SFA_Eve Rodsky: Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix

SFA_Eve Rodsky: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.

Missy Modell:
Welcome to Sorry for Apologizing. I'm your host, Missy Modell: activist, strategist, and recovering chronic apologizer. In this podcast, we'll explore all of the ways women have been conditioned by society to play small, whether it's being expected to have children, tolerate chronic pain, or accept gender inequities, from orgasms to paychecks. This season, we'll work to challenge the cultural beliefs that brought us here and discuss all of the reasons why we should be asking for forgiveness rather than permission. It is time to stop apologizing.

Missy Modell:
Women do so much. We've carried the majority of the mental load at home for so many years all around the world. The mental load is defined as the invisible labor involved in managing a household or family, which usually falls on a woman's shoulders. It can also be referred to as worry work or cognitive labor. This phenomenon has become so normalized that this type of devalued, invisible work often goes unpaid or underpaid, impacting women of color most of all. So despite the fact that all time is created equal, why do we value the time negotiating in meetings more than the hours spent cleaning a house? Why do we value being in an office all day versus managing the school schedules of three kids? A study done by Motherly said that 62% of mothers have less than an hour to themselves a day. If we want to envision a world where we value women's time, where the workplace can actually support a sustainable division of labor at home, people of all genders need to stand up and make a change. Today's guest has created a movement in challenging these gendered responsibilities, and I'm so excited to have her here. The best-selling author of Fair Play and Find Your Unicorn Space, we have Eve Rodsky.

Eve Rodsky:
Hi, Missy! Thank you for having me. I'm very excited to be here.

Missy Modell:
So, you're tackling, like, a really low-key problem. Like, really not complicated, nothing systemic. So, let's talk about why you've devoted your life. We, you know, before we even hopped on, we were talking about caregiving. How does caregiving relate to the work that you're doing?

Eve Rodsky:
Well, Missy, I think, I want to just back up and say, like, I did not set out to be an expert on the gender division of labor. That was not on my third grade. What do you want to be when you grow up? ..., which probably said like veterinarian or astronaut, and it definitely was not what I answered when I distinctly remember Elizabeth Warren, in our one orientation at Harvard Law School, asked us what we want to do with our law degree. And a lot of us women, we shot up our hand, Treasury Secretary, President of the United States. I wanted to be a Knicks City dancer and a senator from New York. So I think because we had heard as Gen X women, especially, that women before us had sort of fixed feminism for us, I went in thinking that gender would not be a barrier. I'd never even thought about gender as a barrier, and so I thought I could smash all of these glass ceilings. And when I tell you that literally, that was 2000, if you cut to 2008, when I had my first son, or 2011, when I had my second son, after a sort of a decade of being married and caregiving and all these things that were sold as, as women's dreams, and the only thing I could tell you that I was smashing was peas, like peas for a toddler, and thinking like, how did I get here? Completely resentful, having like mental, and my body physically breaking down because of the stress of trying to maintain a career and have a family. And so I think the work I've done on myself and the systemic societal work that the Fair Play Movement has become over the past ten years is so that you, your generation, the people after you literally never have to go through what I what our generation went through alone.

Missy Modell:
Something, I mean, I obviously dug through so many stats as it relates to this, but something that really stands out to me, and it wasn't even a stat. I think it was something you said about finding a supportive husband or a supportive partner, and why that, you referenced an article, and why that should not be the status quo. You shouldn't be looking for, so let's talk about that because that's pretty radical.

