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When Eve Rodsky found herself sobbing on the side of the road over a text about blueberries, she knew something had to change. Hence began her seven year quest to create a more equitable division of labor at home. Her book is called "Fair Play. A Game-Changing Solution for When You Have Too Much to Do (and More Life to Live)" and her solutions are based on extensive research with experts from sociologists to neuroscientists to behavioral economists and conversations with couples all over the country.
TRANSCRIPT: We do our best, please forgive or let us know any errors.
Eve Rodsky: I find myself sobbing on the side of the road over a text my husband, Seth, sent me and it just said, "I'm surprised you didn't get blueberries." And you can picture the scene. I just had a new baby, my second son, Ben was just born. I am on the side of the road sobbing with a breast pump and a diaper bag in my passenger seat. I have returns for a new baby in the back seat of the car, because God forbid they have more than a 30-day return policy for clothes. I have a client contract on my lap with a pen, sort of a sticking me in the vagina as I'm trying to mark it up at every red light traffic stop. As I'm zooming to pick up my older son, Zach, who's about almost turning three at the time, in his toddler transition program.
Eve Rodsky: In America, since we really value working mothers, those programs are like 10 minutes long. So I was trying to zoom back and I was like, "Okay, I'm probably going to get into an accident if I'm crying, and my contract's going to get all runny." So I pulled over the side of the road, I just started crying. I knew I was going to be late to pick up Zach, but that was a day I always say, "Thank God Seth sent me that text." Still married. We're very happily married, thanks to Fair Play. But back then it felt like my breaking point, and I said to myself, you know, I'm done. This is not the career marriage combo I thought I was going to have.
Lauren Schiller: I'm Lauren Schiller and that is Eve Rodsky, the author of a new book, a revolution called Fair Play. We spoke on stage for Inforum at the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco this October, to a very lively house. What is this Fair Play you might ask? Well, here's what it's the opposite of.
Eve Rodsky: Second shift, mental load, emotional labor. But my favorite came out of a 1987 article by a sociologist named Arlene Kaplan Daniels, and her article is called Invisible Work. And why I love that one so much was because you can't value what you don't see.
Lauren Schiller: Eve set out to find out why women are what she calls the she-fault, for all things domestic and more to the point what can be done about it. This is Inflection Point with stories of how women rise up.
Eve Rodsky: I had women saying to me, WTF, I'm doing it all. Another woman said to me, "At this rate, after looking at this spread sheet I'm not going to stay in my marriage." And so I realized I had unleashed this rant without a solution. And every other book up until Fair Play, every other book had said, make a list. But there is a problem when you make a list sometimes, right? Because you enter consciousness. But if you don't have a solution, when you're woke and you just are sitting in that resentment, it actually can be worse before it gets better.
Eve Rodsky: And so that's where I realized I needed to put my mediator hat on and say, I do this for a living. I develop systems. I'm a Harvard trained mediator. I am product of a single mother who vowed this one happened to me. I went to my first equal rights amendment march when I was 15 months old. I was there.
Lauren Schiller: You were? Oh my God.
Eve Rodsky: We were there together. It was still happening to me. So I went on a quest to find out if that was true. And the good news for Fair Play, the bad news for society is that it was happening to lots of other women too.
Lauren Schiller: Yup. Well since you mentioned your mom and you mentioned that march, and maybe if I go back through old photos I can find you as an infant.
Eve Rodsky: Yeah, I have that photo.
Lauren Schiller: I was only like seven. But anyway tell us about your mom a little bit and growing up with her, and like what you used to do for fun on your birthday.
Eve Rodsky: Oh yeah. So my mother, we didn't have a lot of money for fancy birthday gifts. Even if we did, I'm not sure she would have given me any, because she doesn't really believe in possessions. But instead what we would do on my birthday, she said she would give me the gift of being the change I want to see in the world. That's the Gandhi quote. And so what we did was she said, I could look at anything I wanted, any civic engagement that was happening in Washington DC. We lived in New York City.
Eve Rodsky: And so around my birthday, she said she'd buy me a Greyhound bus ticket, and we'd pack lunch and we'd go down, and usually it was a march. So every year my birthday starting around seven, we'd go to Washington D.C. and we'd march for whatever social justice civic engagement thing was happening at the time. And I think it really impacted me because a, obviously it's this idea of not materialism b, it's this idea of birthdays, being gratitude for other people, but c, it was the camaraderie to understand that if you go and there's other people there, there's more people than you, who are caring about an issue and that leads you to do more.
Eve Rodsky: And so that was also like the beauty, my love letter to you. Fair Play is a love letter to women, and it's also become a love letter to men. Because I get to share your stories and that's sort of the beauty of the march of this idea that we're all in this together. And it was the cathartic thing for me was that, it wasn't just a me problem. My favorite sociologist C. Wright Mills says, "Private lives, public issues." And I realized this was a serious public issue, yeah.
