Welcome back to Parency Think, to Lucha here, and I'm so happy to bring you my conversation with Eve Rodsky, author of the New York Times best-selling book Fair Play, a revolutionary approach to tackling the eight old problem of, yep, you've probably guessed it, unequalled domestic labour. If you've ever felt overwhelmed by the invisible workload of running a household, or they're simply looking to create a more balanced and fulfilling partnership, this episode is for you. Eve's work has resonated with millions around the world and are in sight with practical and inspiring. Today, we'll be digging into the Fair Play system, exploring why women often become the default parent, and discussing the importance of clear communication and healthy boundaries.
I've got ready to rethink the way you approach domestic life and possibly relationships. Here's my conversation with Eve. Oh Eve, welcome. I'm so happy to be here.
I love your work and your audience, so thank you for having me. Oh, thanks, Eve. You've all said one of my favourite books, Fair Play. I absolutely love your work.
Well because, I mean, it's genius for a start, but also because, I mean, isn't this something that women and couples, families are crying out for? Oh my gosh. Well, not only are we burnt out, but women are being interrupted every three minutes and 42 seconds, but this started with a text that said me, I'm surprised you didn't get blueberries. When I was in the car, I had a breast pump and a diaper bag on the passenger seat of my car.
I had gifts for a newborn baby to return. I had a client contract on my lap because I had dropped out of the corporate workforce. And I started my own firm because I thought having my own company would be more flexible than working for a big corporation. I started crying over this text.
And I remember thinking to myself, as I was sobbing on the side of the road, thinking to myself that my marriage is so cliche that it's going to end over being the fucking fulfiler of my husband's smoothie needs. You know, just, I was so angry and I was sad. I just couldn't believe this was the career marriage combo that I ended up having. I became the default parent and caregiver and chore doer for my entire family.
As I call it in the fair play, I call it the she-fault. And I started to become really aware, really aware of how hard it was for women. I vowed for Matt Dayana, this is going to be my mission, to bring to life this idea that private lives are public issues. This is not okay.
They were all suffering silently and shame thinking if we just wake up an hour earlier, if we have three different new life hacks or software programs that our life is going to get easier. This is systemically unfair. We're really feeling optimistic to do this is our time. And thank you for being a cultural warrior with me and having here so we can really dissect what the frick does this.
It doesn't make any sense. Let's dive into parental child. Like, do you believe that men lean into a particular kind of version of themselves in a relationship that means that women take over the lion's she. So the question, I really thought really long and hard because actually fair play was a love letter to women when I started to write it.
It actually became a love letter to men because what I'm seeing is that the system, there's like a trifecta, there's like three bombs that sort of went off on us, I think, in modern parenting. So it is the ideal worker expectation, right, that we have to sort of be in our button of chair for 12 hours that, you know, money and is it be all end all, you know, in terms of success, right? We don't value care. I ask many men, do you believe in our holding your child's hand in the pediatrician's office is just as valuable as an hour in the boardroom.
And so many professional class men could not say they believe that, right? And in addition, we also have this intense, adventurous parenting that has sort of been thrown on us. Now we have people who spend 10 hours on bento boxes for their children's lunch with like Elsa shaped fucking quinoa pancakes, you know, that's also a big part of it. Jesus, what a load of bullshit.
Yeah, it's just bullshit. I think it's just the way we've all been conditioned. And so to me, part of being a cultural warrior is saying, Oh, even my husband does a dishes. Great.
Then sing it out loud, right? Men need to peer in out loud. We need to skip out of the office and smile when we leave at three o'clock and take our children to the pediatrician's office, right? And be proud that we're holding their hands.
We all have to start normalizing care because otherwise it's just going to continue to follow women. But it's completely easy for men to do that. I mean, they're going to get some kind of a medal for doing that. You know, of course they are.
They're going to get points. They're going to get people clapping them and smoothing their heads and saying on to so fucking clever, whereas if we step out of the office, that's not the case, isn't it? The strongest bias against women is motherhood. And it all stems from this idea that once women have children, we are perceived as not being committed to the workforce.
