88 MITSLOANMANAGEMENTREVIEW FALL 2019COLUMN
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RT0001. Copyright © Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2019. All rights reserved.ALTHOUGH THE NUMBER of couples in which
both partners have careers grows each year,
women continue to perform most of the
work at home. This inequality is a source
of stress for working women and relation-
ship tension for couples, and it’s a key
reason why women off-ramp from their
careers, take longer to advance, and don’t
progress as far as men.
Many working couples recognize these
problems and are trying to share the labor
more equitably. In an attempt to balance
their investment in household work and
manage their complex lives, they are increas-
ingly turning to technology. Applications
such as Cozi, Picniic, Wunderlist, Labor of
Love, and Remember the Milk promise to
help couples split the mental and physical
load of household management, collaborate
to manage chores, schedule appointments,
and ensure that no family balls get dropped.
But to what extent can an app really help
couples hack inequality at home?
As part of an ongoing research project
looking into the lives of dual-career cou-
ples, I’ve been examining the impact of
technology on managing the balance of
household work between partners. Most
couples I studied who adopted householdmanagement applications did so on reach-
ing a crunch point with imbalance and
overload. I’ve found that while applica-
tions can help address these issues, they
also can hinder progress and even exacer-
bate the problems. What makes the
difference, I’ve discovered, is how couples
view and adopt the technology.
Simply put, the apps fail to be effective
when couples treat them as the solution to
what ails them. This sounds paradoxical —the promise of most apps is to serve exactly
that purpose. So, what is going on?
When couples treat technology as the
solution, they jump immediately into im-
plementation mode. They spend time
searching for, testing, and agreeing upon
the “best” applications. Then they put the
technology straight to work. In doing so,
couples overlook the underlying forces
that created their imbalance and overload
in the first place —Hacking Inequality
at Home
BY JENNIFER LOUISE PETRIGLIERI(Continued on page 87)