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Intersectional feminist conversations about doing work and life differently. Hosts Becky Mollenkamp and Faith Clarke talk with entrepreneurs, authors, and thinkers about capacity, care, bias, and burnout. We name the systems we're taught to ignore, and imagine what's possible when we stop performing and start being honest.
Faith Clarke (00:01.646)
everyone, Faith here in our Feminist Founders space where we've been talking this summer about invisible labor. And my goodness, what a ride it has been because between Becca and myself, personal reflections and reflections with various thought leaders and people who have been feeling this pressure and are coming, we've been honest about it. We're kind of peeling back the layers. What is it? And just being honest about it. So this episode is me looking at a bunch of
the insights, reflections, and maybe even the pains that I have come to terms with as a result of my own explorations into invisible labor. And I'm gonna start with a meeting I had with my client this morning as I'm listening to her talk about a moment in her past where she was working on a project with another person. And that other person basically released
They released themselves from responsibility for the project and left her with the rest of the work. I know lots of us have experienced that. We've kind of grown up. I have my friend's son. He's just saying, I hate group work. I hate group work. And I remember lots of us, and even when I was creating work for students, and I said, okay, we're going to work in groups and there'd be a universal grown. Because there's always this idea that it's not going to be equitable. Somebody is going to...
end up doing most of the work, other people are going to skate on the backs of these people, right? And the work of the professor or teacher or whoever is to try and figure out how to not make this happen or how to grade accordingly. So this has been an issue for, we've all been in this moment, but I had a zoom into the moment and I was like, so what made you, this person, exited?
emotionally and mentally from the project, even though their name was still on the project. What made you not, what made you, what made you hold the bag? What made you hold the back? Well, the person had more seniority than she did. And she felt like this person is, is in positive relationships in the organization. And she felt like if she were to complain, she didn't want to be perceived in a negative light.
Faith Clarke (02:21.398)
There's a bunch of that this person has been here longer and known and this person belongs and she's new Maybe she doesn't belong and she doesn't want to disrupt that There is a fair amount of not knowing Well, what would I say? How do I shift things and this unknown? quantity the person was upset with the organization and She knew that and so in some ways she understood what was happening
and was leaving the organization to sort that out. But in the meantime, she's left doing all the work. The organization, though she discussed it with her supervisors, the organization didn't feel like they knew how to, like if they were to, what they were going to do. So there was a difficulty capacity-wise for the organization to shift the dynamic for whatever reason. And the person would get upset.
If she spoke to the person about it, they would get upset and that made her feel unsafe. So for her own safety, because she felt like she was less than in some ways, not less than as an individual, but in the context of this organization, she kind of assessed her place in the value hierarchy. We all do this. We all do this. We cite up a space and know where we are and kind of just decided she's going to.
continue and it was these are quick decisions, right? And so I just want to own that every identity that we have that's a marginalized identity has its labor automatically built in. Because if you experience life through the lens of a marginalized identity,
you also experience life as not fully supporting you, right? And so the world, these glasses are very complicated. I tell people this all the time that the world is built for people who can see. And yes, we've done a ton of work to make sure people have glasses and all this kind of thing. And these three prescriptions in the progressive lens that they sometimes don't work really well. So,
Faith Clarke (04:47.362)
Sometimes I'm looking through the bottom and it's the reading one, but I'm not in the right position. Those of you who have progressives, you know the deal. And I can be in space and be being just required to navigate as if I can see. So I have to go closer to the front. have to, if somebody is going to ask me to read something off of a screen, I'm like, can you send me the Google doc instead of thinking that I can see what's on that screen and things like that. The world is built.
for certain people and not for others. And this is the work of accessibility. Accessibility is about bridging the gaps between the systems that exist and then the people that are navigating the system. Some people have no gaps. Some people just enter into a system and it works for them. And then some people don't. So just on the basic level, invisible labor is the labor you have to do to access the system, to bridge that gap, right? And
I, so as I started to kind of just get, become aware, the client I was talking about identifies as woman, the other person in the scenario identified as male. And in some ways without the conscious awareness, they fell into these roles that had some gender stereotypes in them. And therefore the labor associated with those roles, right? So.