So ironically, when I really wanted to look at this issue and I thought maybe I would tackle workplace bias, what I came to realize over eight years was that nothing is going to change unless we deal with the last frontier feminism. And ironically, that last frontier is in the place closest to us, our homes. And that is why I'm obsessed with the home. That's why I believe in systematizing the home and treating our home is our most important organization, which is what Fair Play does.
How do you do it? And you'll have to practice. So I just want everybody to understand that there's no magic bullet here. So the Fair Play system is based on ownership mindset.
And that was easy for Seth, right? He got it because he does that at work. So for him, when I said to him, I want you to own garbage. And that means getting the trash bins actually out before trash day and actually putting the bag back in, put the damn bag back in, right?
That was the ownership mindset. He got that. So what would happen was he would say he was owning it, but I would still be staring at him all day. And he noticed this and he said, look, you're my garbage stalker.
This is not working. And so I actually sat set down early on in the Fair Play testing phase. And I said, I love that the ownership mindset. Thank you for taking over garbage.
Yes, I'm your garbage shadow. But here's why. Here's a story about me that you actually don't know. Do you know that I didn't grow up with a garbage can?
I actually just had a takeout bag in my kitchen, which would spill out all over the floor, my work nights. And I put my disabled brother to bed as early as 10, 11 years old. And so when I see a banana peel starting to overflow in the garbage, I am eight, nine, 10 years old again in a house in an apartment by myself with a single mother and a disabled brother and I don't want to go back there. And then Seth was able to say to me, well, that's interesting, but you know, I grew up with a housekeeper.
So I don't give a shit about garbage. So what happens when you're so divergent over something that has to get done every day? I'm just going to say, no, no. And so we were able to still, Seth was able to say, I know it matters to you.
So what I'm going to tell you is I'm going to take garbage out once a day before we go to bed. I'll put it in my calendar like a work appointment. That's our minimum standard of care. And that was it.
And then it was the first time in my life where I felt like something was actually changing in my household. When you said I sat Seth down, my kind of real, almost evisceral response to it, like, oh, it sounds like you owned this sitting him down. I did sit him down because that was how we communicated about that. We did not communicate as a practice when I sat Seth down, right?
Because that is the core premise of what I wrestled with with airplay. The new show, which is why am I writing to women? It is not because I believe that this is our problem to solve. But what I do believe is that we've been so complicit in our own oppression.
Society has strained us to believe that it could build a backs of our society on the unpaid labor of women, right? And it has conditioned us it's worth to believe that this is okay. But I'm asking women to be the agents in their own life because it requires the people who are being oppressed to start being agents in their own awakening. Because at the end of the day, we are the ones often in the home who are using what I call toxic time message to devalue their own time.
And that actually became the core premise of their play, which was that we treat as a society, we treat men's time as finite, like diamonds, and we view and value women's time as infinite like sand. I would ask women from all walks of life, why are you the one that picks up the call from the school? Why not your husband, right? Number two was Morn Sidious.
That was the, I'm a better multitasker argument. I had to go to a neuroscientist, Nusha. I went to one of the top neuroscientists and asked him, are women better multitaskers? Inherently, why are you differently for care?
He looked at me like I was crazy. There's no gender difference in the brain. He said to me off the record that we have conditioned ourselves to think we're better at wiping asses and doing dishes and what we take pride in it. And then finally, it was argument we mentioned before this time, it takes me to tell him her what to do.
I should just do that myself. And for that one, I went to Danarie Ellie, who's a very popular behavioral economist. And I said, is that a good argument for women? And he said, the worst argument he's ever heard for women, of course it makes sense to teach, quote unquote, teach men out of white the asses and do the dishes because otherwise you're doing it forever at the expense of your finite time.
We only get the same amount of time as men. Do you believe that your time is worth guarding the same way your partner guards their time? That was the big question. That's ultimately why we're two women.
