The issue of gender balance at home is a critical conversation to have. As Eve says, women are often the “she-fault” parent...the assumption by many men is that “she’s got it”...and “she’ll let me know what she needs.”
This will no longer do.
(also as a note…Eve and I spend a lot of time talking about gender balance…but these principles hold true for same sex couples as well…however, it’s hetero-normative couples that have the biggest challenges! In either case, the insights about applying these work tools in our home lives still stands…)
Eve’s New York Times Bestselling book “Fair Play” shows the magnitude of the issue, and what’s at stake - if there’s no gender equality conversations at home, how can we expect them to happen at work? And what are we teaching the next generation?
But the real reason I wanted to have Eve on the show is HOW she approaches the problem….with a simple deck of cards.
Listing out ALL the tasks that happen in a household and then playing the game “who will hold which card...and why?” is a very very different conversation from “You aren’t doing enough”.
When I talk about the Men’s work that I do, people often ask - what is it? What is it for? And yes, men need to start doing their own emotional work, and Eve and I touch on this, too.
This is also men’s work - Men should ALL go buy and read this book and have this conversation with their partners: What does it take to keep our home life running? Who is doing what? And how can we make the split fair?
Aside from the critical social message Eve is sharing with us, as a facilitator of innovation and collaboration, I love hearing Eve talk about how these techniques of physicalization, visualization and play have worked in her own job as a consultant to shift challenging dialogs. As a person who’s been unpacking the components of a conversation in my Conversation OS Canvas, it’s comforting to see how powerful a physical anchor and a playful invitation can be in transforming a conversation.
Establishing the DRI - the directly responsible individual - is a key idea in corporate team dynamics...and it’s clear that establishing a DRI at home is an idea whose time has come. It’s amazing to see Eve leverage her Harvard Law School training and years of organizational management experience to create a gamified life-management system
to help couples rebalance all of the work it takes to run a home and allow them to reimagine their relationship, time and purpose.
I’m so excited that Eve made time to be on the program and hope you enjoy the conversation...and find a way to create more Fair Play in your home and at work.
And get her book, Fair Play here.
More about Eve Rodsky
Eve Rodsky is working to change society one marriage at a time with a new 21st century solution to an age-old problem: women shouldering the brunt of childrearing and domestic life responsibilities regardless of whether they work outside the home.
In her New York Times bestselling book Fair Play: A Game-Changing Solution for When You Have Too Much to Do (and More Life to Live), she uses her Harvard Law School training and years of organizational management experience to create a gamified life-management system
to help couples rebalance all of the work it takes to run a home and allow them to reimagine their relationship, time and purpose.
Eve Rodsky received her B.A. in economics and anthropology from the University of Michigan, and her J.D. from Harvard Law School. After working in foundation management at J.P. Morgan, she founded the Philanthropy Advisory Group to advise high-net worth families and charitable foundations on best practices for harmonious operations, governance and disposition of funds.
In her work with hundreds of families over a decade, she realized that her expertise in family mediation, strategy, and organizational management could be applied to a problem closer to home – a system for couples seeking balance, efficiency, and peace in their home. Rodsky was born and raised by a single mom in New York City and now lives in Los Angeles with her husband Seth and their three children.
Full Transcription
Daniel:
It means that I'm going to keep proper record on all of the things that I can just record on.
Eve Rodsky:
Okay. Good.
Daniel:
Which means that I can officially welcome you to The Conversation Factory.
Eve Rodsky:
So happy to be here.
Daniel:
Thrilled that you're here. This is the first time I'm interviewing somebody who knew me from when I was a kid. Do you think you're the same as when you were in high school, or are you different?
Eve Rodsky:
I think everybody has the same fundamental core, and we draw on some of that. But ultimately, I feel like a way much more evolved version of that 14 year old. I definitely don't wear a grill anymore, I don't have any gold teeth. But I think we're still ourselves at our core, what do you think?
Daniel:
Well, I feel like your voice feels familiar, generally. Even though it's obviously different, there's a core to your patterns, that are you.
Eve Rodsky:
Same thing.
Daniel:
I think that's really interesting, right?
Eve Rodsky:
I remember you being provocateur, that's what I would call you. I don't know why. I don't have any distinct memories of why I think that about you, but I do remember feeling like you were a little bit counterculture, in a good way.
Daniel:
Thank you. Well, it's interesting because Ron, who maybe we were all doing physics together, possibly. I can't remember now.
Eve Rodsky:
I think I failed that class.
Daniel:
I don't remember a lot of physics, Ron was a really smart guy and I remember he was also a smart ass. He was at a facilitation event I was doing last night and he was like, "You were just like this in high school. You were open and honest, and real." I was like, "I really hope I've evolved since then." So that's-
Eve Rodsky:
No. But I liked that about you, that's what I said I remember that about you. Just feeling like you were a reverend in a good way.
Daniel:
Thanks. It's funny, we just had our 25th high school reunion, June?
Eve Rodsky:
Yeah.
Daniel:
You came back and a lot of other Peglegs came back into my awareness. At that moment, I was like, "Whoa, it was a big deal, she's blowing up. What is up with this book?"
Eve Rodsky:
Thank you.
Daniel:
I looked at it and it's such a fascinating topic, and I really wanted to bring you on because we facilitate all these conversations about facilitation and meetings, and org change. I also care about how all of those conversation dynamics matter in everyday day-to-day conversations. Your book is all about how to transform maybe the most important conversation that we have, which is the one we have with our significant other, our day-to-day, the person we spend the most time with. I know you tell the story a lot, but can you tell me a little bit about the origin story of how you decided to undertake this project? Because it's quite a project that you're undertaking. It's a big conversation you're trying to change.