You know, you've heard the man versus bear argument. I'm not here debating whether men are amazing and beautiful and lovely. Lots of amazing men. I myself have birthed so many, right? And also there's something in the conversation I was reading. Let me see if I find the name of the author.
weighing in on the man versus bear situation. This is from the, let me just get the name of the article, it'll be in the show notes. But a woman who has, a woman who left society to live with bears weighs in on the man or bear. And this was the bike packing online, like magazine or article. And
Faith Clarke (07:03.074)
just as I, you've not heard it, you could Google it. was basically the scenario in TikTok or somewhere where somebody said, you're a woman stuck in the woods, you know, would you prefer to encounter a man or bear? And this woman, when she was seeing the scenario, she was just like, this is resonating because it's not really about the bear. It's about fear of men and under which circumstances are women.
afraid of men. And so she was just talking about herself as a lifelong backpacker who's done a bunch of living out in the woods. She, she's saying, I'm not afraid, but I'm aware. And I'm just going to read a little bit about what she said here. Again, article is in the show notes. So she talks about encountering. If she encounters a man, most of the time, yay, a fellow traveler. She's been not seeing people for men, anybody for whatever number of days, weeks, whatever, and is
so happy, but she's, she's also aware that she needs to watch for any of the signs that she might not be safe. And she's describing this moment about when she decides she needs to get away from the man, not because there are overt signs of unsafety, but because it may be becoming tricky. So she says, I need to get away from the man, but I need to do it in a way that doesn't anger him. This is the tricky bit.
Men who lack social awareness or empathy often also lack other skills in emotional management. And usually what men in these situations actually want is closeness. And they're trying to get closer to me physically or emotionally in the only way they know how. That combination of poor emotional skill sets and a desire to get closer is exactly what puts me in danger. If I deny his attempts at closeness by leaving or setting a boundary,
he could feel frustrated, rejected or ashamed. If he doesn't know how to recognize or manage those feelings, he's likely to experience them as anger. And when I'm a solo woman stuck in the forest with an angry man, that's exactly what women are afraid of. And what I heard in her narration is the number of skills that she's had to have and that many women have had to have in navigating men. This whole ability to be able to
Faith Clarke (09:29.622)
assess another person's emotional state, notice when they are not able to manage themselves, notice it early enough so that the repercussions of their poor self-management does not kick back on them. Like there's this entire dance that she's describing here that doesn't just happen in the woods, what happens in day-to-day life. And so this is me just saying as part of acknowledging invisible labor, it's acknowledging that there is work that
different ones of us through the lenses of our various identities are doing that seem to be part of navigating the gap associated in the world because of this identity, as this woman describes. A friend of mine lives in Canada and she was a journalist and she was talking about this particular article, so I had to look it up, talking about a birth alert. I'm like, what? Birth alert. That indigenous women still in Canada,
There is this thing, you could look it up, I'll leave a link. There's this thing called a birth alert where it's not just for indigenous women, but a lot of indigenous women, if you can enter a birthing space and the medical practitioners are able to call in your birth for whatever reason, a lot of the women don't know why they would call it in, but if they feel in any way that you are unable or whatever to parent your child, they don't have to tell you what it is.
and they can't take the child. And it still happens now, 2025. And I just, I've never walked into a space with my child or pregnant and had the thought cross my mind that I could lose my child or I could not have my child. I don't know any people who've had that fear. And it was just a realization that just...