We have to change that for ourselves before we can change the patterns and dynamics in our home. Absolutely. Of course. This is not something that changes overnight because it was such a hard, hard lesson for me to learn when I realized, you know, how much society had done to me to, you know, I never thought in a million years we could change that pattern until I started to realize how fucked up that was that I dropped out of the workforce to protect my husband's time.
Oh, powerful talk. So can we get a boundaries? Yes. Okay.
So that's why ultimately this became a conversation around the permission of being unavailable as nor effort on my favorite feminist as you know, you can be the victim of your own life or you could be your own heroine. I had to stay to sess. I noticed that you get four hours after our kids go to bed to watch Sports Center and to finish a PowerPoint deck and to work out, whereas I'm doing things in service of our household until the minute my head hits the pillow at midnight and it is patently unfair that you get four hours to choose how you use your day and I get none. Not one minute of our day in the way our system is set up right now where I get to choose how I use my time and I do a man's more time choice over how I use my day.
And that that required me being very, very clear with myself that I wasn't going to live like that anymore. And that's why I say it's about a boundary. Yes. How many listeners here believe you have a permission to be unavailable from what I call the three P's right?
You're sort of your role as a partner, a parent and a professional and uninterrupted day for yourself. Does that sound like fiction or is that something that you do? Because I know that even for myself when I would take an hour to go to this, we also want to weekend other women would say to me who's watching our kids. This is a societal conditioning to be available and to be guilt and shamed if we do this subversive thing for spending any time on ourselves.
I always say if you haven't got your house in order, then it doesn't matter how much ambition you've got. It doesn't matter how clever you are, how smart, how educated, what law degrees, what this, that the other you've got. If you haven't got that in place, then you're tying your feet together. It is everything.
If I can say one thing today and that your listeners take away, it's that so many of us treat communication as a means to an end. And I'm here to say that as a mediator, as some of these work with families for a decade, and what I've learned is that most effective communicators and families are ones that understand a communication as a practice. Ultimately, what I realized for families, especially in couples, was that the main communication vulnerabilities that people were doing were two folds. Then it was them telling me they don't communicate about domestic life, but they really do.
So for example, a woman early on in my research says to me, I don't communicate about domestic life. And then I find out she has an Instagram account called the shit my husband doesn't pick up, and she probably shamed some on Instagram for everything that's on the floor. So what I'm here to say to everybody is you're already communicating about domestic life. So that's the one important thing to recognize is that so many people say they can't have these conversations, but actually they're already having these conversations.
Yeah. And then the next number two big component was hands down over the majority of people I spoke to said that they're biggest vulnerabilities they give feedback in the moment. They use bad timing. They have terrible tone.
That feedback in the moment is toxic. And the only way to stop that is to have that check in or another time when you can provide feedback. So again, if anybody takes anything practically away from today, a one is that you're already communicating about domestic life. You feel less scared to have these conversations.
And number two, we have to stop giving feedback in the moment. Yeah. So they're amazing both. I mean, the piece about giving feedback in real time, you know, without any stepping away from it is really interesting, isn't it?
Because that is when we can really, really damage the relationships around us. That's definitely something that I need to rethink about. Well, I think about it. If you recognize you're there just as a practice, you're not communicating as a means to an end, that you keep coming back to attend in a night check-in or 10 minutes in the morning where you're saying, this is just our practice.
It is a very transformative exercise. And I will say it's been more transformative than anything that I've done that that commitment to that check-in. Oh, I love it. I'm so, so privileged to have you on the show.
I'm happy to be here. And thank you. I know you have a really amazing guest. So I'm so excited that you had me on as well.
I hope that my conversation with Eve gave you a lot to think about. It's so easy to fall into the trap of gender, sorry, I mean traditional gender roles and end up feeling overwhelmed and we all know it resentful. But it's insight. Reminders that we have the power to create a more equitable and fulfilling partnership.
By embracing open communications, setting healthy boundaries and implementing systems like Fair Play, we can reclaim our time and rediscover the joy in our relationships. Don't forget to check out her book Fair Play, which is available wherever books are sold. Thanks for listening. Until next time, keep loving and thinking.
Take care, everyone.