Invisible labor

What It Means

Invisible labor is work that isn't recognized as work, usually because it's unpaid, happens out of sight, or is simply expected of someone. Sociologist Arlene Kaplan Daniels named the idea "invisible work" in a 1987 article, starting with women's unpaid work such as housework and volunteering. In a household today it covers jobs like planning meals, booking appointments, tracking school forms and noticing what's running low, alongside the physical chores everyone can see.

How It Sounds at Home

• "I don't just do the laundry, I notice we're out of detergent."
• "Who booked the pediatrician? Me, again."
• "It only looks easy because you never see the planning."

The Breakdown

Worked example. Two adults tally a typical week:

Adult A does 53% of the visible chores, which looks close to even. With the invisible work counted, Adult A does 62% of everything and 86% of the planning and tracking.

What your result means. When your share of the invisible work sits far above your share of the chores, the chore chart makes the split look fairer than it is. Handing over whole jobs, planning included, moves the invisible part along with the visible part.

How to count it. Invisible work is hard to time. For one week, each time you plan, book, remember, research or check on something for the household, jot down roughly how long it took. Have the other adult do the same, then compare the two tallies together.

Where It Comes From

Arlene Kaplan Daniels, who served as president of the Society for the Study of Social Problems in 1986, introduced "invisible work" in an article published in December 1987 in the society's journalJournalingWriting down your thoughts and feelings, in a notebook or an app, to understand them more clearly and to see what's behind your stress. See more, Social Problems. She argued that everyday ideas of what counts as work leave out a great deal, especially the effort of keeping daily life and institutions running, and that women's work is undervalued because so much of it is unpaid or shaped around unpaid work at home. Her examples centered on housework and volunteer work. Later researchers applied the idea to paid jobs, where it describes effort that goes unrecognized at work, and "invisible labor" is the wording many people use for it today.

Good to Know

Hours are only estimates, and planning often happens in small bits spread through the day, so a rough tally is fine. The point of the numbers is a shared starting place for a conversation about who owns which jobs from start to finish.

Related Terms and Categories

• Mental load

  The unseen work of noticing, planning and remembering everything a household needs, even when someone else carries out the task.

• Cognitive labor

  The thinking work of running a household: anticipating needs, finding options, making decisions and checking that things got done.

• Emotional labor

  Managing your feelings and expressions as part of a paid job, a term from sociologist Arlie Hochschild; now also used for unpaid emotional work at home.

• Fair share of chores

  The portion of a household's chores each person takes on, judged against what everyone agrees is fair given their other work and commitments.

Relationships and shared household