Eve Rodsky:
Yes, I'm on a quest to change a cultural conversation. But ironically, Daniel, things I like to say the biggest problems come from the smallest details and that's how they manifest. We can talk about what the real underlying issues are. But for me, I write about this in the book, but it really is a seminal day for me. It was a day that my husband texted me, "I'm surprised you didn't get blueberries." Maybe at another day, that would have felt fine. It's about a combination of where I was at the time, but you can picture that scene or at least picture with me.
Eve Rodsky:
But I was a mom of a second son, I just had my second son, Ben. I had gifts to return at the backseat of my car, I had a breast pump, diaper bag on the passenger seat of my car. I was rushing to get my three-year-old at his toddler transition program, my older son. In America because we value working families, those programs lasts like about 10 minutes. I'm getting this text in the midst of this crazy day I'm having and it just broke me, it broke me to my core. [crosstalk 00:04:19]. It was, I was like, "What the fuck is this? You get your own blueberries."
Eve Rodsky:
But really what I was thinking was, "Wow, if my marriage is going to end because I feel like I'm out of here, it should be over something way more dramatic. Like my affair with an NFL player or somehow a big dramatic fight in the Caribbean. Not over off season blueberries." But I think for me-
Daniel:
It's a bigger question, we should not be buying off season fruit because-
Eve Rodsky:
Correct. We should not be, no, it's disgusting.
Daniel:
The cost of [inaudible 00:04:51] is too high.
Eve Rodsky:
I agree. It's too high and look the fuck, why was I his [inaudible 00:04:55] his smoothie needs? There was just too many things that were happening to me. But at my core, I was thinking to myself, "How did I used to be able to manage employee teams, and now I can't even manage a grocery list apparently? But more importantly, how did I become the she-faults?" Yeah, that's what I call it in Fair Play, right? The she-fault for every single household and domestic task. It wasn't supposed to happen to me.
Eve Rodsky:
I grew up in a single mom, education was my tool out. I met you at Stuyvesant. That was our public high school, that was for smart kids who couldn't afford private schools. But my mother was alone and from seven, eight years old, I was helping her with her bills, noticing the difference between regular bills and final shutoff notices, eviction notices. I said, "I want to have an equal partner in life." Also on top of that, I'm a Harvard trained mediator, we're both trained to facilitate and to bring forth conversation. For me, the fact that if I was trained to use my voice and I'm a product of a single mom, and this is still happening to me, and I figured it must be happening to other people.
Daniel:
Right. People who don't have these resources.
Eve Rodsky:
Correct.
Daniel:
I want to just double stitch on this idea that the gender gap in both physical labor, organizational labor and emotional labor exists and that the cost is very high. I don't think people necessarily understand that there's a real cost to this. Maybe we can just talk about identity costs, the relationship costs, the wellness cost.
Eve Rodsky:
Well, I think I appreciate that. I think the first part that's really relevant, especially to your listeners, right, is the cost of your relationship. When you go with an unbridled resentment for a long period of time because you're surprised in how your life is turning out. Because then what that turns into from that unbridled resentment is also how you start feeling about yourself worth as a woman, especially in a cisgender hetero relationship. But still this affects same sex relationships. I have a really good data set to share with you, but we'll talk hetero cisgender right now, right?
Eve Rodsky:
Because this is a man woman problem, this is a gender division of labor issue. I'm very clear that I'm talking to men and women. What happens is you get this unbridled resentment and then it starts changing who you are as a human being. Then what starts happening is that you may want to opt out of the workforce because the domestic workload, especially after kids is too high. Then all of a sudden, you're in a place where you're surprised. There's a lot of data about how people end up surprised that things don't look the same in midlife as they thought they were going to.
Eve Rodsky:
I think, Daniel, too many people are talking about the life-changing magic of organizing your junk drawer, that's fine. But really I believe there's life-changing magic in long term thinking, and setting up systems and habits to allow for that planning. Data shows that when you plan, your life may not turn out exactly the way you wanted it to, but it looks a lot better than if you don't.
Daniel:
Yeah. Well, so the thing that I really enjoyed, there was a story you tell about how, and maybe this is just what women are taught I don't know when these things happen, by the way. I studied conversation dynamics and men talk more than women. There's some data that shows that in groups, men talk more than women. When they talk, they hold the floor longer, and that they interrupt women more than they interrupt men. I don't know where this comes from. I do know that women say to me, "I feel like I can't speak up or that it's not okay to break in to the conversation." There was this quote you had of like, "You're already communicating. It's not a story to share."
Eve Rodsky:
Yes.
Daniel:
The wet laundry on the pillow story.
Eve Rodsky:
Okay, let's talk about that talk. Let's talk about how women communicate. Let's talk about women and men, but let's talk especially about women.
Daniel:
Get effective communication, right?
Eve Rodsky:
Correct. Well, I think, yes, men may talk longer, holds the floor in work situations. But actually what I find is, a lot of men retreat in the home, right? Why are they retreating? Well, I think one of the funny things is that, I have men and women saying to me, "We don't communicate about domestic life, right? We've never had these types of conversations." One of my favorite provocative questions to ask is, "Recite your wedding vows, and tell me how you're living them on a daily basis," right? People look at me like I'm insane, right.
Eve Rodsky:
Basically, what's happening is we start getting to these patterns because we're not conversing, we're not investing in our home conversations. What happened or we were supposed to just think we're going to figure it out, or that it's not sexy, or it's not fun to talk about systems or domestic life. But when you do, "Don't do that." I had a lot of women especially say to me, "I can't communicate with my partner, I just can't. It's too triggering. To ask him to hold cards or to tell him to do more," or whatever they thought their play was about, because it's not about that.
Eve Rodsky:
But that's what they were saying to me, and I said, "Well, you don't communicate about domestic life really?" They'd say, "No. We just don't." Okay, so one woman says that to me, right? Ironically as you were saying, 20 minutes later, she's telling me about the time that she's dumping wet clothes in her husband's pillow and he forgot to put the wet clothes from the washer into the dryer.
