The Digital Load

Ten years ago, a family's paperwork lived in a drawer. Now it lives in apps, portals and inboxes, and each of them has a login.

The school has a portal for homework, another for payments and a messaging app for the class. The doctor has a patient app. The dentist sends texts. The insurer, the energy company, the bank, the after-school club: each has an account, a password and a stream of notifications. Somebody in the house holds all of them. In most homes I visit, it is the woman.

A new layer

The digital load is an administrative layer that didn't exist in this form a generation ago. It is mostly small tasks. Check the portal. Approve the trip. Top up the lunch account. Book the vaccination. Reset the password. Read forty messages in the parents' chat to find the one that matters.

Each takes a minute. Together they take a surprising amount of attention, and they have one feature that makes them heavier than they look. They arrive constantly, on the phone in your pocket, at any hour.

Why it falls to her

Usually there was no decision. When the school asked for a contact email, she gave hers, because she was filling in the form. When the doctor's practice launched its app, she downloaded it, because she booked the appointments. Each account was opened by whoever happened to be doing the task at the time, and the account holder became the task holder for good.

A 2021 survey by KFF, the American health policy organisation, shows the pattern for health care. Around two thirds or more of mothers said they usually chose their children's doctors, took them to appointments and made sure follow-up care happened, compared with fewer than one in five fathers. The survey was run during the pandemic and relies on people's own reports. But nearly every one of those tasks now runs through a portal, and the portal is in her name.

Monitoring at scale

Allison Daminger's 2019 study of cognitive labor in couples found that women did more of the anticipating and monitoring, the stages of household work that involve watching for what needs doing and checking that it got done. The digital load is monitoring at industrial scale. It is literally a set of feeds to watch.

What makes it tiring is that it never closes. Physical housework has an end, because at some point the dishes are done. A portal is never done. There may be a new message, or a form due on Friday. Checking is the job, and the job resets every time the phone buzzes. I wrote about this kind of always-open work in The List That Never Gets Written Down.

The password test

When I want to understand how a household runs, I now ask one question: who knows the passwords? I mean all of them: the school portal, the doctor's app, the council account, the children's tablets.

In unequal households, one person can answer at once and the other has no idea. In more equal ones, both have access. More importantly, the accounts are divided by domain. If he owns health, the health apps send alerts to his phone and he reads them. If she owns school, the school emails are hers.

Moving it

The digital load is one of the easier parts of the mental load to redistribute, because it is so concrete. A couple can sit down with a list of accounts and decide, one by one, whose name goes on each, then change the contact details that evening. Changing the email address on the school portal does more than a dozen conversations about sharing the load. It moves the notifications, and the notifications are where the noticing happens.

The one thing that doesn't work is simply giving him the password. Access without the alerts leaves her doing the monitoring, with one more person to remind.