to others, podcasts. But I'll tell you in 2011, there was literally nothing out there. I believe it. And I think you talk about this some in your book about. You had a single mother that you talk about, right? That you had this moment where I think you said, like, that will never be me.

I will have a partner in life. And I so related to that because my mom was a stay-at-home mom. And I kind of realized at an early age, like, this is not fair. Like, this kind of seems rigged, right? Like, the way people would talk about being a stay-at-home mom, like, oh, you're so lucky. You get to stay-at-home. And I would watch it and be like, this does not seem fun, you know? It's not lucky at all.

Yeah. And now that I'm a mom who works and is also home sometimes with my kid, I'm like, that's so much charter for me to be home all day, every day with my child, then to go to work. And I think a lot of, you know, millennials, Gen X, you have this moment of realization of like, I want to do things differently. And then what you're speaking to is that when you make that decision, you get out in the world and not everybody wants to support you in doing that. And that can be a really like sobering reality, I think. Well, of course. I think really actually it's exactly what you're saying, the entire world is conspiring against women. Because even if you're in a dual ambition,

which I like to call it, because I think the problem sometimes of dual working is people think, well, if I make less money than my partner, I should do more unpaid labor in the home. And that's completely false. You've made this decision to raise a child together. I'm not saying it has to be 50-50. I never say that. It's not fair play. It's not a prescriptive solution. But it's it needs to feel fair to both parties. And there have to be clearly defined expectations. And so we'll talk about sort of how I got to this really fun system, which is, and it works, as Whitney will talk about. But before you can even get there, I think the reason why there are so many people out there who say to me, I can't even communicate about domestic life. So I think

that's what's so hard. Because we've made it and we've conspired against women for so long, to make them feel lucky, that they get to be parents, that it's our choice, that we're not allowed to talk about our partners, the amount of women that would say to me, yes, my partner does nothing, but he's a great guy, and I love, you know, and I love him, just the amount of shame and guilt that we've created for women, which are really interesting emotions that we can talk about. But in my research and fair play, it's been, you know, over 10 years now, what I've realized about the different emotions that women feel, we feel anger, we do feel sadness, we feel happiness, we feel many things. But guilt and shame are interesting emotions because

women will act on them in the short term that actually affects their long term decision making in a really negative way. And so the combination of the guilt and shame that we get from schools, because they call us first, pediatricians who just look at us, when they're talking to us and asking all the questions and a smile at the fathers, the hostility we have towards single mothers, as you said, my mother was a single mother. It's really all why, as we said in the beginning of this episode, we need a trigger warning for this work because it's so conditioned, the society is so conditioned for women to be the social safety net, for us to do all the unpaid labor in society.

And if we didn't do it, if we woke up to that we don't want to do it anymore, society would literally collapse. So it's its own handmaid's tail, Wendy. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, when you're speaking about this social conditioning, I think for a lot of women, the idea that they can't bring up this conversation or that it's so hard to talk about it is sort of held up by this idea that men are not good at domestic labor. They're not capable of it. They're not meant to do it. I wonder if that's something that you come up against a lot. Yeah, well, let's talk, a little bit about what fair play became. So after, because it'll bring up these, what I call toxic tie messages, the excuses we give to men. And look, fair play is a wonderful non-prescriptive

system that works for single parents with their kids. It works actually for roommates. It works for LGBTQIA couples. But let's center a woman partner with a man now, because that's where a lot of this toxicity comes from. The journey to fair play after being so abandoned physically, mentally, emotionally by my community and my partner, my workplace was understanding that most women start with a list. And so I started with a list. I started with the shit I do spreadsheet. Yes. I went to other women. I asked them what they do. It was a very healing exercise, Whitney, actually, for me to end up coming up and I talk a lot about this in Fairplay, this shit I do spreadsheet that was made over nine months in 2012

because it was before, again, we had social media. It was before it was on the cut. We just had gotten iPads that year. There was no, again, Whitney Podcasts to help me guide me through except for what to expect when you're expecting, which just told me my baby was going to be the size of a jelly bean. There was no one telling me to expect that my entire relationship would fall apart. and all my identity would be lost.