Daniel:
Then they get sticky, do you wash again?
Eve Rodsky:
Right. Why are they on this pillow, what about the woman who said to me she doesn't communicate about domestic life, but then I find out she has an Instagram account called the shit my husband doesn't pick up. She's publicly shaming him on Instagram every time he leaves something on the floor. Don't tell me you're not communicating about domestic life. In your previous relationship and you're in one now, I could go onto your next camera and I'll see five ways you've communicated about domestic life today, and you know that, right?
Daniel:
Yes.
Eve Rodsky:
We can see that communication happening, but people think they're not communicating. What I'd like to say is you are already communicating. I'm asking for a conversation shift, not a start.
Daniel:
There's another way that I think women are communicating, which is, I have this quote here, which you mentioned in one of your interviews but I've heard it said by my mother. By the way, my mother and my fiancé will listen to this interview.
Eve Rodsky:
Oh, good.
Daniel:
I will be held to task no matter what. But this idea of and the time it takes me to explain it, blah, blah, blah, I might as well just do it myself. That's another thing that is communicated. I think so in UX and there will be design flow goes into this. In the design world, we talk of this idea of de-skilling users. If we do something-
Eve Rodsky:
Ah, I love that.
Daniel:
This is a dangerous topic, I was thinking of this on my way over. I do not want to accuse women of de-skilling men.
Eve Rodsky:
No. But they are.
Daniel:
For their capability, but that they are communicating always, "I've got this." Certainly, my dad will be like, "I'll just wait until she tells me exactly what to do and then I won't get into trouble."
Eve Rodsky:
Correct. That is the number one thing why Fair Play became a love letter to men, is because we are 100% de-skilling men. I think that happening is a culture. This is why I want to get to the crux of my findings before we get into the meat of the solution. Which is, after interviewing 500 men and women that mirrored the US census, which took a long fricking time. But I did it because I wanted to understand why these small details were causing the biggest problems, right?
Eve Rodsky:
That I'm crying obviously over the blueberries, that I have a man in White Plains, New York, telling me he's locked out of his house over a glue stick, and he doesn't know whether he can go back home because he forgot. He got a random text in the middle of his day to bring home a glue stick and he forgot, and then his wife lost it. On her side, right, she'd been working three weeks on a homework project. She just needed that glue stick to put the damn higher Albert Einstein pictures on the poster board.
Daniel:
But the stakes are high, though-
Eve Rodsky:
Exactly. They're the manifesting small. But like you said, the stakes are high, but a very provocative core crux of what I found was that men and women in society don't value women's time, the same that we value men. Men's time as diamonds in our society and women's time is sand. What happens is that women, and this is back to the de-skilling of men, women became the worst purveyors of these societal messages that their time is invaluable. We know from a male perspective and societal perspective, right, when men are making decisions and corporations-
Daniel:
I heard her speaking over there, by the way.
Eve Rodsky:
Oh my God, amazing. She has All Time is Critical Equal, I love it. Can we take a picture of you holding that up? Hold on.
Daniel:
Absolutely. Sure.
Eve Rodsky:
I'm going to reverse.
Daniel:
-seeing it.
Eve Rodsky:
I love it, and this is so cool. Okay, I'm going to have to post that, okay.
Daniel:
But why would it be the case, do you have a sense of ... We know that that is the perception.
Eve Rodsky:
Well, especially from pay of equity, right? We know that in the workplace, that a woman's hour as a doctor is not paid the same. We know that society doesn't value our time the same because they don't pay us the same for it. But what happens when women start saying that to themselves. Well, I had women all over saying things to me, "I'm wired differently. I'm a better multitasker, that's why I'm doing it." Well, there's no difference, Daniel, in our brain's ability to multitask. It's actually very shaming to men to say that somehow you guys don't have executive function to pick up groceries, it's just bullshit.
Eve Rodsky:
One crotchety neuroscientists, my favorite old dude, white dude, looked at me when I said, "Are women wired differently, because a lot of women are saying to me that they're doing extra work in the home because their brains are different, and they have better executive function than men." This guy just looks at me and he goes, "Eve, imagine we could convince half the population that they're better at wiping asses and doing dishes? How great for the other half of the population?" Then other women were saying exactly what you said to me, Daniel, which is in the time it takes me to tell him what to do, I might as well do it myself.
Eve Rodsky:
I went to the top behavioral economists, the professors in the world, and they said that's a terrible argument to de-skill men like that. Because if we're not inviting them into the home and you keep saying all the time, "It takes you to tell you what to do, I'll do it myself." Women are going to keep doing it over and over, whatever it is; wiping asses, doing dishes. Then we're going to be freaking resentful of you guys. Then we're going to divorce over it, 30% of divorces are about these issues.
Daniel:
I would call them roommate issues.
Eve Rodsky:
Roommate issues.
Daniel:
My first wife and I, think just young and stupid and you don't know how to communicate, but it is just the roommate issues. I like it one way, you like it another, how are we arguing over whether or not this sponge should be this way?
Eve Rodsky:
A sponge in this thing has caused two divorces in my data set. That's a lot.
Daniel:
Yeah. It's just wonderful. One thing I want to point out is this idea of that the communication is happening and that conversations, this is my own ax to grind, is that conversations have a place. The conversation shouldn't be happening on the wet pillow, right?
Eve Rodsky:
Yes. I love that. Conversations have a place, that's a great quote.
Daniel:
Well, they exist somewhere. What I love about the cards, and I don't know if we're ready to get there, but-
Eve Rodsky:
Yes. Let's go there.
Daniel:
What immediately sparked me about the cards was, women's time is less valued because it's invisible; all the million little things where you're thinking forward in five steps. We have to get this so that we can do this. Then I have to have that thing so we can have this. When you make all of the work visible, you can then have a conversation about the visibility of who's holding the cards.