Eve Rodsky:
Well, I think it's so ridiculous because one of the pieces of advice that I always hear for women is that be careful who you marry. Like Sheryl Sandberg says that all the time, like I mean in men, it was like, choose a supportive partner. But I'm here to tell you that once a baby comes into the picture, men do 5 to 15 hours a week less, less caregiving and housework. When women outearn their partners, all of a sudden, their unpaid labor, childcare, housework, as my one friend said, having a magical vagina that tells her what her husband's mother wants for Christmas, those burdens go up. So what we're talking about today is not a relic primary breadwinners. It's not a relic, okay, well, my partner, if it's a man, a husband makes more money than me, so I do more childcare and housework. It's not a relic of those traditional roles. What happens to women is that we become the social safety net for society. And so, in a capitalist patriarchy, where we all live right now in America, it's much cheaper to convince women that their time is worthless and infinite, and so that we should not only make money, but we should also raise kids. We should also be the one taking notes in meetings. We should be the one ordering our boss's birthday cake. We should be the one, as my friend who's a rocket scientist says to me, she was tasked to pick out the linoleum tile for her company's headquarters. No, man. They thought it was a compliment to tell her she had great style. She said, hire a fucking interior designer, I need to go back to my rocket science thing. So the systemic issue of women holding society together, doing all of the labor that is unpaid is, again, it's sort of not just a relic of traditional gender roles. It is literally what holds our capitalist, patriarchal society together.

Missy Modell:
So what is unpaid labor? Because I think people might not even view it as labor, they view it as what it is.

Eve Rodsky:
So let's talk a little bit about that.

Missy Modell:
Yeah.

Eve Rodsky:
I had never heard that term before, actually. And in fact, that's what, again, I don't, why I'm here, so that none of you all have to suffer through the realizations and the light bulbs and the shock and the resentment and all the, you know, ten stages of grief. But basically, what happened to me after my second son was born was that I was abandoned in three ways. One was by my workplace, which is very typical for women. When we look, and even if you choose not to have children, if you look like you're going to be childbearing, work starts to discriminate against you. So in my case, you know, God bless him, like Billy O'Sullivan, to go on the airplane with the partner to meet the client. I'm in the basement doing document review, right? And you're like, I must suck at my job because I got relegated to the basement. No, I look childbearing, so I'm going to get less important work because God forbid I go out on maternity leave, I'm more replaceable, right? Then because I'm doing less important work, I get paid less, and it's a vicious cycle that the most vicious and inherent bias against women is motherhood. It accounts for 80% of our pay gap. It's pretty gnarly out there. So that happened first. I was in a corporate job, started to get shitty assignments, was told if I wanted to come back after maternity leave, I could not work from home on Fridays. I would have to be pumping breast milk in a storage room, but make sure to bring a battery pack because there's no outlet in there. So just a lot of indignities, microaggressions. And then, after that, I was abandoned by my partner. So as I was saying to you earlier, after kids come into the picture, men do 5 to 15 hours a week less. I wish I had known that because I'd married an equal partner, somebody after my single mother upbringing, where I thought I was doing it differently than my mom had done it, or had more support than she had. And instead, I ended up being in sort of this, you know, single married mother situation where I was still doing it all but had a ton of resentment. And I had a big breakdown, my husband sent me a text. I'm surprised you didn't get blueberries. And this blueberries breakdown of being the fulfiller of his smoothie needs, I talk a lot about that in Fair Play, how it transformed my life to pre-blueberry and after-blueberry. So abandoned by my partner into these roles that he started to look at me as the default or, as I call him, Fair Play, the Shefault for literally every single household in domestic tasks for my family. On top of that overwhelm, my workplace, after my second son was born, was telling me, basically, don't come back. And then on top of that, because in America, we don't really have things like paid leave, we don't have things like childcare. What ended up happening was that a lot of people said, well, your career may take a hit when your kids are young because we don't have those supports, but once you get into school, once you get your kids into school, you'll start to rebuild your career. Well, I entered school, where I was told that the people around me were going to be my social safety net, and they were going to be the people who know me better than anyone ever knew me. And that first day, I came to that school with my toddler son, I get a nametag to wear around the school that day that says, Zach's mom. So I was abandoned by my social safety net, basically to say, you know, these are the people who are going to know me better than anyone's ever known me. They don't even know my fucking name. And so I think that's why the term unpaid labor became so interesting to me, because I had no idea what was happening to me. All I knew is that I was abandoned by society into Zach's mom, no one cared about my identity anymore. My workplace didn't want me anymore. My partner was viewing me as a role. And so, to unpack what was happening to me, I did start to do research, and it turns out that I was living a statistic I didn't even know, which is that women shoulder two-thirds or more, as we were saying earlier, of unpaid labor, and what that means, and you may have heard it by many names, so you may have heard unpaid labor, you may have heard the term invisible work, you may have heard the term mental load, you may have heard the term emotional labor, you may have heard many different terms that are still referring to the same phenomenon, which is that there is certain labor in our society, whether it's dishes, to unpacking, for travel, to planning, for pets, taking them to the vet, to watching kids, just looking at some of the Fair Play categories that we'll talk about later, to working on your own mental health, to doing home maintenance all the way to purchasing a home, going to the dentist, laundry. There are certain tasks that society has to get done to be a functional society, but unfortunately, that labor is not paid, and that's why it's called unpaid labor. So I'll just give you one last example, which is if I hire a housekeeper to clean my house, and then I marry that housekeeper in our gross domestic product, when that housekeeper is cleaning my house as a housekeeper, we count that labor. But as soon as I marry that housekeeper and I don't transactionally pay that person anymore, that labor vanishes.