And so I made that list. And what the list actually became, because when I sent that list to Seth, I thought somehow back to men that our life would change by showing him 2,000 items of invisible work I was doing that he wasn't doing. And it didn't change. In fact, he was sort of hostile to this list,

back to women not wanting to bring up these issues with men. And so I could have stopped there because, again, a lot of women stopped there when their partner is feeling sort of hostile to these conversations. But instead, I thought to myself, I could eat, pray, love this out of the relationship, because I feel like that was popular back then. I could divorce, which is what I didn't want, because I still liked Seth, but I saw that the women who were actually thriving in their careers were ones that were doing

the one week on, one week off custody situation with their partner. So I thought, wow, I could get two weeks a month off. divorce. That's a pretty good deal for me and makes that do his own domestic work. Or I could get my ass in gear and become my own client, which is ultimately what I did because my day job is an organizational management. I'm a lawyer. I work with very highly complex organizations. And so what I asked ultimately, Whitney, was the question that would change my life, which was what if we started to treat our homes as our most important organizations. And we have 50 years of organizational scholarship.

We have lots of best practices if we start treating the home as an organization. And that's ultimately what Fair Play became. And the reason why I'm telling you all that is because the first thing I wrote down when I had this insight that the home as an organization was what I'd been doing for my career, which is teaching families how to run their organizations. And there's three things. There's this magic formula that you need to have a successful organization. And so I remember writing that in a Moleskine, and I wrote down boundaries, systems, and communication. And so I knew that that's what I've been teaching my clients,

that they need boundaries, systems, and communication for a successful organization. So, of course, systems is where I started because that's easy and we'll talk about that. But this all gets back That's the long answer to your question about why we give men this pass, why we say it's too triggering to bring up these conversations. And the time it takes me to tell him what to do, I should do it myself. Or another one I gave myself was I'm a better multitasker. I'm wired differently for care. Or another one I gave myself, Seth makes more money than me, even though it's a dual ambition

household. So I should do more of this unpaid labor. or one of my best friends said, yes, we're both colorectal surgeons, but I can find the time, and my husband's better at focusing on one task at a time. So look, we're not Albert Einstein. We can't fuck with the space time continuum. There's no way for women to find time. But that's why I realize that that's what we've been doing.

Because we've been conditioned to believe that men's time is finite like a diamond and women's time is infinite like sand. This has been a conditioning forever. If you don't believe me, just look at health systems that say breastfeeding is free. When it's really 1,800 hours a year, it's a full-time job. Women enter male professions, salaries go down. We know women's time is less valuable. But that's why I realize that fair play was going to be a hard thing to sell.

And it was going to take a movement because I can design the systems. I can teach you how to communicate. But if women are going to breach their own boundaries by believing their time is sand and make excuses for men and be complicit in their own oppression, then this is going to take a movement. And that was the hardest part. Of the boundaries, the systems and communication, it's the boundaries, Whitney, that has made this a movement and not just a book. Yeah.

I think that part about women participating in their own oppression is such a hard one because I know I was doing that myself, right? I would say things. Like you just said, I'll just do it. It's easier if I do it. If I ask, I'll have to explain it. And in reality, like, if you don't put up the boundaries, if you don't kind of force it to happen, it's not going to happen. Correct. Things will continue, like, happening in the same way. And I think for any women listening or for anyone that's listening that struggles with that, it does kind of take you saying, I'm not going to do this anymore. I'm not going to play this role in this dynamic anymore in order for it to change. It's so hard. It's so hard. And again, it's why Fairplay's a movement, because we need each other.

I need a Whitney out there talking about this. It can't just be me saying, here's your system. Here's your card game. It's a beautiful card game. Fair plays 100 cards. When you hold a card, you own it. It's very similar to your Aunt Marion's Majan group like mine, where you don't bring snack twice to the group and you're out. It's just clearly defined expectations for the home. One man said it transformed his home because before fair play, they used to wait to decide who's taking the dog out right when it's about to take a piss on the rug every single night. That decision fatigue cycle. So the system itself is a system where you hold a card. It's a very fun card game, you own your own tasks. That's not the hard part. Like I said, if the boundary systems

communication formula, Whitney, that's the fun part, the ownership part, because again, men do it all the time. We don't, not going to work for Whitney and come to your office every day and say, hey, which should I be doing today? Whitney, I'm just going to stay here and wait till you tell me what to do. So men understood the systems. And in fact, I had coaches and men in the military being obsessed with fair play. But it was a lot of times it was the women being complicit in their own oppression. And also, of course, men being scared of their life changing this idea around, like I said, the boundaries. And so that the movement is saying, my time is diamonds. And I'm not going to live like this anymore. I can be a game changer in my own life. I'm not going to live like this

