 All right, so thank you all so much for coming back and joining me at my social distancing home office for yet another crisis conversation where we're really exploring how the coronavirus is changing the way that we work and live, gender equality, social policy, it's really upending everything. And today I am so excited to have Eve Rodski on as our special guest. We wanna be able to have interaction and we want people to share their stories. We're gonna be bringing in the story of a father who says that the coronavirus is changing the way that he looks at the division of labor at home. But here we're gonna be talking about, all right, women tend to do twice the housework, twice the childcare in a normal setting. How did we get here? And now what is happening with coronavirus? And do women not just come home now or actually stay at home with the second shift but now are they homeschooling? Do they have a third shift, a fourth shift? Or do we have an opportunity for a real reset? So Eve, I wanna start with you and let's just kind of, let's just start with where we are, kind of pre-coronavirus. You've written this fantastic book called Fair Play based on your own experience and you kind of start with the drunk guy's jacket. You just start by telling us sort of where we are and tell me about the drunk guy's jacket. Absolutely. And yes, thank you Bridget, you are a cultural warrior. I hope we can collaborate forever and ever on these issues. I'm a huge, huge fan of Better Life Lab and I can't wait to do more with you. So I just wanna say that first and thank you so much for your leadership on this issue. I believe it's the most important issue in a sport with way of the feminism after researching this for now eight years. So yes, I did interview 500 men and women and married the U.S. census. That's what took so long to write for like eight years. But it starts with the main story, 500. And through social media, I was able to get people who identified all the way from women who got their children taken away from them in the foster care system, all the way up to self-identified billionaires because that's who my clients are. My day job is I'm a mediator and a lawyer for clients that look like the HBO show Succession. Wow, you should feel bad for me. But what I do for them is I create family systems where dad when I meet them is marching out of the room when his second son speaks and then by the end of our engagement, all three generations of a family around their family business or family foundation are communicating with grace and humor and generosity. So that's the background of who I am. I come at this from an organizational management and legal and mediation lens. But when, so yes, I have a lot of data, but this is also the fair play is also really about my own personal story, how I came to this work. And really it started with a few things, but one of them was on a one day work trip to Seattle right after my second son, Ben was born. I woke up 5 a.m. You know, I'm loading all my crap into the car. I had extra clothes and I was leaking up from my breasts. I had a breast pump with me. I had extra documents. You know, I'm getting to the airport and I pull up at 7 a.m. So Ben had just been born. I had a three year old son named Zach and I'm going to Seattle because as a your own business owner you don't really get a maternity leave. So I go to the airport at 7 a.m. I get a text from Seth, my husband. And the text said, some guy left his beer bottle and wet jacket. His broken beer bottle and wet jacket on our lawn. Okay, Bridget. So what am I supposed to do with that? I'm not getting on the plane. Yeah, why are you telling me? I ignore this drunk guy's texts and I get on the plane. I start prepping for the family foundation meeting. I'm leading that day. Like I said, around with three generations that are around the table that had been fighting so badly when I met them. Dad was storming out of the room and his son would speak and now they're functional. And we had this great meeting. I conclude the meeting. This is a true story. My pump, I don't know, breast pumps may be better these days but my pump was, back then it would make these really crazy sex noises. I guess it's fun. I don't know. So I don't know, maybe pumps are quieter these days but I was too embarrassed to pump in the restroom of the family office building because the restroom was right off the boardroom. So I ended up pumping in a dark stairwell out of my clients building and then I raced to get to the airport. So, cut to 10, 30 p.m. that night. I'm coming home, dragging all my shit into the house, getting out of the cab and out of the corner of my eye, I see on our lawn a wet jacket and a broken beer bottle. It was still there. And so Bridget, I decided to give my husband the benefit of the doubt. Really? That's probably more than I would have done at that point but yes, okay. I was thinking, you know, maybe he was dead. Maybe he was dead. Excuse. Or maybe he was trapped under a giant boulder or something, you know? So I went into investigate. I put my breast milk in the refrigerator because that's gold and I walked upstairs and he is stretched out on our bed but he's not dead. In fact, Bridget, he tells me he had four hours after our kids went to bed with the help of our nanny to watch sports center work out and finish his PowerPoint deck he needed for the next day, right? Plenty of time. Plenty of time to decompress from his long day but not enough time apparently to pick up a drunk guy's jacket and beer bottle that we found on our lawn 16 hours earlier. So you ended up doing that