By Mira Sundar, Staff Writer
Aiden Locke for Graphic.
Stress and burnout affect women significantly more than men, especially job burnout. Just being a woman requires significantly more energy due to the various structures of our world being designed against her. The question, then, is not whether women are tired, but where her energy goes, and why society feels so entitled to it. One thing is clear: women waste their energy in various different ways.
From the earliest stages of life, women are conditioned to embrace motherhood as the greatest expression of worth, the ultimate job of a woman. The mother becomes the archetype for all forms of feminine energy, so naturally, it becomes her life-duty to disperse herself and overextend. Her value lies in how much she can give, leaving nothing for herself and wasting her energy on everyone else. She has a never-ending list of jobs to complete.
Feminists call it “invisible labor,” the taken-for-granted jobs of cooking, cleaning, and caretaking. Gillian B. White writes in The Atlantic that although labor is divided in U.S. households, women work significantly harder, having to complete tasks such as caretaking or housekeeping, and yet this work remains invisible to all around her. Beyond the physical tasks lies the draining mental labor of managing the emotional climate of every member in her household, the mental load.
Regardless of whether or not she becomes a mother, she cannot escape the constant cognitive work of planning, predicting, and organizing the needs of others. Her labor defines her, as Betty Friedan names this “the cult of domesticity” in The Feminine Mystique, where media, in her case, during post-WWII, “kept women trapped in the home by convincing them that domesticity was their natural destiny.” The duties of the housewife have been burned into the female identity so deeply that to exist as a woman is to constantly maintain the comfort and stability of others. Ultimately, all this work remains unacknowledged, treated as the magical work and invisible foundation of everyone else’s freedom and selfhood.
Particularly in male-dominated fields such as STEM, this energy waste becomes acute. Women must continually prove competence against presumptions of inadequacy, performing excellence in defense, merely to be seen as credible.
Even subtle comments or dismissals force women to expend significant cognitive and emotional resources, as according to research by Kim and Meister (2022), microaggressions in the workforce “trigger a cycle of rumination and self-doubt that may ultimately result in women choosing to leave STEM,” transforming into “an identity threat.” Furthermore, women consequently expend effort gauging intent, risk, and modifying their behavior, taking energy away from actual growth. Simultaneously, she must remain gentle, approachable, and visually appealing. Her constant self-surveillance disfigures her true identity.
The most inescapable of expectations on a woman are those on her body. Every single woman wastes years of her life worrying about how small or large she is in places. Years are tragically lost to body anxiety that could have been spent in creation or true self-definition. Melissa Dahl writes the results of a survey in Today, that women spend about an hour per day in this self-surveillance. The only result of reducing herself through self-objectification is an erosion of agency, as objects are not capable of anything more than appearing.
The male body and perspective remain the unmarked “default,” do not have to acknowledge judgement, while the woman, by contrast, must expend immense effort simply to move through the world due to the invisible rules of beauty and likability, and her forced servitude to everyone around her.
Society will push this worthless gendered labor on women regardless of us gaining the ability to participate in the workforce and other freedoms. We are still but indentured by these disastrous systems, slowly losing ourselves in this slavery, and we only recognize the cost when it’s too late.
What might we achieve and reclaim if our energy—our lives—were truly ours?
Sources
Dahl, Melissa. “Stop Obsessing: Women Spend 2 Weeks a Year on Their Appearance, Today Survey Shows.” TODAY.Com, 24 Feb. 2014, www.today.com/health/stop-obsessing-women-spend-2-weeks-year-their-appearance-today-2d12104866.
Friedan, Betty, and Lionel Shriver. The Feminine Mystique. Penguin Books Ltd, 2010.
Kim, Jennifer Y, and Alyson Meister. “Microaggressions, Interrupted: The Experience and Effects of Gender Microaggressions for Women in STEM – Journal of Business Ethics.” Researchgate, Researchgate, 5 Aug. 2022, www.researchgate.net/publication/362515653_Microaggressions_Interrupted_The_Experience_and_Effects_of_Gender_Microaggressions_for_Women_in_STEM.
Office of Federal Operations. “Special Topics Annual Report: Women in Stem.” Special Topics Annual Report: Women in STEM, U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, 2019, www.eeoc.gov/special-topics-annual-report-women-stem.
White, Gillian B. “The Invisible Work That Women Do Around the World.” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 14 Dec. 2015, www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/12/the-invisible-work-that-women-do-around-the-world/420372/.
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