Eve Rodsky:
I love that because that's right. It's not about you, right? We're in a relationship, right, Daniel, it's not about you. The fact that you grew up with your mom putting the sponge on the side of the sink and not inside, and there's bacteria on that sponge. It becomes not about you, it doesn't become about me, it becomes about the work. I think the most productive conversation end up being about the work, whatever you're trying to do. If things are getting in the way, whether they're implicit bias, that's what you're working on.
Eve Rodsky:
You're getting people to stop interrupting others or whatever you're doing to make ultimately the conversation about the work. For me cards, as a mediator, as a facilitator for high net worth families, my day job is I work with families that look like HBO show, Succession. One of the issues, right, when they hire me, usually it's when they have at least 150 million in their foundation. They're hiring me to work on a succession plan for their giving their family business. But what happens, right, if you go into a patriarch who's hired you or their family office has hired you.
Eve Rodsky:
When you say, "Well, tell me about your succession," and they say, "Well, I'm not going to die." Well, then there's no conversation, right, that's what happens. Where is the place that you say conversations have a place? Well, there's no place if you're willing to just dead the conversation. What I found was that, once I used cards to gamify like, "What does your legacy look like, does it look like a clock, does it look like a coin?" I had even the most difficult patriarchs who had made billions of dollars in their lives, millions and millions of dollars in their lives open up to me.
Eve Rodsky:
To say, "Well, actually my legacy looks like a coin because my father gave me my first five cents to start my paper routes." It's a tool, so Fair Play ultimately is a card game. You hold a hundred cards that represent every single domestic task. You would have to do 60, if you don't have kids. You're added 40 additional, if you have children. So make people out there rethink about whether they want those kids or not. Then what you do is you hold each card with full ownership. It's not rocket science, it's a very easy card game you play.
Daniel:
I want to talk about ownership because I have a sticky note.
Eve Rodsky:
Oh, good. I want to take another picture of your sticky note.
Daniel:
Well, because there's so many things here in it. What I love about your work is, I have a sticky note from a previous interview I did.
Eve Rodsky:
Oh cool. Can I see it?
Daniel:
Yeah. Sure.
Eve Rodsky:
Oh, cool.
Daniel:
Esther Derby writes about organizational change and she talks about how we're very bad at temporal reasoning, but we're really good at spatial reasoning.
Eve Rodsky:
Cool. That sounds interesting.
Daniel:
Oh, and I love how you are physicalizing the conversation about gender, but also in your mediation and family planning stuff, using metaphor and visualization. I know in my facilitation work is the way you do it, it makes better.
Eve Rodsky:
You have to, it does. Tools make things better, exactly. Again, back to what you and I do similarly, right? It's like getting people to focus on their work, to work focused on the work. What I found over and over again, and now I've been testing these concepts for seven years. I'm three years with the full game, with thousands of couples that look very different from each other. Is that there is something really beautiful about, when emotion is high, cognition is low, right?
Eve Rodsky:
That's what I say as a mediator. The problem is that in a home, the roommate problems, once you are in it with that partner, emotion's high all the time. When you can take and say, "We're going to play this card game over margaritas and tacos." I had this one dude who sent me this awesome Instagram post of him holding the Fair Play cards in Vegas, and he said, "These are not the cards I thought I'd be playing here." But it was so fun. I was going to say, just gamification makes things fun, but that's those tools to get to do the work is really their key.
Daniel:
The first thing just as a sidebar is, I love how you attack this problem; a Styverson kid doing a Westinghouse paper.
Eve Rodsky:
This is Westinghouse all the way.
Daniel:
You go like, "I've got my boards and here's my research, and-
Eve Rodsky:
Binders and binders of women, I like the Rodney quote, right, binders of women. I have to tell you, the secret about the gender division of labor, Daniel, is that it's fucking dry as hell. This is the most boring topic ever and so you have to attack it like a Westinghouse paper. How are you going to bring this to people's attention and make them pay attention in a way that doesn't put them to sleep? We've been talking about these poems for a hundred years and I feel bad for men, because it's boring and it's shaming them.
Daniel:
Do you think it is?
Eve Rodsky:
I do.
Daniel:
This thing is juicy because this is-
Eve Rodsky:
Oh, it is juicy. It's juicy now and I think it is life because again, I think the gamification makes it fun. But I will say that if yo go down these roads of capitalism and work, and all that, your mind can be blown and you could say there's no solution. But this is the beauty. The beauty of it is that, the science is starting to prove what Fair Play found. I think it's also because I have a big sociological sample. A great Atlantic article just came out saying that basically, paid leave, talking about pay equity, it doesn't work unless you have empathy from white men or from men who are in decision making ability.
Eve Rodsky:
That's been the cool thing about my love letter to men, is that, 65% of the info Eve Rodsky emails I've gotten since the book was published, just in October, people had to find me, have been men, over 65%. What I realized from that is that what men were saying to me ... One man said to me, "I do more than you write about." I said thank you for that. The most men were reaching out to say, "This conversation, the way domestic life is working, it doesn't serve men. It just doesn't serve men."
Daniel:
Oh, it does de-skill men. I think the idea that we can't do it and that we can't do our own emotional work, which we haven't talked about that.
Eve Rodsky:
Right. We can talk about that, yes.
Daniel:
But it's a shame and I'm looking at another one of my sticky notes, which is this idea that it doesn't have to be, and maybe people are scared that it does. It's impossible to make it 50/50. We want equalness, we want equality in our relationships, but it's a play and it's a dance, which is why the title of your book is so apropos, right? It is a play.
Eve Rodsky:
It's a play, it's a dance. I love that you got that because I think the most important thing to tell men especially is that, 50/50 is the wrong equation. It hasn't served partnerships for a hundred years. I believe in equity as opposed to equality, and what equity looks like. This is how I will explain now more about the Fair Play system. What do I mean by ownership? Well, in organizational science, right, or in project management, we have these concepts that I bring into organizational work for families and it's all based on this idea of ownership, right?