Lauren Schiller: So in the start contrast to your moment on the side of the road, you tell a story in the book about being on an airplane and checking off this dude across the aisle. Can you share the story and kind of what epiphany that brought?
Eve Rodsky: Absolutely.
Lauren Schiller: We'll hear that story and more right after this short break.
Eve Rodsky: So the man on the plane, I call this case of the man on the plane. My cousin and I, right when I was discovering all these issues, getting to consciousness about what was happening, I was becoming the defaults. Or like I like to say in the book that she-falls, for every single thing for my household and family, regardless of whether we work outside the home, women do two thirds of what it takes to run a home and family regardless of whether we work outside the home. So before that was a statistic I was undeniably living, but I didn't know at the time.
Eve Rodsky: So around the time when I was undeniably living this, but didn't know it at the time, I was on a plane with my cousin, she was coming back to L.A., she was coming out for work. I was coming home from a work trip and we had our grab and go Chicken Caesar Wraps. We went to Hudson News to buy presents for the kids. The second we enter boarding area, DirecTV decides to call me. I'd forgotten I'd scheduled a satellite installation appointment from six months earlier. If anyone's ever dealt with ATT, you don't want to ever deal with not taking that satellite appointment.
Eve Rodsky: So I'm trying to install a satellite dish on FaceTime with these men at my house. My cousin at the same time, her phone blows up, her au pair didn't know where to go for soccer practice, and didn't have the cleats or the shin guard. So she's sending him back home. The au pair back home to get her stuff, and we're having this very interactive boarding session. As we get to our seats, my cousin, as I'm still on the phone with ATT, realizes she left her laptop bag back in the boarding area.
Eve Rodsky: So we're pushing through to try to get back off the plane. I'm screaming the whole, the plane, the first class flight attendants weren't that happy, that people all the way back in coach were trying to disrupt the first class passengers. She gets off the plane, we get back on the plane, and it was this collective staring at us like, "Ladies, get your shit together."
Eve Rodsky: Now on the other side of the plane where you're sitting, this man walks on and we became very interested in this man, because he's about our age. He just takes out a laptop. He literally has no luggage, and we see sort of his screensaver is a really cute brunette, and some kids on his screen saver and he just starts typing, just starts typing. And somehow he manages to finish a PowerPoint deck as we're in the air. And then my cousin keeps looking over and she's like, "What is he doing? He's like solving world peace. He's like solving like calculus."
Eve Rodsky: He was using this sort of weird grid, this geometric grid, and then he fell asleep. And then he was doing some candy crush on his phone and there was obviously no good movies on to be watched. We were just became sort of obsessed with him and about five hours into the flight from New York to L.A., my cousin just looks at me and says, "I just wish I was that man." And it was this idea, right, that what is the value of an unencumbered mind? It really is truly priceless. And Virginia Woolf talks about this, almost a hundred years ago that Shakespeare couldn't have been a woman because her mind is too encumbered.
Eve Rodsky: And so that really got me thinking about the cost of women, right? The cost of women, of being on our side of the plane, and the motherhood penalty for being seen as not having our shit together, and what the beauty is. And so that set off this idea of the pricelessness of an unencumbered mind. So then from there, my passion, what I call my unicorn space, became this idea of how do we get women, how do we get women to have less of an encumbered mind? We're never going to have a fully unencumbered mind, but even if it's a little less, even if there's one less satellite dish appointment, maybe we're just dealing with the au pair, it'll be a little bit better. Maybe I will have 20 minutes to play candy crush in the airport too.
Lauren Schiller: So in the book you talk about the difference between equal and equity.
Eve Rodsky: Yeah.
Lauren Schiller: Like that the goal is actually not... So all this stuff that we're responsible for, which, I mean that is a whole other conversation. It's like why are we the she-faults? Actually I'll just ask you that. Did you learn about that? Like why are we the she-fault?
Eve Rodsky: There's two phases... Well, I have three phases of research. So phase one was figuring out why we were the she-fault by going through every single article and book, because I'm a really good researcher. My college roommate can tell you that. That ever been written on the subject of what I call the she-fault. And it turns out that she-fault has a name actually many names, second shift, mental load, emotional labor. But my favorite came out of a 1987 article by a sociologist named Arlene Kaplan Daniels. And her article was called Invisible Work.
Eve Rodsky: And why I love that one so much was because you can't value what you don't see. So what if, and this was my first foray into this idea of the solution was, what if I made visible the invisible. And I finally showed Seth all that I do. And so that has led me on this mission to create what I call the Shit I Do spreadsheets. And it was a really fun exercise that took me months. But what it started with was me writing down every single thing I did that took more than two minutes, that have a quantifiable time component.