anymore. No, I'm not here to threaten divorce. I'm not here to say I'm out. I'm committed to this relationship. I'm committed to our lives, but I'm not committed to how we run this organization. Yeah. I don't want to be CFO, COO, CEO, worker B, and middle management while you get to be the consultant that comes in once every month to go to pay our bills and to meet with a money manager. Like that, that is not how this organization's going to work. This organization's going to have three things. It's going to have one, explicitly defined expectations. Two, it's going to have fairness and transparency, and three, we're both going to know our role in advance. And so when I was able to start talking like that, that's when Fairplay became a love letter to

men, because men said to me, I need this. I need a system where I know my role in my household, so I don't feel like my ego is being slammed against the door every time I walk in because I can't do anything right. And I look like I'm an appendage in this household instead of a valuable member. And so again, it slowly became something where I felt such a rage, which you'll see in the beginning part of the book, but it turned into it towards the end, this more generous love letter to men. It's so funny. The example that you talked about, like, coming into the office is exactly what I used with

my husband that caused him to finally get it as I'm like, imagine you walk into work every day and you go into your boss's office and say, what should I do? and like you just don't know what to do you never learn what to do like you're going to get fired and so you have to take the same approach like you're saying at home so i want to give people like some kind of tangible skills that they can use and i'm wondering if we can walk through like even a couple who hasn't had children yet who are just starting out like how they can get ahead of this because i think we have these conversations very like retroactively yes a lot of the time and so So where would you recommend people get started? Well, I'll tell you a quick story about how small it could be. I think it's important to realize that it doesn't need to be a major change. I think people are really afraid of that. And so let's go to that boundary systems communication formula because we talked boundaries,

which was the hard part. We talked the system. But really that communication piece ends up being why people can't start because they say to me, I've had a conversation about domestic life. And it's really been triggering for me because it didn't change anything. So I like to tell people a couple of things. One, this woman said to me, very smart woman, C.O.O. of a major corporation, I don't communicate about domestic life. This was early on Whitney in 20, I think, 2012. And that's when

I believe women still. So I would write down, okay, doesn't communicate about domestic life. And then about 30 minutes later into the conversation, she's telling me that every time her partner forgets to put laundry in the dryer. She's been dumping in on his pillow. So I crossed out, doesn't communicate about domestic life. And I put in all caps, communicates about domestic life. She's communicating for sure. There was a woman during COVID who posted in this, it's like a 27,000 member Facebook group called The Reasons I Hate My Husband during COVID. Of course, people told me about it. I'm always still researching. If you hear anything, you could always tell me about more research. So this woman posts in this chat, if my husband dies during COVID,

it's going to be because of me, not the disease. So I DM turn. I said, I'm a researcher that, you know, that looks at domestic life. Just a quick question, you know, I want to know sort of what, how do you communicate with your partner on a daily basis about, about domestic life or chores, housework? And she wrote back to me, I don't communicate with my partner. This is my safe space. So I want your listeners to reflect on this fact that this woman felt like threatening to murder her partner in front of 27,000 strangers felt safer to her than a conversation with the person who's supposed to be the most intimate with her. That's scary to me. Yeah. So I think what I want to tell you all out there to get started is first you have to have that internal shift.

to realize you're not starting a conversation. You're shifting a conversation. So if you come into this realizing and telling your partner, we're already communicating about domestic life. I heard this person speak. She can go on to our Nescam tonight, and she can see five ways we've communicated about domestic life. She doesn't even need to hear the words we're saying.

I think if you come into it realizing you're doing a communication shift and not a start, it's very comforting. And then I'll tell you this quick story about this couple who decide to adopt fair play during the pandemic because it shows how small it can be and then we'll give some actual real tips. But this couple decided to adopt fair play. And so what they did was they went through the card game in the right type of systematic way, which is not scorekeeping, not saying, I hold all the cards, you hold nothing, I hate you. They really went through the cards. And again, there's lots of free resources in our website in the book about how to play. But one of the

key tenets to playing this game is that when you first go through the cards, you're just there to sort of assess and see what you value, what's in your deck, what's out of your deck, you're trying to take things out so your life isn't so overwhelming. Maybe you take out thank you notes. Maybe you take out birthday celebrations and you do something smaller that year. You get aligned. And so in this conversation, I'll call them Richard and Amy, they realized they were reporting back to me that Richard held a lot of cards in what we call the home suit. That's the green suit. The cards are four suits.