Eve Rodsky:
When you know your role, when there's fairness and transparency, when there's specifically defined expectations, things work better for an organization. You get there really by this idea of context, not control. Whereas right now, the home is all control, not context, so get me that glue stick, pick up the milk. Like your mom said to your dad or your dad said, "I'm going to get in trouble unless I do it exactly right." But the best workplaces are working on this DRI model, the directly responsible individual coined by Apple, or the rare responsible person coined by Netflix.
Eve Rodsky:
Where you don't wait to be told what to do. Imagine walking into your boss's office or even to me, say you're a podcast host and you say, "Hey, what should I be talking about today? I'll just wait here till you tell me what to do." Well, you wouldn't be a very good host of your own show, right? We're used to taking responsibility everywhere. Even my aunt Maryanne, she has a Mahjong group, Daniel, and she told me that ... I said, "Do you have clearly defined expectations in your Mahjong group?"
Eve Rodsky:
She said, "Actually, we do. If you don't bring snack on your snack day twice, you're out." Why is it that aunt Maryann's Mahjong group has more clearly defined expectation than our home? It doesn't feel 21st century to me. This idea of keeping conception planning and execution together, the DRI model is very powerful. I'll just give you one metaphor and it's the metaphor I talk about in the book about mustard. This idea that somebody, right, in your household has to know your second son, Johnny likes French's yellow mustard with his hot dog, or his protein, or otherwise he chokes.
Eve Rodsky:
That's the conception, right? Seeing that and having that knowledge. Then someone has to monitor that French's yellow mustard when it's running low and put it on a grocery list with everything else you need for the week. That's the planning stage. Then someone has to get their butts in the store to get this French's yellow mustard. That's the execution stage in project management. Now, in my 500 plus interviews, I found that men, especially in hetero cisgender relationships, are stepping in at the execution phase, right?
Eve Rodsky:
That's a huge problem because when you guys bring home spicy Dijon every damn time, then you're getting in trouble. Like you said, you know that word, you got in trouble like the way your dad said it. Then men all over this country were saying to me, "Regardless of socioeconomic status, regardless of ethnicity, why would I do more in the home? I can't get anything right," and that was making me sad.
Daniel:
This is the feedback loop.
Eve Rodsky:
Feedback loop. I love that you call the feedback loop because then when women, and we're going to get back to something you asked, I've heard you say before too when I was researching you. But about communication and it has one word, right, it has to do with trust. Because then what women say to me were things like, "Well, my husband take the estate planning card, I'm not going to trust him with my living will, the dude can't even bring home the right type of mustard." Like you said, this is communications about trust.
Eve Rodsky:
When you've been a feedback loop of just shit, when you're in the shit feedback loop, you're not recognizing what actually talking about is trust. When you lose trust in your partner, then everything goes really poorly in the relationship.
Daniel:
Yeah. It colors everything and starts to color everything, and that's when the glue stick is not a glue stick anymore.
Eve Rodsky:
Correct.
Daniel:
Because it's a symbol of not taking responsibility.
Eve Rodsky:
It becomes a symbol of everything that women ... Number one thing women hate about home life according to my 500 plus interviews, is that they can't sleep because they have too much on their brain. The number one thing men told me they hated about home life besides feeling like they were failing all the time, was nagging. They hate it, they really hate it. I get it because I would want to be nagged either, and so the only way to eliminate that is this model of ownership.
Daniel:
Well, because I've had these conversations before, and I feel like Jane and I can have the conversation. She can say what she wants to say without it feeling like nagging because I'm welcoming the ... It goes both ways, and I'm like, "Hey, I have something I want to talk to you about. This is just high level, here's the arc. No playing here, but this is what I want." How do you feel like the best way to frame the invitation to this conversation? Because the cards definitely seem like it lowers the bar of risk.
Eve Rodsky:
Yes. Right.
Daniel:
Like, "I want to talk, tah-tah-tah."
Eve Rodsky:
No. Never say we need to talk, ever, ever, ever. Like you said, the invitation is so important and I actually give some tools to women, especially. My mom is of left wing feminist and she said to me, "Why is it that you're asking women to initiate these conversations, why can't men?" I said they can, but we've been waiting a hundred years for men to initiate this conversation. [inaudible 00:29:34] anti-capitalists messaging, I put my favorite feminist, who's Nora Ephron, and she said, "You can be the victim of your own life or heroin." I am talking to women to initiate these conversations, but also men can too.
Eve Rodsky:
Actually that was the beauty of the 65% being men saying, "I want the card game, where can I find the card? I'm ready to play." It was really beautiful to watch men want to initiate these conversations. But I think back to people being so triggered and scared of having had huge blow-ups. Doug Stone, my professor at Harvard, he wrote a book called Difficult Conversations, and I love that book so much. Because I take a quote out of it in Fair Play and I talk about how he says, "Why is it so hard to have difficult conversation? Because if you don't, you're going to be freaking resentful and sitting in the same damn patterns. But if you do, you risk it becoming worse."
Daniel:
Right. You might lose the love of your life.
Eve Rodsky:
Correct, and you're really worried.
Daniel:
Which feels like life or death.
Eve Rodsky:
It does feel life or death. That's why it's back to the idea of, when you gamify something and you can focus on the work, and not the person. The invitation, so what I've seen work and not work. But I've seen not work is; we need to talk, I'm throwing shit on your plates, I'm fucking done, all those situations where you can get to what I call your [inaudible 00:30:52], like add number eight or 10. But what does work and you can tell me what would work for you as a man, I think that'd be very helpful for your listeners. But what I have seen work is when someone is just willing to come to the table when emotion is low, cognition is high, whether it's on a Valentine's day or a trip to Vegas.
Eve Rodsky:
But I do find those very, what I thought would be triggering moments, are actually moments where men are very receptive to saying. When women say, "I want to invest in our relationship," through a gamified tool that takes emotion out, I find men willing to listen.