because of an identity characteristic, there are tons of these women. there's a particular case she was telling me about was a young woman went in to have a baby and she went in on her own. And that was a, that was a red flag in some way, for some reason. And just thinking that way, if you show up to have your baby by yourself, that means something about your ability to parent. So just as a notion of the,
Faith Clarke (11:54.868)
labor of a particular character. So let's start to talk about Black folks and how many of us have had to have these conversations with our kids. How many Black women are seen as aggressive because we're not smiling or whatever. And so our counterparts could not be smiling and they just look serious or focused. And a Black woman not smiling looks aggressive. And how much the performance of
whatever it is that's socially acceptable is needed and the work of performing. So we call it masking for in the case of neurodiversity, but so many of us with the lenses of our identities are masking for the sake of being accessible and integrating, right? And we are doing that work. The work is not the system's work is ours. So I guess I have been feeling the weight of that for so many of us and feeling the unfairness of it.
that all that happened is that we were born and you're born and automatically given more work because you are alive, right? And I think when we think about ourselves as founders, we want to be honoring not just ourselves, but we want to be creating spaces where other women, other people who are not men, all the people, but as feminists, we are going to center people who are not men.
as a way to elevate and then therefore level the playing field. We want to create something that creates justice for everyone. And so if people are arriving at work exhausted from the effort required to be alive in your skin, then how do we want to design our businesses and our work to be able to support that?
And yet we do need people working. part of my own work is to help organizations design their work culture so that it's restorative, so that it's not part of the extraction. And that means a certain amount of intention. That's story for another time. And you can definitely hit me up when I can go on about that. But there's one element of this invisible labor in the workplace. Well, there are a of elements of invisible labor in the workplace I want to just point out. And I'm almost wrapping up now.
Faith Clarke (14:16.334)
I'm going to soapbox for a little and wrap up. I want to point out a couple of places in the workplace where this type of thing is showing up because unfortunately women at work hold the most of the emotional labor and stuff like that. so I want to, let me just see, Claude, my AI assistant Claude. So I was looking at this research article and I thought in particular the physical health impact of emotional
of invisible labor on women and then the mental health impact kind of hit me. And so just wanted to share some of these statistics, some of this data with you. That the age group that was most affected by physical, invisible labor among women is 35 to 55 year old women. 60 % of the women fatigue and exhaustion. This is just in the findings. And then,
53 % of the women, so some of the 60, back pain, joint issues, muscular skeletal disorders, 26 % of the women, and then it goes down, issues, sleep disturbances, 16%, et cetera. And they said that the primary reason is the repetitive household tasks and lots of moving, lifting, and so on, poor ergonomic practices, and lack of sleep.
So there's a ton of work that's happening in between and all the time, and then people aren't resting and it's resulting in a physical impact. But they also said that physical health impact, but they also said that women, because of some of these other factors, are the least likely to go to the doctor about the physical health impact. So the physical health impact of invisible labor is the biggest one that women experience. But running right along,
Women in the age group 25 to 50, 63 % of them report stress and anxiety. Emotional burnout, 56%. Isolation, 46%. Mood swings, 43%. Depression, 30%. This is of this sample, so who knows, right? And the whole balancing out, no, you're physically exhausted, your body is not beginning a breakdown, and then you're doing this work, it's...
Faith Clarke (16:37.004)
juggling domestic duties and not being fully supported and expectations and caregiving demands and it starts to pile up and it starts to double over. And so there is this interconnected health burden they're calling it that it's deeply it's woven together right the physical the mental and the social health impacts are deeply interconnected and so women 70 % of women experience time poverty.
And then not to mention the systemic issues that cause self-neglect. 60 % of women neglect their personal health because of invisible labor. I could just stop.
Faith Clarke (17:19.95)
Let's see, am I still recording? good. I could just stop there, but I wanted us to just pause. And as you are assessing your own stuff over the past few weeks, let's just ask, like, what's your health situation? In what ways are you guilty of any of this neglect? And we know the systemic stuff is there and we know that if you release it, this is not a made up thing. If you release the invisible labor, things do fall apart.
