A letter to female remote entrepreneurs who might not know what’s coming. 

I’m a strong independent woman. I make my own money, I pay my own bills, I keep my cats luxuriously housed in ludicrously expensive cat trees on my own dime.

But when my husband and I moved to Boston and I found myself alone, working at home, for long silent stretches of time, I began to struggle. All of a sudden, I’d turned into a housewife.

Because I was home and I had the time, I took on most of our house duties even as I managed my own freelance writing business. I vacuumed, I swiffered, I cleaned surfaces, I took the trash out. I planned the meals, wrote the shopping list, stayed home to take care of the delivery, and decided who would cook on which nights. 

I organized our social calendar, reaching out to mutual friends to meet up and reminding him of upcoming events when he forgot. 

Back when we both worked in offices, we split the household chores more or less equitably. However, I found that when I worked from home, I did more of the home-work purely by virtue of being at home more.

This really distressed me. I didn’t handle it well. It manifested me passive-aggressively harping at my husband, who I felt wasn’t doing enough. If he forgot to take the recycling out, I’d lose my shit. If he said he’d pick up lettuce on the way home and forgot, I’d fall apart. 

It took me a long time to realize that I was reacting so strongly because I was lonely, overworked and feeling like I’d time-traveled to the 1950s. And this jarred with the image I held of myself as a modern woman.

Nobody Talks About the Reality of WFH for Women

I wasn’t the only one to experience this; I just had a delayed reaction. During the pandemic when a lot of white-collar workers found themselves working from home, it was well-documented how women picked up the vast majority of the slack in the household tasks. Among parents, the disparity in work and parenting done between mothers and fathers is even more staggering.

But I wonder how prevalent this problem was pre-pandemic. If women had more work to do when both men and women in heterosexual couples stayed home, then how much bigger is that burden when the man is out of the house altogether, like my husband is?

Even though we both earn about the same, I did much, much more housework than he did. And I have to assume the same is true of many women who work from home. 

When men work from home, they report increases in productivity and improvements in career prospects. When women work from home, they report increases in stress, depression, and burnout. 

I Made Myself Less Available

It took me way too long to realize why I was miserable and lashing out. Happily, it took me less time to start addressing the problem. A large part of it was communicating with my partner and expressing how I felt. He started doing more around the house, which relieved a lot of the pressure. 

But the main factor that helped me achieve more of a balance was to be selfish. I put my foot down and refused to do the shopping list. I made a point to spend time outside the house, trying to make my own friends and patronizing cafés I picked out myself. 

I still do more of the housework and organizational labor, on the balance. But it’s a better divide, and we’re at least aware of the problem. 

Girlboss or Housewife?

I was not ready for the reality that when I worked from home, our dynamic would shift. I did not expect to do more housework. Like most people, I hate cleaning and am not passionate about organizing meal plans. I was totally caught off guard by how much that invisible increase in work affected my mental health, even before I figured out what was going on.

Nobody warns female WFH entrepreneurs about this fact. I certainly was unprepared. When I envisioned how I’d work from home, I saw myself typing in my office, planning out my YouTube video calendar, or having productive meetings. I did not predict cleaning up cat sick, going to the store to pick up the final ingredients for dinner, or emptying out the dishwasher.

My partner is a feminist who understands that we should shoulder the work evenly. We’ve had multiple conversations about the subject, and over the three years we’ve lived together, we’ve come very close to parity. But when I started working from home, that changed dramatically.

I wrote this article to warn any potential women who decide to work from home to be warned. No matter how much of a feminist your partner is, some sexist societal habits and expectations are so deeply ingrained that you will have to fight hard to root them out. I wish I’d known sooner.