There's home out, caregiving, and magic. So he was doing a lot of things. He was very helpful. He was doing things like garbage. He was doing things like dishes, which is very, very helpful. But he held not one card in the caregiving or the magic suits. So that means that she was managing his parents, all the birthday celebrations, all the emotional labor of the home. So one of the cards he decides to take on to start switching that

dynamic over is a card called magical beings. So magical beings is the card that would encompass lucky leprechaun, tooth fairy, you know, Santa off on the shelf, whatever magical being comes into your life during the year. So he takes that card on. And the first time that he's responsible for it, So it was this daughter's second tooth. The tooth fairy didn't come. The tooth fairy didn't come. So when Amy reports back to what would have happened before a fair play, is she would have said in her sort of a verbal assassin way,

he ruined her child's magic. I fucking told you you couldn't do it. I'm taking it back. And the time it takes me to remind you to do this, I'm not doing it. So all this hostility would have come out, sort of all or nothing language. And Richard ironically admitted to me that if this had happened before fair play, he would have blamed Amy for not reminding him to put the dollar under the pillow. That was their dynamic. And if it sounds familiar out there, it's okay because many of our dynamics were like that.

So post-fair play, it's ownership. You carry through your own mistake if you're owning something. So Amy held her tongue, which she said was the hardest part, to not verbal assassin him. But just to look at him and say, thank you for recognizing that you own this card because he did say, I fucked up. Once she heard, I fucked up, she was able to say, okay, I can give him the space to correct it because he's taking responsibility and not blaming me. So she stepped out.

He tells me he emails tooth fairy at gmail.com in front of his daughter as sort of a joke to say, hey, tooth fairy, what the hell? You know, you didn't come last night. creepily, he gets a response to what's Whitney. Turns out, someone's answering duth fairytuml.com, thank you, whoever you are, we love you. And she writes back, supply chain issues, sorry, I couldn't get to you last night. And then he said to his daughter, when she got home from school, I heard back from the tooth fairy. He read her the email and said, when the tooth fairy doesn't come on time, it turns out she brings double the money.

And so that night, he put double the money under his daughter's pillow. And that's the end of the story. It's just small. But to me, it says everything about the dynamics and that relationship and how they can interact with each other moving forward. And that's why I love that story so much. A hundred percent. I mean, what I'm hearing in that story is like we're allowed to make mistakes in this family. Yes, yes.

We know that we will make mistakes. We're going to be here for each other, let people repair when those mistakes are made, and that I will continue to dedicate myself to my task, my role in this family, and make up for it when I mess up, which is really, I think, what gives us the trust in that person again. So I imagine that this was almost, even though it was a mess up, it's a moment of affirmation for this couple of like, okay, you're trying, this is important to you, you've got this, even though you slipped up. And I know that I can mess up and my spouse is going to be there for me because I've given them that same grace, which is so powerful. Well, I just, I love how you just recounted that

because I think that's exactly everything, everything that I felt was happening in this couple's dynamic. And if you think back to, you know, we keep talking about organizations here, If you think about the core of an organization, like the two things that we're asking for certain things like explicitly define expectations and roles because we want to get to the two things that most organizations don't have, but we wish they did, which is this idea of consistent accountability and trust, as you said, trust. And so I think for me, that's what that story felt like. that couple was restoring accountability, Richard was taking the accountability, and then so Amy

felt like she could trust him again. Can you speak a little bit about this idea of owning a task? I think this was so pivotal for me, like to get rid of that mental load and why that was important for you in the fair play method. I'd say that was probably my second most important insight for myself that a home is an organization. The second most important insight, was this idea that I couldn't get accurate data from couples because they were overreporting what they did. That's what men do and that's insistent with data that I have from other studies and women underreport what they do.