And it is an incredible weight to carry. And what's the situation with your physical health and your emotional health and what are the ways that that needs to be attended to? And I'm going to talk about that in a little bit, but first I just want to say that exposing it, it feels hard to expose it because we're like, no, I see it and what I feel. So it's almost discombobulating to kind of have it all out there because
you are managing it as much as it was hurting you, you know? But now that we're exposing it in all of our explorations, it's like, what do do about it? It becomes hard to unsee. And so I guess I just want to say, is this the last thing? I just want to say that part of what people, when we're talking to people about this and our experiences at Tone in these past two weeks, whether I'm speaking directly about invisible labor or I'm giving an example, you know, I might say,
this and this and this is going on and I am not going to participate in these parts. This is not my work to do. A well-meaning person wanting to protect me from the backlash of drawing a boundary gives me work. They're like, okay, okay. if, okay, I get that. That makes sense. It's not your work to do. I agree. All right. So
to make so and so not be upset about you drawing this boundary, maybe you should talk to so and so, other person, and then you explain it to them from this point of view, right? Like you wanna think through their eyes, explain it this way, and then position it in this thing, and then what you do is that you have them talk to this other person, and then you come up with a little bit of a PowerPoint explaining the...
Faith Clarke (19:39.134)
ROI of this other thing that you are having third person talk about so that person doesn't get upset with you for you not doing the thing that you're setting a boundary for. And I was like, this is fascinating. So I am overworked doing work that's not mine to do. I draw a line and say, I'm not doing that work anymore. And to protect me, I know it's a sign of love.
But everybody knows how the system works and they're like, okay, we don't want you to be hurt by this. So do extra work. And it becomes this pervasive cycle that we're never centering the people doing the invisible labor. We're always centering power and we're centering power and figuring out how to navigate power, want to keep ourselves safe, to give power what power wants, et cetera. And it's like, it has to stop. have to center the people.
who are doing the invisible labor. So in our feminist founders context, we're talking about ourselves, we're talking about people like us, and so as you are noticing this, how can you shift your perspective to what you actually need and center yourself? And then how do you broaden that centering to include the other people who are caught in the invisible labor in various ways?
And how does that centering shift into how you do your work as a business and how you invite other people into that work, whether as clients or as collaborators or as staff. So Claude, I threw Claude, my AI person, my AI assistant. AI is a mixed bag. I will not go into all of my thoughts on decolonizing AI right here, but I was grabbing, I was doing some quick data research from this article.
And this is consistent with my own thoughts on the matter. These four suggestions as to what we need to be doing right now. It's not cut and dry, but these are practices. Maybe that's what it is. These are practices that we need to be doing. And number one, we need to name and track the labor. Like name and track the labor. So many of us, a colleague of mine has just been appointed.
Faith Clarke (22:02.026)
as a executive director part time, the moment she said to me she was part time, I was like, Jesus. Because it's no such thing. It just means half the pay. But what it means is that without her clarity on boundaries and centering herself and being really in a nonprofit, right? So without a lot of clarity, the work is gonna leak over the whatever.
halftime, part-time is supposed to be. So name and track, invisible labor, journaling or accountability with a person or just whatever you do, just note it. What are you doing mentally, emotionally, anticipatory work? Just notice the patterns. Are you the one that, like I tell people in my household, I'm the executive functioning brain. I'm the one that knows all the schedules. I'm the one that knows all the interdependencies. I'm the one that knows how the ship runs.
And that's labor because I'm not in control of how the ship runs in a lot of ways, because I am in a household with adults, but I know how it runs. So based on what I know that I'm being back up kind of, you know, I'm trying to figure out how to make things happen because other people are bumbling along, not acting like they know, because they have the privilege of forgetting. And I'm referring to my adult offspring. So don't be upset with me. They're my kids.
And I'm just acknowledging that the parent, mother in particular, invisible labor is quite a real thing, even when you have adult kids. Backup behaviors. Like I think that in our work spaces, they're in a good team. What teams do is understand everybody's work. And once you start to elevate your invisible labor,
How can you develop, and this is labor, I just said it, this thinking about this and being part of developing it, but maybe if we're all doing it together, it won't feel so hard. How do you help the people who are around you to think about their backup behaviors that bridge some of these invisible labor gaps so it's not just you? Once you expose it, I've noticed with so many of my clients, they don't want to.
