This post is a review of What’s On Her Mind: The Mental Workload of Family Life. By Allison Daminger. Princeton University Press. 256 pp. $29.95.

In 2018, a comic entitled “You Should Have Asked” depicted a harried mom whose male partner is seeking instructions before pitching in on household and childcare tasks. “The mental load,” the artist wrote, “is almost completely borne by women. It’s permanent and exhausting work. And it’s invisible.”

In What’s On Her Mind, Allison Daminger, a professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, draws on extensive interviews with 76 different gender and 18 LGBTQ couples to provide an informative analysis of the near-constant “background job” of cognitive (non-physical) labor in families. Daminger demonstrates that although many Americans endorse gender equality, a substantial majority of women do most of the cognitive (and more than their fair share of the physical) work. She explains why and suggests how a more balanced allocation of responsibilities might be achieved.

Studies of housework tend to focus on concrete tasks, including cooking and cleaning, that are relatively easy to measure in minutes and hours. By contrast, Daminger emphasizes,........

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