SLOANREVIEW.MIT.EDU FALL 2019 MIT SLOAN MANAGEMENT REVIEW 87
for instance, their struggles for power and
control, the roles they expect each other to
play in their shared lives, and societal ex-
pectations of gender that exert a powerful
influence on them. The problem with
ignoring these forces is that, as one man I
interviewed thoughtfully described, “The
apps became a symptom of the problem.”
Let’s explore how this happens.
To adopt an app, couples need to enter
all of their household chores into a list,
typically noting deadlines and recurrences.
This compilation makes a couple’s historic
inequality of contributions to household
work fully transparent. To aid the rebal-
ancing of effort, a standard feature of all
the apps I looked at is the ability for part-
ners to assign each other tasks.
In couples who treated technology as the
solution and overlooked the underlying
causes of their inequality, this feature was
used in a way that made things worse. The
partner who did the lion’s share of house-
hold tasks (usually, although not always, the
woman) was the one who assigned tasks to
the other. Rationally this made sense. The
“assigning” partner had a more complete
view of what needed to get done and could
engage the other partner in tasks through
the feature. However, having one assigner
rarely worked well. “There was no conversa-
tion,” explained one man with whom I
spoke. “I would just get notifications from
the app that I had a task to perform and a
deadline for it. I massively resented that.
The app turned my wife into my manager.”
The roles people took on — nagging
manager, resentful spouse — increased
tensions between couples and often led
them to abandon the technology and re-
vert to their previous state of imbalance.
As one woman explained, “Our family be-
came a project management exercise, not a
family, and I was the project manager. On
the one hand, I felt vindicated that I was
doing way more household work than
him, but instead of it making him step up,
it made us more embattled. Was it worth
it? No. After six weeks we gave up.”
I found that couples for whom house-
hold management technology made a
significant positive difference approached
its adoption from a very different angle.
Instead of treating it as a solution in and of
itself, they treated it as a way to enact and
track a solution that they found through
frank conversations about their desired rolesin their relationship and their expectations
of each other. Through these discussions,
they decided how they should divide and
manage household tasks. The conversations
were not always easy, but they formed the
basis of a deal that helped partners over-
come their inequality and overload issues.
One couple I interviewed, having
reached their crunch point just before
Christmas, spent a whole day exploring why
their input into household work had be-
come so imbalanced and negotiating a
division of labor to remedy it. Once they had
this firmly agreed, they adopted an app to
make it happen. As the husband explained,
“It’s the clarity that got rid of the friction,
not the app. The app is simply a way to track
the clarity. Now we have a reset meeting
every three months to revisit our deal and
make sure it’s still working for both of us.”
Surprisingly, the couples who found
their solutions through probing conversa-
tions were the heaviest users of the apps.
They used apps for anything from tracking
chores and compiling shopping lists to
making appointments, managing calen-
dars, and planning holidays and other
events. As one woman remarked, “The apphas become our external brain.” These cou-
ples reported finding the apps incredibly
helpful for reducing overload, balancing
out tasks, and keeping them and their fami-
lies on track. They also reported that the
apps changed the way they used their time
when they were together and the conversa-
tions they had.
“I’d rather spend the two hours we have
each evening discussing how we feel and
how our day went rather than [discussing]logistics,” one woman said. “The app made
those boring administrative conversations
redundant. Our time has become quality
time, not practical time.” Many couples
who adopted technology as a way of enact-
ing a solution made similar comments.
The technology worked excellently as a
tracker, they said, and as a bonus it became
a tool to maximize their quality time.
Taken together, my research shows
that couples can hack inequality — not
through technology, but through conver-
sations that unearth the forces that drive
imbalance in their relationship. Once they
have explored these forces and negotiated
solutions to them, they can use household
management applications to make a posi-
tive difference in their lives.Jennifer Louise Petriglieri is an associate
professor of organizational behavior at
INSEAD (@insead) and the author of the
forthcoming book Couples That Work: How
Dual-Career Couples Can Thrive in Love
and Work (Harvard Business Review Press,
2019). Comment on this article at http://
sloanreview.mit.edu/x/61106.
Reprint 61106. For ordering information, see page 4.
Copyright © Massachusetts Institute of Technology,- All rights reserved.
Hacking Inequality at Home
(Continued from page 88)
COLUMN
“ I would just get notifications from the app
that I had a task to perform and a deadline
for it. I massively resented that. The app
turned my wife into my manager.”