Gender roles have certainly changed throughout the years. Many families are no longer an old-fashioned one where dad goes to work all day and mom stays home with the kids; although, we’ve come far enough that’s it’s also perfectly fine for women to choose to stay home instead of working while their children are in daycare.

Whether women choose to work outside the home or not, the good news is that the number of hours men and women work is pretty close to equal. This “work” includes paid and unpaid work (such as housework). The bad news is that women tend to take on another invisible workload.

As Ellen Seidman says in a poem she wrote for her blog Love That Max, “I am the person who notices.” She writes about how she notices when the toothpaste in bubble gum flavor is running low and when they need more granola bars and kale chips. The list, in poem form, goes on and on. It’s an exhausting list of things to notice.

If you’re a woman, you can probably relate to this. The invisible workload that women carry is thinking. It includes noticing what needs to be done and what needs to be bought. For example, women are more likely than men to notice that they’re about to run out of toilet paper, that there’s dust and fingerprints on the TV, that the children’s feet grew and they need new shoes.

Women tend to notice before men, and they have all of this information swimming around in their heads. Since women are the ones who notice, they are also the ones who delegate. This is probably why men think their wives can be nags – they delegate some of the things that they’ve noticed to their husbands.

Back in 1996, sociologist Susan Walze published a research article titled “Thinking About the Baby.” She found her participants by contacting couples who had posted birth announcements in the newspaper. All 23 of the couples had brought home a new baby within the year.

Walze found that the women did much more of the mental work involved in childcare and housework. For example, they were more likely to be the ones doing things like researching pediatricians. They worried if their children were hitting developmental milestones or not. They decided what to have for dinner. The list is endless.

While the men may have been willing to help out with the work, like cooking dinner, for example, it was the women who were more likely to expend mental energy thinking about it.

Thinking is unseen work. It can feel overwhelming at times seeing all the things that need to be done. Granted, if the wife were away, the husband would eventually have to start noticing himself, but since women tend to notice first, men often doesn’t get the chance to be the one to notice.

Thinking about the house and the kids and what to have for dinner isn’t all that women have to consider. They also have to consider things like hem length on a dress for different occasions where a man can have a go-to suit that works for just about any dressy occasion. Women also have to make an effort to be nice, like when asking for a job raise, where men can just focus on being assertive.

If you’re a woman and you find yourself mentally exhausted, this is why. If you’re a man, don’t consider your wife a nag. She’s already tired from this invisible work. Help free her mind by making an effort to notice…or simply ask her for a list of things that need to be done.

Women, do you feel the weight of this invisible work?