Daniel:
Yeah. It's so interesting because the nature of a game and I've talked about this on this show a lot. It's important to me because I think in facilitation, inviting people into a game works, "Hey, I know this is silly, but draw your succession plan for me. Humor me," right?
Eve Rodsky:
Right. Exactly. Humor me, exactly. Yeah.
Daniel:
It'll only take a few minutes and then you get something at the end of it. There's this idea that a game has rules and a boundary, and an invitation.
Eve Rodsky:
I love what you just said. It's a boundary, so that's it. You're so good because as I said, I want to take you on the road with me. I think we should write an article together about communication. I really do, I'm just thinking about where to pitch it actually now.
Daniel:
By the way, these ideas, if you've ever read Finite and Infinite Games by a philosophy professor named James Carse, a lot of these ideas come from him.
Eve Rodsky:
I did read James Carse.
Daniel:
Yeah, and Daniel Mesic, who I've had on talks about it, in terms of agility, agile, software development as a game-
Eve Rodsky:
That's the boundary. I think what you just said is so key because ... Yes, I've read James Carse and I'm obsessed with, I love all [Elly Design 00:32:35] thinking stuff out there, I read all that. I read a lot. Like you said, this is my Westinghouse project. This is seven years of just diving into something that I didn't know was a problem and then trying to understand the solutions. But what I love about what you just said is the idea of boundaries. I think, again, back to difficult conversations, if you don't have a boundary around them, they do do no harm.
Eve Rodsky:
That's why I'll tell you just a quick story about what didn't work for me, right? When I first started this idea, I came across this article from 1986, it was a sociologist named Arlene Kaplan Daniel. She articulated these ideas of the mental load, emotional labor, second shift, all these things were basically the two thirds of what it takes to run a home and family fall on women. She articulated as invisible work. That was so transformative for me because there was a modicum of solution in there, right?
Eve Rodsky:
It's what you said before, Daniel, that if you don't value what you don't see, right, how can you ... Even the Bible, right? We have to put words to God, because we have to see it to value it. I was very obsessed with this idea of writing down, and I thought that was going to be my solution. I really did write down every single thing I did that was invisible to my partner, and then ask other women what's invisible to them. I went on a nine-month quest to create something called the shit I do spreadsheets.
Daniel:
Of course, it's a spreadsheet too. That's where it goes.
Eve Rodsky:
That's where it goes. I love Excel, so it was a 98 tab spreadsheet about probably like 17 million megabytes, ended up being over a thousand items of invisible work. Things like; girl scout cookies, ordering in sales, all the way to application of sunscreen, all the way to making school lunches. It became the origin of the game. But when it was this 98 tab spreadsheet, I had this great idea, right, back to our communicating is with boundaries and mediation, and trust. I had this inspired idea just to send off the 17 million megabytes spreadsheet to staff, with just a subject line that said, "Can't wait to discuss."
Daniel:
That's a pretty dangerous invitation.
Eve Rodsky:
Oh my God, talk about no boundaries. For someone who facilitated for a living-
Daniel:
What was his response, was it the face covering OMG?
Eve Rodsky:
Yes. I owned the response, was just that right, the see-no-evil monkey. What happened in my household was a see-no-evil, which again, write lists all fucking work, right, conversations, communications, boundaries do. Then it was even worse than other households because I had women, you can't make this shit up. But I had a woman from, she called me, she leaves me a message on my cell phone. I don't know how she got it, saying, "I received your spreadsheet from my mom's group, from the Jewish Federation of Arizona. I'm just calling to tell you, Eve, that at this rate, I decided to not think in my marriage."
Eve Rodsky:
I felt like should I do spreadsheets and release the shitstorm? I got very scared that it was going to stay there, and then that's where the game started. The game started because I wanted to start putting boundaries around these conversations and rules. That I'll work for my values-based mediation training over a decade, then things started to look up. But when you do things like a giant 19 million megabytes spreadsheet and you send it off with no context of somebody, that's a conversation without boundaries.
Daniel:
Yes. Well, so I want to go back again because not many people will know what values-based mediation is. What's interesting is that when we talk about organizations as being purpose-driven, and in a way we're trying to govern a house the same way based on human-centered design, like what's the ultimate goal so that the children can survive and we need mustard?
Eve Rodsky:
And thrive.
Daniel:
And thrive, and so that we can connect and communicate. Those are the OKRs objective, like don't kill the children, pure souls, there's mustard on the table. Can you talk a little bit about how your skills in mediation do you feel like found its way into this, and what values-based mediation is because I don't think many people know what it is?
Eve Rodsky:
Right. Yes. Well for me, what it is, is this idea of combining organizational development and management with a really deep understanding of how to have what is your why conversations, like you said, right? This idea, OKRs or what is your ultimate goals in the business world. But it comes up a little differently in the home, and I'll explain what I mean. The organizational management side of bringing business concepts like the DRI to the home made tons of sense to me.
Eve Rodsky:
When you hold the conception planning execution, then you know what type of mustard to get. That made a lot of sense to me and it made sense to my husband. We started to try to play this organizational management game about three years ago. I gave him, one of his cars was garbage and he understood that the full ownership meant getting the garbage liner back in, right?
Daniel:
Conception.
Eve Rodsky:
Conception to planning, to execution, to execute-
Daniel:
And resetting.
Eve Rodsky:
And resetting. But the planning means that we live in a house now, we used to live in apartment. Maybe garbage was easier or not, I'll explain. But for us, you have to get the damn bins out on time before the garbage man comes, right?
Daniel:
That's the garbage issue, that's great about men. We were talking about breaking up with New York, but here's what's great about New York, garbage chutes.