and you write a lot about how it was so indicative of really what's at the root of so much of this unfair division of labor at home. It's the expectation of who does what and also how we value time and who we think has more valuable time. So talk a little bit about now we're in this crazy situation with this coronavirus. We've got people, if you can work remotely, you are. Everybody's living kind of on top of each other. People are trying to figure out how to work and homeschool. You've got frontline workers who are going off to work and who knows how they're managing work and life and that's part of what we're gonna be trying to talk about here. So it's upended absolutely everything. What are you seeing? Is it making things worse? Better? Could it? What are you seeing? That's a great question. I'm seeing, I did another 100 plus survey this week of women and men and I think Bridget, exactly what you said, we are at an inflection point right now where we have a choice to go back to traditional gender roles or we can really reset. This is the first time the invisible work, my favorite term for the mental load and the second shift in emotional labor. My favorite term of all those metaphors is invisible work because how can you value what's invisible? But this made things visible and what I found from my poll was that there are actually 12 what I call in fair play cards. So fair play is based on a card game of 100 cards that you can basically have your values conversations around in the home and these are the ones that are causing the most consternation and I wanna get back to time because I think it's really important because it is really, really, really important right now. So this is the dirty dozen. The dirty dozen that people are saying or are having, they're having the hardest time with. Again, these are the sort of they looked at the fair play cards online and they picked. I love that the dirty dozen. Dirty dozen. It's really a baker's dozen if you have kids. Laundry, groceries, meals, home supplies, like who's buying the toilet paper and hand sanitizer, emergency planning, tidying up, cleaning, dishes, garbage. And then if you have kids, home work, which has now become homeschool, discipline and screen time, watching of your kids, whether it's a toddler all the way to a teenager who may be escaping quarantine and social interactions for your kids, arranging Zoom calls. That's the baker's dozen that's causing the biggest problems. But before we can get to the solutions and I want to get there because this is a better life lab and what you're doing is really about solutions, which is why I love collaborating with your team, is to just go back to the drunk guy's jacket for a second because why couldn't fair play just be a card game where you sort of gamify who's doing what in the home. There's all the rules for it in the book. But the core premise bridge that you brought up before was really important because I want to explain to your listeners that while we're all fighting over drunk guy's jackets, who's picking up the broken beer bottle or the sponge in the sink or who's setting the table for dinner. The small details right now, the dirty dozen are causing huge problems. But the real finding of fair play and it's really more important even now was this idea that society and men view women's time as as infinite like sand and we view society, we view men's time as finite like diamonds. And we know that from equal pay because even in the same job, right? Women are paid less, especially women of color. But what about women? So this is what I want to say to any women who are on this call. It was women who were devaluing their time the most. And this is what I mean, I'll just say it really quickly. I had women all over this country, again, for my 500 plus interviews saying things to me like, well, of course I pick up the drunk guy's jacket because my husband makes more money than me. Well, should I be penalized because I chose philanthropy and my husband chose private equity for the rest of my life or doing invisible work? Even in the same job, women make less. So that's a terrible argument. Other women were saying to me, Brigid, I'm a better multitasker. I'm wired differently for care. Which is not true. This is not true at all. I went to the top neuroscientists in this country, one of them, because from my clients, I get to fund them. And this old crotchety white man looked at me, Brigid. And it was actually one of the only times I cried during my interviews of the eight years was when he looked at me and said, he said to me, wow, you think women are better wired differently for care? That's your hearing or women are better multitaskers? Well, imagine Eve, we could convince half the population that they're better at wiping asses and doing dishes. How great for the other half of the population? Wow. So that was a very powerful moment that actually made me cry. And I think this old white man thought I was crazy to start sobbing in his office. And then other women were saying in the time it takes me to tell my husband or partner what to do, I might as well do it myself. Well, that's a terrible argument according to the behavioral economist, Dan Ariely, because of course you wanna teach someone how to wipe asses and doing dishes, otherwise you're doing it forever. Right. And finally, women in the same jobs, two colorectal surgeons, two shipping supervisors, were saying to me things like, well, my husband, and this is heterosis gender, that he needs a lot more downtime than I do and I can just find the time. So I just wanna say to everybody before