Millennials were raised on girl power. The Spice Girls told us what they wanted, Destiny’s Child bought their own diamonds, Buffy saved the world, Elle Woods triumphed at Harvard Law, and Mulan defended China. The message was relentless and exhilarating for 90s girls: You can make your own money, have a big career, and become the hero of the story. What popular culture didn’t imagine was that the men who would eventually live with these female heroes would need to change, too. Now that this cohort is in the thick of their parenting years, it’s clear that the enormous cultural project of teaching girls and women about equality was not matched by an equally deliberate project aimed at boys and men. We taught women to do the things men do without teaching men to do the things women do.
Many of these women in heterosexual couples just got more work. Despite making up roughly half of the U.S. workforce, women spend significantly more time than men on housework and caregiving, and that doesn’t include the mental load. In a University of Southern California study, mothers reported shouldering 73 percent of the cognitive labor of running a household: the anticipating, planning, organizing, and delegating that happens before a task even gets done. “Sometimes I wonder if I’m just a tradwife with a corporate salary,” a TV executive said to me as she considered the division of labor at home. For a generation that was promised things would be different, the frustration is bubbling over. But there’s good news: men have finally entered the chat.