Eve Rodsky: So you can't quantify love, but you can quantify how long it takes you to buy the flowers for the recital. So that became gestures of love, in one of my Excel tabs, and slowly I started building and I don't know if any of you that use Excel, but it had 98 tabs, 20 items of sub tabs, over a thousand items of visible work. And then I sort of sent it to my friends to say what am I missing? And I had friends who say, "Well you forgot sunscreen." I say, well obviously you don't have to use Excel then, because it's tab 72, under medical and healthy living, you just didn't down to item 21, because it's there.
Eve Rodsky: Another woman who I didn't even know, literally a friend of a friend that found my list through the Jewish Federation in Arizona said that she noticed I didn't have allowance on there. And I said, "Well then you really don't know how to read Excel because it's under tab 55, it's under family values and traditions." It's item number seven because why else are you giving allowance unless it's to have some sort of family value. So I think they were like freaked out, but they were very happy that it was that thorough.
Eve Rodsky: And I finally get the courage after these months and months to send this 19 million megabytes spreadsheet off to my husband, with the very eloquent need or like perfect communicator in the subject line that said, "Can't wait to discuss," with no context other than that, and just send it off into the ether and waiting for his response. And I'm waiting and waiting, and I finally get Seth Rodsky, unread email in my inbox. I open up the email and it's just one monkey covering its eyes. That was that. I didn't even get the courtesy of the three monkey trio. So sad, just to see no evil.
Eve Rodsky: And so obviously in my household, right, this has triggered a see no evil reaction. That's where I realized I needed to put my mediator hat on and say, I do this for a living. I develop systems for very difficult families, and if that doesn't make sense to you, just picture the HBO shows succession. Those are my clients. You should feel bad for me. But the good news is that working with families like that, I've had a decade of experience in mediation and systems building around shared values.
Eve Rodsky: Where even the most difficult clients, who would literally storm out of the room, when their son would be speaking, can share and have communication with grace and humor and generosity around very difficult family issues. So if that can happen for those families, I thought, "Well why not bring the same systems learning into ordinary households?" And that's sort of how I started developing Fair Play. Yeah.
Lauren Schiller: Okay. So let's get to this equity question, versus equality question. Because I mean it seems like the very first place that you would go is like, okay, there are a hundred items on this list or a thousand items on this list or whatever it is for you or your family. So if I just give you, my partner, half of them, everything's good.
Eve Rodsky: Yeah.
Lauren Schiller: But you actually say that's not true. So talk about that a little bit.
Eve Rodsky: So the Shit I Do spreadsheet evolves over time into the 100 Fair Play cards. And what I found was, the science backs this up. 50/50 is the absolute wrong equation. And I actually think 50/50 has held us back for a 100 years, because it's never 50/50, and then when you think it's going to be, there's a lot of disappointment and resentment and on and on and on. So what I realized, and the science backs this up, is that perceived fairness is a better indicator than actual fairness, whatever that means in the home in terms of how you view your partnership.
Eve Rodsky: So my perceived fairness may look different Laura than your perceived fairness. But what it comes out of after doing all the research is ownership. And so what I mean by that is everything you sort of need to know about Fair Play, you sort of can learn from the life changing magic of mustard. And what I mean by that is somebody has to know your second son, Johnny, like spreads French's yellow mustard on his protein, otherwise he like gags on protein, right? So if he dips it in French's yellow mustard, he eats his protein. That's what I call conception.
Eve Rodsky: That's what organizational manager's called conception. Then somebody has to put it on a list, or notice that the French's yellow mustard is running low. That's what I called planning. Then someone actually has to get their butts to the store to purchase the French's yellow mustard. And that's what I call execution. And that's when men step in. And that's a big problem, because they always bring home spicy Dijon, the nasty scene, they just do. And then men all over the country are saying to me, "I'm never going back to the store for my wife, because I went to the damn store, I got the mustard and I can't ever do anything right."
Eve Rodsky: My love letter to men, women all over the country were saying things to me like, "Well what do you mean Eve? You want me to trust him with making our living will? He can't even bring home the right type of mustard." And so it led to this trust spiral, where women just kept on taking more and more and more back on their plates. So what happens when you own the full mustard situation? When the conception, planning, execution stays together, when you have context? Well, if I'm the one who notices that my son needs a mustard and plan for the mustard, and I execute mustard, then something beautiful happens. You actually bring home the yellow mustard.
Eve Rodsky: And so Fair Play is predicated on that notion of ownership. And so that's why I say it's not 50/50, because men are not taking 50/50 of the cards. Even stay at home dads often don't have 50 cards, but when you have ownership there's perceived fairness, and so back what I just said, perceived fairness is a better indicator of marital happiness, and that's what I kept seeing all over the country, when you own the mustard situation. And if you don't believe me and you say, "Well, yeah, right. That's definitely not how we do things in our family."