against the solution, there's no way to find time. We're not Albert Einstein, we can't fuck with the space time continuum here. So this premise, what we have to go into the next century, this century believing, is that all time is created equal. That we only get 24 hours in a day and women's time is just as equal as men's time and we have to throw out all of those toxic time messages we give ourselves. Only men with that cultural understanding can we move to a place of domestic rebalance. Yeah. So with that in mind, the whole idea about time and value because I think that's so true, you really hit at the root of what's so much of the expectations are and what's going on. I wanna bring in Stephen and Stephen, you're gonna have to help me with your last name. Deepi Young, you know what? I'm just gonna, if you didn't tell me where to put the accent. So I'm gonna let you introduce yourself and Stephen and I had a really interesting conversation earlier this week. He was on last week's conversation and he put it in the chat. It's like, I'm really learning kind of like my role as a father feels really different with this coronavirus. So we had a conversation. So Stephen, please introduce yourself and talk a little bit about how you were saying that, you know, now that all of you guys are all like living and working on top of each other, you're starting to see things through your wife's eyes, through your partner's eyes and you're beginning to see kind of just what Eve has been talking about, that kind of time and value a little differently. Right, yeah. And hi, thanks so much for having me. My name is Stephen DiPianco. Thank you, Stephen. The hardest question, how does it say my last name? Yeah. And yeah, I'm a father of three. I've got two girls, nine and seven and then a three-year-old boy. And my wife is married. I work full-time as an entrepreneur, actually working to help empower dads to be able to lean in more at home. And then my wife is a therapist. And so during this period, certainly our life has turned upside down in terms of our schedule, our routine. I really love Eve the dirty dozen that you talk about. For sure. In terms of how we broke down, who did what prior to coronavirus? Certainly my wife was doing and continues to do a lot of the invisible work. And it's stuff that some of it we had figured out. So let's say we were pretty good about meals. She was pretty good about groceries and we've had been able to gradually improve over time, downloading apps and taking our grocery lists online and things like that to help us both be able to stay on top of things. But with this, when we tried to improve what we were already doing, often the conversation pre-coronavirus would be like, oh, I don't have time to think about that. I don't have time to get this better. And so those improvements, ways to try to make things more equal just would fall to the wayside. But now that we're a couple of weeks into being both at home with three kids including this preschooler who needs the most attention and both of us working, I'm working full-time. She's working part-time, but her schedule is very much in flux. We're having to talk about how we divide that dirty dozen pretty much every day now and who's doing what. And for me, there's stuff that she's really been super great about calling out, like, I just need some time, like I need some downtime. And so we're working to, okay, she's getting some downtime talking to some friends on a Zoom call. Okay, I'll put the kids to bed, make sure they're bathed and ready to go. And just she called out to me, she said, wow, you did the laundry, you folded the laundry last night, that was great. She said, pre-coronavirus, you probably, it would have been like a 50-50 chance that I would have done that. But now, I think, I don't know, maybe I'm on a streak of two days in a row. And so- You know, Steven, one of the things that struck me when we were talking is that you were saying that before the virus, you know, you might've just walked by that laundry basket and not even noticed it, or just assumed, well, that's her deal. And that the virus is sort of making you realize, well, why am I assuming that that should be her deal? You know, so Eve, I'd love to hear kind of what some of your reflections are, you know, about time and value. And I think it's so interesting, and you write about this a lot in your book, the power of just having conversations and kind of stripping off the mask of assumptions. Steven, I love what you said about, this seems to be a conversation all about time, a lot of metaphors around time, and you know, understanding your wife also needs time, not to always be picking up the drunk guy's jacket in the cold minutes of her day while you get, you know, your three hours to watch sports center and relax. So I really appreciate, Steven, that understanding. And I think, you know, really the beauty of conversation. So let's just talk again as a mediator. So what I was saying to you before as mediators, we often say the presenting problem is not the real problem. So is this really about, again, drunk guy's jackets or who's folding the laundry? No, but this is what it's really about. What it's about is trust. And this is what I mean. What I mean is that I talk in organizational management language. So this is the typical situation before corona, before fair play, people play. This is what was happening. Think about mustard, right? You think about mustard and how it got in your refrigerator. How did that French's yellow mustard get there? Well, somebody has to know your second son, Johnny, likes French's