Eve Rodsky:
Ah, garbage chutes are so good, I miss garbage chutes so much. They are the best. Incinerators, that's what we called them. I don't think there was even fire there, but that was my mother called it, incinerators, [inaudible 00:38:42]. But yeah, so basically he took garbage, he understood what that ownership meant. But what was happening to me, Daniel, was that I couldn't stop stalking him over garbage, right? He called me, I was his garbage shadow. In the kitchen every time he'd walk in, I'd be just staring at him. My husband himself is tall.
Eve Rodsky:
I'd open the door under the sink, so he would hopefully trip over it and see there was a garbage lying down there, just back to the passive aggressive bullshit that we were talking about. That's when you asked me how my values-based mediation came into this. What I realized was, you can do as much organizational management you want until you're blue in the face. But if you're not going to take one step back and start exploring what is your why for why you are actually doing things, and nothing's going to work. It just doesn't work because it just becomes nagging again, or like a list, or then you forget and I'm pissed.
Eve Rodsky:
What happened was, I timed out the game. I said, "Let's just take a break on this so I can mull on this a little more." I mulled on it, and then I came back to the table when emotion was low and cognition was high. I was able to say to Seth, "Look, here's why I'm stalking over garbage and I want to practice having these types of conversations. I'm stalking you over garbage because I grew up in Stuyvesant town. You know my mom, she's sort of a mess. She's awesome, but she's leaving her keys everywhere, she don't want to drive her kids. So you know my mother, but what you don't know about me, Seth, is that we didn't even have a garbage can in my house."
Eve Rodsky:
We had a small apartment, we didn't have a garbage can. So what we would each do is just grab a takeout bag and start throwing our own garbage into these bags in the kitchen. Then it would just inevitably spill over onto the floor, and there were hundreds of cockroaches or water bugs. God forbid, you open the light at night in the '80s in the lower East side, and especially of garbage is out. I was a very dehydrated child, I was never able to go into the kitchen for water. But what I said to Seth was, "When I see even a banana peel that's out of the garbage piling up, I start to having a panic attack, like I'm seven.
Eve Rodsky:
I feel like I'm a latchkey kid again, with a single mom who's never home. I feel like I'm stuck back at seven, I don't want to be brought back there. I need to not feel like I'm seven years old again in a house where there's cockroaches and water bugs." Then Seth was able to respond and say to me, "Look, I grew up in a privileged house. I had a housekeeper who dealt with our garbage and I slept on Domino's pizza boxes in my fraternity. I don't really give a shit about garbage."
Eve Rodsky:
Then I started thinking, "What happens if you're so divergent in your values over something that have to happen every single day?" Well, what happens is that we ended up divorcing over stupid shit, like garbage and sponges, right? What we were able to do was borrow from the law and medicine, and different disciplines that use this idea of a minimum standard of care, the reasonable person's standard. We started to say, "Because we were able to talk from our why to say where can we meet in the middle that feels okay to both of us?"
Eve Rodsky:
Where we came out on the garbage was, Seth said to me, "Okay, I will promise you garbage will go out every day. I will get it out every day when I get home from work, I'll put it in my work calendar, like in a fucking work appointment, as long as you never freaking mentioned the word garbage ever again." That was a miracle for me.
Daniel:
Was that hard for you though? I would think that's still a challenge because you have to do your work.
Eve Rodsky:
Well, trust. Back to trust. I had to do my work and trust. Back to what you said, this is all about trust. I stepped back and I said, "The good news is, this is Fair Play's predicated on a weekly check in." It was not like I had to hold my tongue for the rest of our lives. But if there's something I want to bring up, we do it in our check in, which is, we do it with short term rewards substitutions. We always do it with some sort of cupcakes or sweets because we both love, we have lots of ice cream or alcohol and then we deal our cards.
Eve Rodsky:
I don't get feedback in the moment, I wait till then. That's transformative. But what was really transformative was that garbage started going out. It was like a miracle. It was like Moses parting the Red Sea for me. It changed my life and it changed, I think, the way my husband and I communicated forever. That one garbage example, and then it grew from there. Because we realized, "Oh shit, this is working for garbage. Could we do this for everything else?"
Daniel:
This is what's so critical, is that we can design. Using these elements of design, you're doing it on purpose. We can do it better than we are doing it, versus the habitual way. Which is, your habitual way and his habitual way, rubbing up against each other in not nice ways.
Eve Rodsky:
Correct.
Daniel:
I am looking at our clock, we're getting close to the end of our time. I want to be respectful of your time. Is there anything we have not talked about that we haven't touched on? We've had a far ranging conversation about the gender gap and making it more visible. Is there anything we haven't talked about that you think we should touch on?
Eve Rodsky:
I'd like to just touch quickly on unicorn space, which is another important part of designing your life. What happens in midlife?
Daniel:
Oh, yes. This is the result. This is the payoff.
Eve Rodsky:
Yes. I want to talk about payoff. I think it's really important to talk about the payoff because what's happening in midlife? Well, the real midlife crisis to me isn't breast implants, not a fricking green Ferrari, right? It's that, we sort of lose sight of who we were younger, when we had dreams, when we thought we knew what we wanted to do in our lives and we lose our milestone. Culture tells us, even for men too, "Get married, get that car, get the green Ferrari. I'm supposed to have my diamond ring." But what happens when culture, we see happily ever after for the man and woman, and little mermaid, right?
Eve Rodsky:
But he's 19, she's 16, what happens with the rest of our lives? Are we just supposed to be parents and partners, and workers? This idea of the active pursuit of what makes you you and how you share with the world, I'm fascinated by it. I call it unicorn space because I don't think it fucking exists, like the mythical equine, unless you reclaim it. To me it's like creativity, it's what you're doing, Daniel, with sharing with the world your unique perspective and skills. That is what I want everybody to be able to do, whether it's paid or not.