Eve Rodsky: I just say, "Let me stop you because the most successful organizations do it that way." Netflix calls it the RRP, the rare responsible person, where they're given context, not control, and you never wait to be told what to do. Apple coined the term DRI, which is a directly responsible individual, where you own a task from conception and planning to overseeing the execution. So I believe it's time to start treating our home with some respect and rigor. That our home is our most important organization, because who would ever walk into your boss's office and sit there and say, "So, hey, what should we be doing today? I'll just wait here to tell me what to do."
Eve Rodsky: You wouldn't have a job the next day. But that's how we're doing things in our home. So I'm asking people to just bring some respect, some rigor. Like I said, treat our home like an organization, because when you do, then things start to change.
Lauren Schiller: So what about the idea of who has more time? So you actually break down kind of three or so, maybe it's four categories of situations that women are in, why don't you say what the categories are. Because, you've got women who are working full time and you've got women who are staying at home, and somehow there seemed to be equally responsible for as long the same things. But this idea that especially the women who are staying home, by choice or otherwise, theoretically have more time.
Eve Rodsky: Well the first thing again is back to fairness, right? Fair Play is a very customizable situation. So my affair is not going to look the same as your affair. Again why I think 50/50 is the wrong equation, because what does 50/50 mean, in a stay at home marriage where maybe you are taking on more of the marriage, the responsibilities in the home. But back to your question Lauren, about time. So why is Fair Play not just a card game? I wish I could just like hand out decks. But what I realized was that, and you've said this a tone sort of switches.
Eve Rodsky: The first half of the book really it has to be some consciousness raising, and then you can go to the South Beach diet part where I give you like what to eat and when to eat it, and that's where men come in, because they do like the prescriptive stuff. But the beginning was so important because of my finding. I had this giant finding that I wasn't expecting, and it sort of predicates everything that comes after in Fair Play. And it was this idea that women and society view men's time as finite, like diamonds, and women's time is infinite like sand. So what do I mean by that?
Eve Rodsky: Well, men were saying things like, "My power hours, I make more money and she has more time." So we were hearing it from men that, we know that from equal pay, we go into the office for the same amount of hours. We're paid less for those hours. But what I didn't expect was that the worst purveyors of not valuing their time would actually be women. And so women all over the country were saying things to me like, "Of course I should pick up the extra slack in my home, because my husband makes more money than me," not true.
Eve Rodsky: Other women were saying to me, "I do more in the home because I'm just wired differently. I'm a better multi-tasker." So I went to the top neuroscientists in this country to find out that that's 100% not true. And one actually said to me, off the record, "Don't use this in the book, but you can use this on your tour. Imagine you can convince half the population that they're better at wiping asses and doing dishes. How great for the other half of the population." That's that multitasking message. Hence, there's a 100 CEO's in the Forbes list this month, and guess what they all have in common except for one, they all are men.
Eve Rodsky: Okay. Other women were saying to me, "In the time it takes me to tell him how to do it, I might as well do it myself." So I went to the top behavioral economists who think all only about longterm thinking, 1000% not true in terms of longterm planning and my favorite were the two people with the same job? Yeah, we're both colorectal surgeons. Yeah, we're both shipping supervisors, but my husband's really busy and overwhelmed and I just find the time. And so I like to say, unless we're somehow Albert Einstein and we know how to fuck with the space time continuum, we definitely can't find time.
Eve Rodsky: There's literally no way to find time. But there is time choice of how you use your time, and if I have less choice of over how or use my time, then my time is less valued. So having to break those down for women especially was really important. So a lot of the book is looking at our own views of how we view our own time. And so I like to say, imagine a world where we're all time is created equal, right? Where we actually really believe that an hour holding our child's hand in the pediatrician's office, is just as valuable as an hour in the board room.
Eve Rodsky: If that becomes true, then guess what? Men will be more likely to do it, and then we'll start having some real changes in those workplaces. So all time is created equal, that's where the fundamental premise came from.
Lauren Schiller: So I mean, that is a huge societal shift.
Eve Rodsky: Yeah.
Lauren Schiller: Right.? And you know, I guess change starts at home. Have you learned about how that might ultimately ripple out to being rewarded in our larger society? I mean what do you think needs to change kind of from other directions?
Eve Rodsky: That's a great question. I'll tell it to you. Can I tell a two minute story that actually illustrate some sort of change that's happening? So I'll tell you a story about my friend Julie and Ed, who wanted to try Fair Play around the holidays last year. It's a terrible time to try anything new. But this actually was after the manuscript was submitted. So you're hearing a story that's actually not in the book. So Ed is the type of guy who said things to me like, "I'm the CEO outside the home, and my wife's a CEO inside the home, so throw up."
Eve Rodsky: Okay. But that's Ed. I like him. That's sort of the way he came at this. And so Julie wanted to try Fair Play, because she was super overwhelmed, and she says to me, "My mom just entered the hospital. Ed says he wants to help. I'm taking the kids to school. I'm working part time. I'm still making their lunches. I'm trying to decorate the Christmas tree, try to do a holiday card, plan our Christmas travel, and I'm at my breaking point."