So it was actually pretty hard to move to developing the system, a system for people without getting accurate data. And so when I was hearing from couples who handles groceries, Oh, we both do. Who does school pick up and drop-offs? We both do. Something was wrong, right? Because these were women reporting stress-related illnesses due to the mental load,

and their partner was not knowing their role. So I kept thinking, well, if they're both doing it, why are things feeling so hard? So I had to change the research question. And once I did that, it was life-changing for me. I started to ask people instead of who handles groceries. I start to ask people, how does mustard get in your refrigerator? That's a much better question. And it's served me very well because I've asked it now in 17 countries over 10 years.

And even in the Nordic countries, Whitney, where everyone thinks everything's perfect in Norway and Sweden, it was the same, the same dynamic, which is women married to men overwhelmingly are the ones who notice what type of mustard to have in the house. They know their second son Johnny needs yellow mustard, otherwise he won't eat his protein. That's conception. We know that from organizational management. That's a project management step called conception. We get paid big bucks for that to notice new things, to get new ideas around noticing. So I was able to break out that phase and say, okay, women are handling the conception, the noticing, the new idea that, oh, if I bring yellow mustard in, maybe my child will eat their hot dog. Then, women were also reporting that they were the ones getting stakeholder buy-in

for what their family needed on that list and also monitoring the mustard for when it ran low. So that planning phase was also staying with women. And then, ding, ding, ding, the reason why I said they both handle groceries, why they were saying that was because men were stepping in at the execution phase to go to the store to actually purchase the groceries. but they bring home spicy Dijon every fucking time. And we ask for yellow mustard. And are you blind?

You've been in this house for 10 fucking years. You don't realize every single meal, Johnny's eating yellow mustard. Like, what is this weird shit with seeds in it? And so, as you said earlier, it's this erosion of accountability and trust over these death by a thousand cuts. And that is why that question became so powerful. because in an organization, if you keep the conception, planning, and execution together, it's a much more efficient system. Apple call, I think they called the directly responsible individual.

Netflix called it context, not control. We know this ownership mindset is a very helpful tool for organizations. So once I could isolate that there was a both trap by people thinking they're both doing it, but actually both not doing anything, because it's very, efficient, you can switch up that dynamic. And so Fairplay is a system based on conception, planning, and execution, staying with one person. And now a lot of people are adopting this. A couple of books, a lot of articles, couple books that have come out with their own version of what I started. But I'd say CPE is still the most popular way to say it, conception planning execution. And that's the Fair Play system. I love what you're pointing out here.

and I think for anyone who's listening that's been in that situation of like, why did you get this mustard? It turns into a fight that is not about the mustard, right? And that one person's like, why is it such a big deal to you? And it's because that mustard is a representation, right?

Of like, you're not paying attention and you're not an active participant in the home life. And I think, like you said, the death by a thousand cuts, like that just piles up over time. and then you snap at mustard. Or blueberries, which is my breakdown. Right.

And then we get gaslit for people to be like, well, why do you care so much? Or your standards are so high. Or women need to lower their standards. All this language that's so misogynistic and, you know, just are awful. Yeah. Because we don't need to lower our standards. I deserve a partner who pays attention, like you said. Mm-hmm.

Absolutely. And I think now that more women are in the workforce, some of them primary earners in the home, like, there's another option now, you know, you don't have to put up with it. And so I think we're seeing a huge shift in the consequences of that. I do too. And I think back to the movement, you know, sadly, over time, we've seen that as women made more money, men do not automatically take on more domestic labor. In fact, women feel guilt and shame for making more money, so they take on more domestic labor. And so it's really going to take this movement, right?

Your listeners hearing you believing that their time is diamonds, understanding that these conversations have to happen by the person who's aggrieved. You can't wait for the person who is grieving you to take charge because they probably won't. And that's okay. And sometimes it's okay just to hear these insights and to feel helpless at the moment, but just understand that other people like us here, Whitney and Eve, have been through this and gotten out to the other side, or at least they're in a practice on the other side. My son Ben said to me, one of the Google searches when I put in your name is Eve Rodski is still married.

And yes, I'm still married to Seth. And in fact, he holds a significant number of cards now, probably even more than I did. and I started off holding every single one of them. And so there is a possibility of change. And it's just understanding that we're going to be working on boundary systems and communication the same way we work on exercise, which is that we can't say to ourselves, I exercise once in 2005 and I'm going to be fit forever. Just sadly, fair play is like that.