yellow mustard on his protein, otherwise he chokes, right? That's what we call conception. Then somebody has to, and this is in the workplace. We call this a DRI, the directly responsible individual. Somebody in your home has to monitor that mustard when it's running low and put it on a grocery list with everything else you need for the week. That is what we call an organizational management, project management planning. And then we have to get our butt to the store to purchase the yellow mustard. Now, in my 500 plus interviews, regardless of socioeconomic status and regardless of ethnicity, that's where men were stepping in in heterocyst gender relationships. They were executing that execution phase of going to buy the mustard. And the problem is, Steven, you guys are coming home with spicy Dijon every freaking time. And I asked you for French's yellow. And how do you not know you've been living in our house for eight years, Steven? And how do you not know that Johnny likes yellow mustard and not spicy Dijon, right? So it's not really about the mustard, it's about trust. And so men, why Fair Play became a love letter to men was because men all over this country were saying things to me, like I would do more in my home, but I can't get anything right. And then women were saying to me, Eve, you wanted me to trust in with the estate planning card, my living will, the dude can't even bring home the right type of mustard. Right, saying, what is this? What is this? This is not about mustard, as immediately we often say, presenting problem, not the real problem, the real problem is trust. When I can trust you to do something reliably and well, as Clayton Christensen said, my favorite Harvard Business School professor who just passed away, he said, the secret to a happy home is doing your tasks reliably and well. And that it comes with context, not control. It comes with owning the full mustard situation, withholding your conception, planning and execution together. That's how we do it in the workplace, those clearly defined expectations. But the only way you're gonna get clearly defined expectations is by communicating. How else would you know? I don't have invisible delegation, communicating. And so, if you invest, I like to say, invest in your relationships like you're investing in toilet paper. Well, people would be hoarding that about now or then, right? Invest in relationships, I promise you it'll prevent less of a shit show. Right? So, that's the squeeze metaphor. But what happens is that there is, you know, a lot of, and someone just said that in, is there, there's something called male mullingering that Dargene Professor Dargene actually talks about pretending to not be competent. But I actually don't think that's the case. What I found in my research was that when you give someone control and not context for nagging, right, go to the store for me. One man said to me, it's not sexy to have my wife be in charge. Once we move, you move to a model of owning your shit, it's very, it's a game changer. I love that owning, owning your shit. And I love that. You know, you've got your shit I do list. And, you know, all this, all this really, I love the toilet paper notion there. But it's, but there, you know, I think this is sort of like the, you know, the great unspoken problem in the United States or really around the world. We don't know how to talk about it. We don't really have, we don't really take it seriously. And yet it is so fundamental with women doing so much of the unpaid, invisible labor. They're not able to compete in the workplace. Men are stuck in that role as well. It really, it really holds all of us back. And we don't really have, it's not like you can pass a national policy even though we're having a hard enough time to do that around things like paid family leave or paid sick days. But it's like the solutions are really very, they really come down to us, you know, and kind of like having that ripple out and in terms of changing the culture. You know, I want to bring in another participant. He said, stay at home dad. And first before I bring a man, I do want to say that people are loving your, your description of women's time like sand, infinite and men's time like diamonds. And that is very, very powerful. Something for all of us to think about. But let's bring in the, I'm not sure how to pronounce his name correctly. I, Peggy Thomas, is that right? He's a stay at home dad. Tell us, are you there? Can you tell us some of your thoughts? Sure. Thank you for doing this. So it's Teji. Thank you. Sorry. No worries, no worries. And I think, you know, this is, it's doing the rounds, but I think when I was experiencing this and I, I don't think I'm the only one, but when you're doing it, it feels like you're the only one. So my children now are 13. I have a son who's 13 years old and I have a daughter who's 11 years old. So I grew up in India, was born there, came to the Bronx, lived in New Jersey, and then moved down to DC. But when, when my son was born, I was juggling grad school. I was, you know, my wife's a pediatrician. So I, you know, was taking care of him full time. And then we moved to Montgomery County. And, you know, I found this like parenting group. Because it was based on this type of way of parenting that I just never experienced. My, my parents were very old school, traditional Catholic, like put your head down, get shit done type of folks. And you're in your prescribed role, right? That was my background too. Men, work, women, house stuff. I don't, and never the twain show me. Yeah. Yep. And it was super hard. For