The invisible work of running a household: who carries it, and what it costs

Across two German surveys of 368 women and 1,871 mothers, women reported doing 84.2% of the invisible household work -- planning, organising, remembering -- against 69.4% of the visible tasks. Mental load correlated with negative affect (r = .36), anxiety (.33) and depression (.26).

"Mental load" names the part of running a household that leaves no trace: remembering the dentist appointment, noticing the shoes have got too small, holding the whole schedule in your head. Researchers led by Stefanie M. Jungmann ran two German online surveys -- 368 women, then 1,871 mothers -- to separate that invisible work from the visible kind and ask what it costs. The split was stark: women reported handling 84.2% of invisible tasks against 69.4% of visible ones, so the inequality is not in the cooking and cleaning but in the thinking behind them. They were also significantly more dissatisfied with how invisible work was divided, and that dissatisfaction belonged almost entirely to mothers: women without children reported essentially no difference between the two kinds of task. The reasons people gave were consistent, and revealing -- the most common were that the work is never finished and simply repeats, that there is too much of it, and that it leaves no break or time for oneself. Mental load tracked with worse mental health: positive affect fell slightly, while negative affect correlated at r = .36, generalised anxiety at .33 and depressive symptoms at .26, all modest-to-moderate associations. Two limits shape what this can support. Both studies are single snapshots, so nothing establishes direction -- carrying more invisible work might raise anxiety, or being anxious might make the same workload feel heavier, and the data cannot separate those. And recruitment ran through university mailing lists, Instagram, X and parent forums with no incentive, which selects for women who already recognise "mental load" as describing their life. The percentages should therefore be read as describing this self-selected group, not as a population estimate of how German households divide labour. Notably, some participants reported no burden at all.