If you do the heavy lifting of emotional labor in your household, then you know that the weight of it can be crushing. If you aren’t sure that you are shouldering the bulk of emotional labor in your household, here’s a review. Emotional labor is the invisible, unnoticed, unwaged, unwritten, undervalued work women do at home and in the paid workforce. It is the thinking about what’s coming up, what needs to happen, how to look into the future to anticipate birthdays, family meals, holiday dinners, do we have enough toilet paper, how come we don’t have any more ketchup? Granted, all of these little tasks individually are easy to do but also supremely important to the functioning of a well-ordered […]
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The Pandemic: Getting to the Other Side
By: Regina F. Lark, Ph.D. “Calgon® – take me away!” said Loretta. “There’s not enough Calgon® on the planet,” replied Jill. And thus began the joyful noise at the first in-person gathering of my close women friends since the start of the pandemic. You remember Calgon®? The product you sprinkle in the bathtub to soak away your cares and woe, with the promise to take you away! Although Calgon® isn’t explicit about what it will take you from, you can rest assured that women knew, and have always known, that a man can work from sun-to-sun, but a woman’s work is never done. My friends were talking about the toll of the pandemic – how it snatched our best-laid plans […]
Continue readingUpsetting the Status Quo
By: Regina F. Lark, Ph.D. It’s been over a year since I posted the blog, “Grim and Grimmer: The Impact of Quarantine on the Lives of Professional Women.” I’d love to say that we’ve learned many lessons in the 18 months of living with COVID-19 it’s more than disconcerting to realize that we still have a long way to go. What I wrote last year remains true, keeping reading to learn about one woman who is calling for radical change in how we do business, and upsetting the status quo. A new word entered our vocabulary this summer: She-Session. C. Nicole Mason, President of the Institute of Women’s Policy Research, coined this term which refers to an economic downturn where […]
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