Eve Rodsky: So I said to her, "Well, what's breaking you?" And she said my second son, Brody, second grade secret Santa project, because it has to be made from scratch. I always say thank you to the schools. It's so nice to do that to us around the holidays. But they do. And so she said to me, "Well typically if I hadn't heard about your Fair Play concepts, I would just give Ed a list of all the things I need to get for me for the secret Santa project. And when I got home from sitting my mother in the hospital, I'd be building the project with Brody.
Eve Rodsky: But you're telling me not to do that. You're telling me to ask Ed, CEO outside the home to own the homework, this one homework projects for one day, one card for one day." I said, "Yes, I am asking you to do that." And so Julie said to me, "Well I wouldn't even know where to begin? Like that's completely not our habit." And she was sort of panicking, because she wouldn't have the tools to ask him to own the homework card for this project. So Fair Play at its core is really based on values. It's not a score keeping exercise where you throw cards at your partner.
Eve Rodsky: I asked you to back it up to what is your why. So I did that with Julie and I said "Why do you value this project? Let's just start with that. Why is this the project that's breaking you?" And so she said to me, "Well it's the signature second grade project, because we're supposed to be teaching our kids that Christmas is not about a $100 [inaudible 00:25:56]. It's about a lack of materialism and the fact that you can get a nice homemade gift that you actually are excited to open, means a lot to me in the school."
Eve Rodsky: Okay. I was feeling like that was a very articulate answer. And then she says, "On top of it, my son Brody drew the name of a new girl at school, and I watch her, I'm the one who drops off in the morning, because I have a part time job. And so I watch this little girl sort of walk around, and no one's really talking to her. And it would be really nice if my son who is popular and athletic and who has been at the school since kindergarten would make something really nice for this new girl. Like maybe would make her feel more welcome, and it would foster empathy for him."
Eve Rodsky: So I tear every time... You know, when she said that, I still tear up telling that story. So it felt very powerful to me. Her why. So I said, "Just say that to Ed. Just what you just said to me. When you're calm, not when you're feeling overwhelmed, but when you're calm, articulate that. Exactly what you just said to me. You say to him." So I was interviewing a lot of people at the time, so I almost forgot about checking back in with them. But I'm so happy I did because Ed gets on the phone and tells me that right after Julie told him that he began Googling secret Santa projects for little girls with his son Brody.
Eve Rodsky: Remember this is CEO outside the home guy, and that's what I call conception. Because they decided in a Popsicle stick jewelry box, and then he tells me that they start writing down on a list everything they need to build that project. So they wanted color, this is all Eds details. They wanted colored, Popsicle sticks, glue, glitter and Brody even wanted the little girl not to have to use two hands to open her jewelry box. So they were buying a knob for the box that was on their list.
Eve Rodsky: So that's what I call in Fair Play, the planning. And then Ed tells me that he found this really cool store named My Goals. And it wasn't even that difficult because you could just go to one store, and get everything you need. So wow, that sounds like a really cool store. And they go to My Goals, they pick up everything they need for this project and they come home. And they start building it. And so Julie chimes in and says, "Well, my life changed in that moment." And I said, "Well that's a pretty big statement. So what was changing for you in that moment?"
Eve Rodsky: And she said, when she saw Brody and Ed on the floor working on gluing these pieces together for this Popsicle stick jewelry box, that she noticed that Ed had glitter on his hands. And she said to me, I said, "Well, what was making that so meaningful to you? And she said, "Because it finally felt like he was in it with me. And because glitter is a fucking pain in the ass to get out and it's always in her hair and on her hands. And how cool if he actually gets it on his hand and here and realizes that."
Eve Rodsky: And so that sort of got me thinking right, about small micro changes. I didn't ask this man to take a 100 cards. I didn't even ask him to take homework for the year or the month. This was ownership of one card for one project, and his wife gave him trust to do it. And so imagine all men have glitter on their hands. Because back to what you said about societal change that starts in the home. So Ed's also a very high up position at a very important East Coast company. What if he recognizes that there's value in doing secret Santa projects?
Eve Rodsky: Maybe he'll let his employees leave earlier. Maybe he'll understand that women, their time matters, and so we should pay them the same. But I do think it all begins with glitter. Yeah.
Lauren Schiller: Okay. I actually have to ask you about the CEO of the home business, because I was just chatting with someone this weekend who said that that's what their tax advisor put down on her tax return as her title, and she was happy about it.
Eve Rodsky: Okay.
Lauren Schiller: But you're like, "Hmm, so what?" What is the downside of that?