me, because I was also one of the group of my friends to get married earlier and then have kids earlier. So I was like, you know, some of the friends that I know are just starting to now kind of get to that stage. Some, some still not there yet, but it is what it is. But what I find was super isolating because I was also, you know, working on a startup. I was like, where do I fit in? Because when I would go to the playgrounds, like no one would talk to me. Like, and it was mostly moms. And the moms just sort of like kind of, you know, and I've had comments where people are like, oh, like, are you the helper? Meaning like, huh? Like, I'm like, no, I'm like, they're my kids. Like that's my son. That's my daughter. And it was just such an awkward experience. And I didn't get it because I was like, oh, yeah, like most guys don't, and this is very early on, but I think over the years, even for dads who might be in this role, whether it's by choice or whether it's like, I had to figure things out on my own. And I, you know, my wife was at work and I knew she had a busy schedule because she's seeing patients all day long. So, but then I also knew I had no support system because it's just culturally speaking. It's like Indian fathers don't kind of do what I was doing at the time, right? Like you're like, you're supposed to be the head of the household and kind of doing what needs to be conquered type of stuff. But, you know, and so I was in limbo for a long time because I didn't fit in with the moms, but I also really didn't fit it with the dads. So we'll take you. Thank you so much for that comment. So Eve, you know, what do you, you know, you write about this too in your book that, you know, when we thinking about a reset and, you know, I see that we're coming kind of coming down on time. So we're going to have one more, one more comment that I'm going to read to you and then I want to leave some, some closing comments. But, you know, you write about, you know, it's really on all of us, you know, that it's not just men or these big bad, you know, my God, you, you know, you don't notice the laundry that we're all kind of in this system and we're all, we all play a role. So you also talk about the role that women have in this. Can you talk a little bit more about that? Well, especially for Ted G, like you're, you know, this idea, the start of the gendered idea that invisible work, domestic work, our home is not an important organization that we're just going to figure it out. Well, that hurts anybody who's working in the home, whether it's a man or a woman, right? Because the main issue here is that we need to start valuing care. And so what I just want to leave you with Bridget is what I'm going to die in the sword saying to like, the day I die and hopefully we can collaborate for a long, long time and hopefully one day we won't need to, because this will be normalized. But what I want to shout from the rooftops, which applies to Ted, you too, right? Is that an hour holding your child's hand in the pediatricians office is just as valuable to society as an hour in the boardroom. And if that's what we can get out of this crazy experience, that we begin to value care in a way we didn't before, and I believe we are, we are set up for a really wonderful reset. And I do think that once we value care, then it won't matter who's doing that care, men or women, but it'll help us all. And right now, yes, it is disproportionately affecting women. Yes, women have a motherhood penalty where we lose five to 10% of our wages for every child that comes into the world. But once we watch and model and see men doing it. So again, thank you, Ted, for being an early cultural warrior. Because when we see men doing care, it's really the only way that I believe as a society will finally view an hour in the pediatricians office just as valuable as an hour in the boardroom. I love that, you know, and I think that that, I feel like we could go on for another half hour, hour or more. This is such an important conversation. And you're right. My goal as the director of the better life lab is to put myself out of business where everybody recognizes the value of care, paid and unpaid care. And that, you know, that you need both. And really to find a way to value that in a really real way. So Eve, thank you so much for being. One last thing. See you right now. My favorite sociologist says private lives, public issues. This is not your private life. This is all of us going through this. This is now a public issue. Absolutely. And we need to have. Cultural public policy practice responses. And I think that's another really important thing that you're right, that there's a lot that is done within the family, figuring out what is fair to each, you know, to each unit, but that there's an, that we're all living in this structure and that those are some of the conversations that we need to be having. And thank you. Thank you so much for, for being here. So, and thank you all for participating next week. We're going to have Rachel Deutsch. And we're going to be talking about, you know, the millions of people who have now lost their jobs. We're going to be talking about unemployment in the, in the age of Corona and, and, and what you do there. So thank you, Eve. Thank you so much to my, to David Shulman, my producer, my wonderful, wonderful, but our life lab team. It's a St. Julian who's our, with our program. She's awesome. Thank you to the new America communications team. And thank you all for participating and wash your hands and have a safe and happy week. Well, have a great day. Bye.