Faith Clarke (24:21.262)
whoever this beast of burden is. Often it's one or two people within a particular small team. And they don't want that person, so they say anyway, they don't want that person shouldering all the weight. And I think maybe this is about building some more cohesion in the team, having the leader take some responsibility for that so that you can have team backup behaviors for these invisible labor tasks that are happening.
and the gaps that are going to be result, that will result when you stop doing it, right? So build some backup behaviors and shared, like a shared accountability in a small collective of people. I'm trying to do that with my family here. I know I'll tell you in a couple of weeks how successful I am, but definitely at work, I think that this is essential. I am working on the boundary setting, which is the third practice.
with my with my adult humans research says that 70 % of women experience time poverty and so how do we set some boundaries around our time just it will feel so uncomfortable to say I'm not gonna do this and to Let it drop. I heard a story of a mentor of mine told this story and I so respected her she decided that she wasn't doing all the cooking in her household she did and she kind of
allocated, I'm cooking on this and this day, and she had kids and she announced it and left it to other adults in the household and the kids to figure themselves out on some other days and the kids weren't little. But what she did then was that she prepared her own food on those days because she knew that the communal cooking situation was going to fall apart because the other people had no practice in it. So she had to hold on to her boundary and she had to be willing to sit with the
upset feeling that she feels when she sees people, her teenagers not eating, eating poorly, her husband maybe he's making the food, maybe he's not, maybe he's forgotten and she had to care for herself with her own food while also maintaining the boundary. I respected her so much because I can feel in my body how hard that is. It's really hard for me even now. Set some boundaries and hold them even when it feels hard.
Faith Clarke (26:41.834)
And then back to your collective support. I think that we are so much stronger when we're together. We so need this squad, this group of people around us, that when it is that one of us is just in the throes of, I don't know how to shift this. I don't know how to make this work. That there is the labor associated with having grief and not grieving. And in our collective spaces, we can
allow each other to grieve. We can kind of do what I call, you know, lap or skirts around the person. A person can be in the center grieving and we all form a circle around and just say, yeah, you can grieve now and say to people around, avert your gaze, look away. Nothing's happening here. Mind your business. And give each other the space to feel what this feels like and to be supported as we do the difficult changes needed both to release the world. I wrote a piece about.
women holding up the world. I'll see if I can find it to share in this episode. But the work of releasing the world is also the work of grieving the things that crash that you were holding. And when we are collectively holding each other, we're able to navigate that grief. And then we're also able to recreate the world that we want together, right? This world where our
our work is seen and honored and respected and shared, right? And so I've rambled on for a minute on all kinds of things that I've been thinking about. I'm going to be interviewing my friend, Jay Suley sometime soon because she's an expert because she's committed to anti-patriarchal, decolonial relationship building and intimacy and anti-burnout. She has a really wonderful breakdown of
emotional labor and all the labor on the different ways that we leave labor on each other. So I'm looking forward to that conversation with her coming up soon. And I'm also looking forward to how our stories inform the actual data about this research is happening all over the place, but our stories matter. And when we tell our stories, that impacts the design of solutions in our systems so that we can build best practices for us.
Faith Clarke (29:04.718)
not for whoever was researched. And so I look forward to hearing your stories and us together thinking about how do we, how do we, how do we change this? Because it has to change. This, it stops with our generation. We should say so. At least we'll make it start, right? Stops with our generation. This kind of 70 % of women are time poor. 70%.
If we even believe in the idea that time is money, 70 % of women are time poor. And this is worldwide statistics, right? The emotional care of the world systems that's required for the world to run sits on the shoulders of women. We do need to change the system up so that we are not being sacrificed for the system that we are.
in and engaging in. As Dr. Gervani said to me, she's like, will no longer engage in my own sacrifice. So as you're processing these things, I'd love to hear what your thoughts are. Please comment or send us a message as Becca and I kind of we're just pulling some of our thoughts together. We have some fun stuff coming in the fall about this and ways that we want to help each other heal. So talk to us. We'll talk to you soon. Take care.