Eve Rodsky: The downside of that is that it means that ownership of every single card is landing on the woman, and nobody can hold all the cards. I mean in single mother of households, yes, they do try to hold all the cards like my mother did, and stuff falls through the cracks. And there's societal issues, we're not valuing that. We could talk all day about single mothers, but if you have the solution, privilege, to have a partner at home, I say to you, "Nobody should be holding all the cards."
Eve Rodsky: And so again, what I found was that men like Ed... So let me just tell you another thing, one last thing about Ed that I don't often tell, but in this context I think it's important. He also told me that Brody, his son started crying in the car on the way back from My Goals, because he was sad his grandmother was in the hospital. And I think the reason Ed told me that, I don't want to put words in his mouth, but I want to go back and ask him. I think he told me that because he felt privileged that his son was finally confiding in him.
Eve Rodsky: And there's a connection there when your son's willing to be vulnerable and cry to you. And what does that do for him? And so people know, I love these types of stories. So I got a call two days ago from a client in Seattle, who told me he was at a funeral, not to get all existential. And he said, "You're going to love this story about the funeral." I said, "Well, that's really cool. You think I love stories about funerals. But tell me why I'm going to love this story." He said, "This man, again, very powerful man in my clients realm. My HBO says, you know, succession realm passed away.
Eve Rodsky: He wasn't my client, he was a friend of my client. And his daughter... So even though he was super powerful, I guess he was always a tooth fairy. He held the magical beings card for his kids, and his daughter read all of the poems she ever received from him as the tooth fairy at his funeral." And so I think about what is that for men? What do we care about at the end of our lives, right? We care about those things, those connections we make. And so I saw men who were getting ownership, not given a list, not what I call rat fucked, the random assignment of a task, but actually given ownership, they were getting more meaningful connections out of their family life.
Eve Rodsky: And so it's not good for men either to live in the CEO of the home CEO outside the home siloed living. Even if it's not, like I said, 50/50, trust in the home matters. When you're doing it together, I saw huge shifts in how people were interacting with each other and their children.
Lauren Schiller: I think it's worth spending a few minutes talking just functionally about how this works. Because I've been having fun pitching it to various people.
Eve Rodsky: I got my ambassador.
Lauren Schiller: And I'm like, "This is going to change everyone's life. It's going to change my life." But I was able to go to my husband and say, "Well I have to prepare for this interview. Right. So I need you to play this game with me. That's going to create more efficiency in the home." And I like watched to see what his reaction was. And I was like, "Or," because you've got several pitches that you can make to your partners. Right?
Eve Rodsky: Yeah.
Lauren Schiller: And I was like waiting to see which one he'd most respond to. Meanwhile, my 14-year-old daughter is listening in because she hears everything and she keeps asking me, "Mom, what's this game? Like are we ever going to play the game?" So I'm like ready to take a pack of cards.
Eve Rodsky: Yes. You're going to take on cards.
Lauren Schiller: So let's talk about you. I mean, you've obviously referenced the 100 cards and, a few of the different categories and that you need to have the concept planning and execution.
Eve Rodsky: Yeah.
Lauren Schiller: There's also things like minimum standard of care and all that. So could you just give a little rundown of how this game works?
Eve Rodsky: Yes. Remind me to get right back to that. Because you just said something important about communication.
Lauren Schiller: Okay.
Eve Rodsky: And then we'll get right to the practicality of it. So just one quick thing about how women communicate, and men too. So a lot of women out there were saying to me very powerful women even, and ones that again have less economic privilege that they can never have a conversation about these issues in the home. It's hard that they didn't want to bring it up, that this was too tricky. So one woman said that to me, and then completely unironically about 20 minutes later. She's like, "So yeah, it's when my husband didn't put the clothes in the dryer, I just dumped the wet clothes on his pillow."
Eve Rodsky: Another woman said the same thing. "I can't have a conversation about this in my home." But then I find out she has an Instagram account called the shit my husband doesn't pick up, and she takes pictures of all of it and she posts it on Instagram. So what I'd like to say to all you women and men out there, is I promise you, you are already communicating. I will go on your nest camera, watch you for a day, circle every single time you are communicating about home life. Even if I don't see your words coming out of your mouth, you are already communicating.
Eve Rodsky: So when I could say to women, you were having a conversation shift, but not a start. Women felt a little bit less scared to have these conversations. And so that is one way to do it. To say we're going to have a shift and not a start because we are already communicating about home life. Now another thing is if you need lots of tools, Fair Play gives you those tools. They give you all the mediation tools that I have out of my practice, but it's also again back to the work we have to do in ourselves, why Fair Play is not just a car game.
Eve Rodsky: I have a lot of quizzes in the book, not just on who said it when, but on what type of personality profile are you, what toxic type messages have you given yourself, and also what type of communication vulnerability do you have? So a big communication vulnerability that I had and a lot of women have in my data set, was they love to give feedback in the moment.
