How Emotional Labor is Dragging Down Gender Equality
&quot;If I were to point out random emotional labor duties I carry out—reminding him of his family’s birthdays, carrying in my head the entire school handbook and dietary guidelines for lunches, updating the calendar to include everyone’s schedules, asking his mother to babysit the kids when we go out, keeping track of what food and household items we are running low on, tidying everyone’s strewn about belongings, the unending hell that is laundry—...&quot;<p>That all sounds like household management with some relationship management thrown in. What does it have to do with labouring over <i>emotions</i>? It sounds like this person needs a partner who shares more household responsibilities and has an organization and cleanliness habit that is more in line with their own.<p>EDIT: I just did a quick search of this term &quot;emotional labor&quot; and this comes up from wikipedia:<p>&quot;Emotional labor is the process of managing feelings and expressions to fulfill the emotional requirements of a job. More specifically, workers are expected to regulate their emotions during interactions with customers, co-workers and superiors.&quot;<p>That seems a lot more reasonable definition for emotional labour. Actual emotion management. The author of the featured article seems to want to attach this term to just about every kind of task that occurs in a household.