It's a practice. Yeah, that's such a perfect segue. way, though, to where I wanted to go with talking about where this movement is going, because I think what you're saying comes from a place of believing that, like, men are truly capable and valuable participants in domestic life, right? And that there are benefits to that. And that women also, when we're talking about heterosexual couples, women have time also that is valuable outside of just what they can contribute to the home. And so I'm sure you've seen this new data point that's been going around, that millennial dads spend three times as much with their kids

as previous generations, which when my husband, I read that, we were like, what were they doing before, like, with all this time? But I'm wondering if that's a testament to you of like where this movement is going and what are some positive things that you've seen. Oh, I've seen some wonderful things. I really truly believe, Whitney, right, that for women to step into their full power outside the home, we have to invite men into their full power in the home. It's the only way. Totally. Before us, 10 years ago, the way we heard women stepping into their full power as a boss bitch was this idea of outsourcing. That's a highly problematic concept. Of course, we should all pay a living wage short to domestic help and to honor them, which is why I work very closely

was something called the National Domestic Workers Association. But this idea that white women were going to build their careers just by outsourcing to other vaginas, to other, you know, replacing a vagina to black and brown women is highly problematic. And so men have to be part of this movement. As much as we love to outsource what those caregiving and magic cards, the ones we talked about earlier,

there are 50 cards in the fair play deck, of 100 that are not outsourceable. Medical and healthy living. As much as you love Alexia, she's not deciding whether or not your child's adenoids are being taken out. Most parents actually want to go with their kids to get a haircut or give them the haircuts themselves. Again, you're the ones thinking about whether or not to have a lucky leprecha, a Santa,

a tooth fairy in your house. There is many teacher communication. There were 50 cards that are quote unquote, non-outsorcible. So even if you thought, oh, well, if my partner is so overwhelmed, can't she just get help? That message, I think, is being retired in favor of, okay, I'm not a helper. I'm not going to try to seek help for her. I'm a partner in this relationship. And I'm here, as you said earlier, to show up with accountability and trust. I think what I love most about your message is that it's like very inspiring, the sense of like, it's never too late to start

having these conversations. It's never too late to rework what's going on and in the home. And I love looking at it through the lens of like, if we were a business, you know, where are our weak spots? This is our most important organization. And so I'd love to hear kind of what's next for your fair play movement. Well, right now, I'd say really looking at the workplace and seeing what's happening to women because a lot of this unpaid labor that's happening in the home, is happening at work. So I want to make sure that women feel supported in the workplace. So we're looking at a lot of data. And then the other important thing for the movement is working with people like you, Whitney. We have now over a thousand therapists trained in sort of these fair play

principles so that I don't have to go into every home, but that there's people who have mental health training who are helping people, people have communication training, people who have a lot of really wonderful skills, therapists, MFTs, life coaches who are incorporating these principles. So that's very exciting. And then I'd say the most important thing for me is the advocacy work, obviously making America more hospitable to motherhood. And I'd say the most interesting thing for me is that we've been following women for 10 years now. And if you don't believe that it's urgent for you to handle this, what we're seeing is women who do not, of step up when they feel aggrieved to change the dynamic in their relationships, the ones

who are working for pay and who are also feeling aggrieved by all the unpaid emotional labor and mental load in their house, they're getting sick, Whitney. And we're finding some really interesting data on how sick they're getting, hair loss, autoimmune disease, insomnia, SSRI use for the small part of our study that isn't getting treated for stress-related illness, they're self-medicating through two glasses of wine a night, edibles to get through their weekends. And so we want to make sure women's health is okay. And I don't believe women's health is going to be okay

until we eradicate this unbelievable mental load that we've given to women. Well, I am so grateful for your work and in awe of where you have taken it. I feel honored that I'm able to support you in it in some small way. And I can personally attest that your card deck, your book, everything has been transformative in my life and the life of my own clients and the people I work with. So I'd love if you could share where people can find you and your work. I'd say the most fun place to show up is come with us, sign up for our newsletter at fairplaylife.com because we continue to update all of our research. And so you'll get basically the cutting edge research, the cutting edge articles on these issues. And we try to

give people a lot of practical advice about how to have these conversations. And then, of course, you could always show up anywhere on social media, but Fairplay Life is our Instagram handle. And we share a lot of that research and those memes and relatability. It's very humorous online. Well, thank you so much, Eve, for being here. I really appreciate it. And I hope everyone will go check out your work. Thank you, Whitney.