Lauren Schiller: Yeah.
Eve Rodsky: And so when emotion is high, cognition is low. When you're giving that feedback in the moment, it's super unhelpful, but we love to do it. So my editor laughed at me because I had about 20 pages of explaining to women why not to give feedback at the moment from a neuroscientist perspective, from a psychologist, from me, from clergy. And so she said, "I get it that you really want to get this point across, that you have to hold your tongue to a time when emotion is low and cognition is high. But we can't spend 20 pages dissecting this. They're just going to have to believe you with three supporting experts."
Eve Rodsky: So it's about four pages in the book of that point. And so you have to start with using tools, sitting down, communicating at a time where you're calm, and that's where the cards help. So back to the practicalities. So if you're communicating, and not giving feedback in the moment, and you're sitting down, when you're calm, what happens is you have a full set of tools, right? Your brain is in a place that can have conversations that are more than just take the damn dishes card, because I never want to do dishes again. That's when Fair Play fails. And that's sort of the beauty of why this took me seven years. It was all to get to the last chapter of the book, which is called the top 13 mistakes couples make and the Fair Play fix.
Eve Rodsky: Because I needed to have testing subjects from all walks of life that mirrored the U.S. Census to get a sense of what was tripping people up. So you get to read about all the people's mistakes and how to correct them. But a big mistake was jumping right to the division, because it just became another list. So I did that. That was my first mistake, before I used my own mediation training to sort of develop the system. I just sort of had this game of fight idea, and I gave Seth the garbage card.
Eve Rodsky: And so what started happening was I started just following him around the house, sort of as his shadow. I even like opened the door under the sink to just remind him that that's where the garbage liners were. And so he could like trip over it as he was trying to get a snack. And he stopped me one day and said like, "This garbage thing is not working because you're literally stalking me over garbage, and I'm not going to own anything if this is what it feels like to own, something because you're literally stalking me over garbage."
Eve Rodsky: So this is my own mistake of just jumping straight to the division. So that's when I had a backup and say, My entire mediation practice for decade is based on values based mediation, where I ask people what is their why? So why am I not bringing that into the system? Well, it's because it's a really weird conversation to talk about your values over garbage, who does that? But what I found was that when you do that, it brings transformative change into the home, transformative change that lasts. And so that's what I started doing.
Eve Rodsky: I sat down and said, "So let me tell you why I value garbage. As you know, you went to my house, you saw my apartment on Avenue C in 14th street look like, you saw the Chinese takeout bag that sat on a knob. You saw that there was no garbage can in my house growing up." What happened was garbage would spill on the floor every single day. It would have this little bag, it would overflow. And so I was a very dehydrated child, because after sundown I was afraid to turn on the light in the kitchen, because we have cockroaches and water bugs that would just scatter everywhere.
Eve Rodsky: So I'm extremely triggered by garbage. But I'd never thought to tell Seth that. And so we sat down and I told him the story of my upbringing, and then he responds by saying, "Well, I slept on a Domino's pizza box as my pillow, my whole fraternity life. So I don't really care about garbage. I actually like garbage. It doesn't bother me." And so what happens, right when you have such different values over something as simple as garbage. Well then you borrow what I did from the law and from medicine, and you come up with what's reasonable, a minimum standard of care.
Eve Rodsky: And that's what we did. So I said to Seth, he said, "I will hold this card. And what feels reasonable to me is if garbage goes out once a day, and I will take it out once a day at 7:00 PM. I'll put it in my calendar like a work appointment, as long as you never fucking mention the word garbage ever again." And ever since that day, garbage goes out at 7:00 PM, and sometimes we re-deal when he's not home, and we take other cards. But that's what happens. 20 minute conversation. You invest in those conversations, and it's a lifetime of change.
Eve Rodsky: And so when women say, "Well, I don't want to spend 20 minutes talking about garbage." I love to just grab their phones, and I go to their screen time app, and I promise you they've been on Instagram or Facebook longer than 20 minutes. Invest in your partnerships, treat the homeless some respects because it pays off spades. I really believe change starts in the home. Yeah.
Lauren Schiller: Well one of the things that I was really excited about in reading this book was, aside from the very obvious benefits, is this notion of unicorn time, and that that gets to be a card. And when I saw your book, I'm like, "What's this little unicorn doing on that scale there?" So can you explain what you mean by that and let's talk about it.
Eve Rodsky: Yeah. It's this idea of unicorn time, unicorn space. I call it that because it's like the mythical equine, it's this beautiful creative space, that we used to have before kids and partnerships. But it doesn't freaking exist, unless we reclaim it. So it's really this idea and it changed the way I wrote the book. I really am an organization manager. I'm a mediator. I get to the presenting problem, the underlying problems. But what stopped me, which kept pulling me back into the fact that this was bigger than just a game, was not only the toxic time message we were giving ourselves, it was the identity loss that was being reported in so many women after children.
