Abstract
How does cognitive household labour – the ‘mental load’ involved in anticipating, fulfilling, and monitoring household needs – influence decisions about whether and how to participate in public life? Studies suggest women take on the vast majority of this load, yet the impact of these private sector inequalities on participation in public life is underexplored. To make progress on these questions, we contribute new causal evidence about the effect of prompting respondents to think about their own mental loads in a survey experiment fielded to employed British parents. Our main argument is that priming the mental load will crowd out interest in political and labour market participation. In line with expectations, our survey experiment finds a strong negative effect of mental load priming on intentions to engage in politics and at work. Our results offer new insights about the continuing relevance of household-based inequalities to gender equality in public life.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | e29 |
| Number of pages | 21 |
| Journal | British Journal of Political Science |
| Volume | 55 |
| Early online date | 21 Feb 2025 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | E-pub ahead of print - 21 Feb 2025 |
Data Availability Statement
Replication data for this article can be found in Harvard Dataverse at: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/NEATCBAcknowledgements
We thank Rabia Malik, Tamta Gelashvili, and the participants at research seminars at Gothenburg University, Kings College London, and the annual meeting of the European Political Science Association 2023 for helpful comments on previous versions of this paper. We also thank the editor and three anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback.Funding
Support for this research was provided by the Department of Politics, Languages and International Studies at the University of Bath.