Eve Rodsky:
Because it's linked to our longevity, is linked to our partnership health, and it's linked to our mental health, and this idea of the active pursuit. Self-care could be reading a book, but it's the writing of a book. Self-care for me is eating pies, but it's the baking of the pies. The act of pursuit of what makes us us, is really, to me the payoff. It's what too many of us will forget or call the stupid hobby, or dismiss it as a vanity project. No, this is integral to our world.
Daniel:
You can't have it if you're constantly either doing everything or arguing about who should be doing the stuff.
Eve Rodsky:
Correct. In men, they do take more leisure time. But a lot of men were saying that they don't feel good about their leisure time because they know they have a pissed spouse when they came home.
Daniel:
They're slinking away, like, "I'm going to get it."
Eve Rodsky:
They're slinking away, but why?
Daniel:
I don't know.
Eve Rodsky:
Why can't you be allowed and be proud of saying, "I'm investing my Saturdays into my tennis game," right? Or whatever active pursuit that makes you you, or reading about design thinking, or the gender division of labor, whatever your passion is. As long as it feels fair, right, hypothetically.
Daniel:
This is so relevant but I got to know, tell me about pies really quickly because I love baking and eating pies too. Just like-
Eve Rodsky:
I want to talk to you about pies for one second. Can I tell you something really cool about pies?
Daniel:
Yes. Please. Absolutely.
Eve Rodsky:
All right. Well, this is one of the coolest things ever. I had this. What are the provocative questions I ask men was, "Are you proud of your partner?" A very provocative question because it was a very big red flag if they couldn't say anything other than, especially in midlife, "She's a great mother and she helps me keep my life moving forward." I'm like, "That's great. That's a personal assistant and a mother in a row. Those are two roles. What about the person you married, why are you proud of them?"
Eve Rodsky:
Men couldn't answer that, unfortunately led to other bad outcomes in my interviews with them about how they were fairing with the relationship. The opposite of that is, when men pick up on their spouses' and partners' passion, women do too but especially men, and it doesn't have to be paid. That was one of my cool findings. That being proud of your partner didn't have to do with correlate to wealth, or to monetary fulfillment. It was this picking up in your passion. I had a man who was married to a dental hygienist.
Eve Rodsky:
I got him through Facebook, I was interviewing him for Fair Play about the division of labor in their home. Then I asked him, "Are you proud of your partner?" Again, she's a dental hygienist, he didn't say she's amazing at teeth cleaning. He starts going off about her church pie competition and she was in the finals for a strawberry rhubarb pie. I don't bake pies, but I guess what he was explaining to me that strawberry rhubarb is not an easy combination, because strawberries tend to go wet, or something.
Eve Rodsky:
Rhubarb was actually a poison and it's not so easy to work with. He's right, so you can tell your listeners more. But anyway, I ended up having to mute him and continue to work because he just kept going on and on in this gorgeous, beautiful way about the design on his wife's strawberry rhubarb pie that was going to win her church competition. That's what I want to end people on, right? Let's be proud of each other for being able to pursue what makes us uniquely us.
Daniel:
Yeah. And not just the garbage.
Eve Rodsky:
Not just the garbage.
Daniel:
Wow, that's amazing. Right now, what's going on for me is I am super proud of my fiancé. I love her a ton and I'm glad that I can say that. Thank you for calling our attention to, it seems like that's, ooh, there's someone at the door.
Eve Rodsky:
That's my dog, so another part of the house.
Daniel:
One takeaway, I think for everyone that I can think of right now is check with yourself, are you proud of your partner? Is there a parting thought of one thing men should do about the gender gap and one thing women should do about the gender gap?
Eve Rodsky:
Yeah. I think it's very important to both think about whether you're proud of your partner. Then even more importantly, are you proud of yourself? If they're in their midlife, if you're not proud of yourself, then that's not going to be great for being partner to you. I want to have permission to be interested in my own life and I want to be married to someone who's not boring, right? That's good for many things, including sex. But the one takeaway I will say for men especially in midlife, and this is for men with children. Because the craziest thing that happens is that men do less after kids.
Eve Rodsky:
My only takeaway is that, if anybody out there listening is planning to have kids or is a father, just remember that because of this, maybe the de-skilling or these weird patterns around trust, you're doing less and that's not going to help us in gender equality. The one thing, my big takeaway, my small action item that can make a big difference is calling your child's school, and making yourself the number one contact on the school list if your child is sick. That's one thing I'll ask everybody to take away, and to go home and do today.
Eve Rodsky:
Being number one on your school list because that modeling, that change when you're in the office and you get the call from the school, or the school seeing that a man is first is very significant.
Daniel:
The cost of not doing that is we can't have equality between genders until men step up in that way.
Eve Rodsky:
Correct. It really is. I want to invite men into the home so that we can invite women to step out of the home, and into their full power. I promise it will benefit you because you are a partner to those people. They will be less resentful, they will be happier. Also the role of what you get from being proud of your partner and supporting them is priceless. Like you said, I saw your face when you said you're proud of your fiancé. I want you always to feel that way and to support her in that, because it'll make you stay together forever.
Daniel:
Yeah. That's the idea, is the dream.
Eve Rodsky:
That's the dream.
Daniel:
As Ada Calhoun, another famous pegleg author said that the key to staying married is not getting divorced.
Eve Rodsky:
Or can I put it differently?
Daniel:
Yes.
Eve Rodsky:
What I'm going to say is that, I think the key to marriage is divorce for married people. Because a lot of the people that I saw happiest in midlife were divorced, because they were free and they had more time. Then their partners did take over emotional labor and domestic work. What I say is, let's create divorce in marriage.
Daniel:
That's a great trick. Well, so thanks for your time. Thanks for talking about how to design this conversation better, because it needs to be redesigned desperately, clearly. I think we're all really lucky that you're out there having this conversation with the world too.
Eve Rodsky:
Well, thank you. I'm so excited. I'm already thinking about what our design, the conversation out there can be, so I'll be back to you.
Daniel:
Okay. Well, then we'll call scene!