Eve Rodsky: I don't know who I am anymore. One woman who had three Ivy league degrees said to me when I said, what is your unicorn space? What is your creative space that makes you uniquely you, and how do you share that with the world? She said, "I don't even understand what that question means. It's physics." I said, "What do you mean?" She said, "Well, I'm an object at rest. Object in motion stay in motion, objects in rest stay at rest, and I'm object at rest. I won't even know how to answer that question."
Eve Rodsky: And why that was so important. It was because I asked a very provocative question of men. I asked men all over this country, are you proud of your wife, of your wife or your partner? Men always went to, "She's an amazing mother." Okay. I said, "That's great. That's a role." And then they said, "I couldn't do it without her." I said, "That's great. That's a personal assistant, so tell me more." If a woman had her self-worth, something that made her, her, right? Whether it's volunteering with the firefighters, like one woman I interviewed who does American Ninja warrior, or for me the gender division of labor, or baking pies or whatever it is, then the man immediately went to that.
Eve Rodsky: It was never like, "Oh, she's an amazing dental hygienist." One guy said to me, "The dental hygienist husband, my wife's perfecting rhubarb," and he went off for 15 minutes about how hard rhubarb is to work with. Because she wants to add rhubarb to her pie collection that she's going to enter in some contest. I don't bake myself like that, but I guess apparently rhubarb gets very runny, and so you have to like perfect it when you're baking. But this man knew so much about rhubarb, because it was his wife's passion. He was picking up on her passion.
Eve Rodsky: And so I said it's not about a shaming ourselves to say our spouses need to be proud of us, but it's about us being proud of ourselves. Feeling a little bit like we were here, before we had these roles of being parent, partner and worker. And it really, really affects women and men too. There were some men who said, "I really need to find my unicorn space," as well completely we both need it, and we can't resent our partners for taking it.
Eve Rodsky: So I'll just end on that. That's my Harper's Bazaar article, you can look out for it. It's called the Real Midlife Crisis. What happens when the person who loves you the most resents you the most? Because my finding was the three things that most people said made them happy, were adult friendships, self care, true self care, not CBD oil pedicures, but like working out, or walking to the beach with your dog and unicorn space. Those were the three things that we didn't want to give our spouse anytime for.
Eve Rodsky: So it's not about breast implants or a Ferrari, it's about bringing back in our happiness trio, which starts with unicorn space, in saying that we all value this. I deserve this as much as you do, even if it's unpaid. And that was the hardest for stay at home mothers, because they said to me, I'm already doing all this unpaid work. How can I add in baking pies on top of that? But they have to, because it's about your marriage. And then what I found out from the research is also about our longevity.
Eve Rodsky: It's about our longevity, being who we are and being able to share that with the world and a little, even if it means just like bringing a pie to your neighbor, that is about our longevity.
Lauren Schiller: And it's also just about being interesting. You talk about being interesting in the book, interesting to yourself and-
Eve Rodsky: You have a right to be interested in your life.
Lauren Schiller: Yeah.
Eve Rodsky: You have a right to be interested in your own life. And so many women said to me, "I don't feel I have that right to be interested in my own life anymore."
Lauren Schiller: All right.
Eve Rodsky: Sorry to end on such a downer. The good news is that the after, which is a sequel that I'm writing now, is all these women and men who rediscovered their unicorn space, and it's the most inspiring thing to watch.
Lauren Schiller: I just have to say, I feel like it is... how many people here would say they have unicorn space? You know, something that they really value and they get time to do. That's awesome. I mean, is that a good percentage?
Eve Rodsky: That's great. I love this room.
Lauren Schiller: That's right.
Eve Rodsky: 40% of the room.
Lauren Schiller: Keep doing. Yeah. Yeah. So for those of you who don't, there's a little workbook.
Eve Rodsky: Workbook and how to get it back. But I will say that, when I was in blueberries time, right, when I was sobbing on the side of the road, anytime someone would forward me a find your passion and you know article, I would say that's just another fucking thing. I don't have time to do. So thank you for shaming me. You wanted me to have self care. Great. Then you take my kids to school and try to mark up a contract with a pen in your vagina. You try to get some self care time.
Eve Rodsky: So I found these very condescending messages to women along with lower your standards, all these other messages I could tell you about all night, because it's just putting more shit on us. So I only believe in unicorn space in the context of domestic rebalance, only in that context. Alone, it's just another thing on our list of shit we don't have time to do.
Lauren Schiller: That was Eve Rodsky, author of Fair Play, a game changing solution for when you have too much to do and more life live. Speaking with me, live on stage at Inforum at the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco. I'll put a link to Eve's book on my website, inflectionpointradio.org, where you can find future events by clicking on the events tab. Come on out. I'm Lauren Schiller, this is Inflection Point and this is how women rise up.
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