Missy Modell:
That's absolutely powerful. So what does that mean? Does it mean that labor should be paid?

Eve Rodsky:
Well, I think what's interesting is that in the 1970s, there was a Wages for Housework movement, where there were a lot of feminists who argued that, yes, this unpaid labor should be paid. But this is what I think. What I think is that it's bigger than policy. And there's something called the Overton window, which argues that you have to change culture first, and then policy comes later. So the policy change that I would like to see is a question that I asked thousands now, thousands of people in 17 countries. And that question is, do you believe holding a child's hand at the pediatrician's office is as valuable to society as an hour in the boardroom or a boardroom? And I will say that when I start to ask that question in 2013, most especially white men said, no, they don't believe that. They believe the hour in the boardroom is more important. And so that's the societal change I'm talking about, right? That if we center care, then everybody wins. And even feminists, a lot of feminists quote unquote, told me that they didn't believe, and now we're holding a child's hand was as important as being in the boardroom. And in fact, what those women said to me was, well, I'd rather outsource those tasks, right? It's like that old trope, if you're so overwhelmed, just get help. We hear that a lot, especially after kids for women. The problem with that type of feminism is, if you believe an hour in the boardroom is more important than an hour holding a child's hand, and you believe that outsourcing is the way to deal with these issues, then what happens is that you have a whole class of domestic workers, which are typically black and brown women that are supporting the lives of white women. So it's like a vagina replacing a vagina, and these conversations never, ever, ever touch men. And so you ask me sort of what I think the change is. I think the change is not necessarily paying for housework, but it's about making sure that men do it.

Missy Modell:
And even it's important to discuss what happens when this happens. What happens when women are not compensated, and they lose time, they lose themselves. What is the harm, the danger in that?

Eve Rodsky:
Well, I think two things happen, Missy. And again, I think one man said to me, you really like to go dark, to go light. But I think sometimes staying in the dark is helpful because we're here today to say this is a one-on-one. We're talking about a conversation that we can, Missy, and hopefully, I will come and talk again, but this is the opening to you who may never have heard these terms before or think this won't happen to you, to understand that we're, the Fair Play community is here for you. It's here for you and in all of your glory. We want you to continue to be the acrobat and the clown and the dancer and the senator and whatever you want to be without society tearing you down and telling you your time is not valuable, and that you're only allowed to be a partner, a parent, and a professional, right? There is a rich world out there for women. But what I would say is that, you know, we're at an inflection point now, I think, where there's, as I said earlier, there's two real costs. One, obviously, is the more obvious cost, which is that 43% of women take a career detour after kids. So that is an obvious, you know, when you lose economic power, that's highly alarming. And we see it with abortion access, right? If you become a younger mother, you're more likely to be in poverty. That is not an accident that there are some politicians and lots of people who want that, to make women less powerful. But I think the more insidious, Missy, thing that happens is that it's like the boiling frog and that anecdote where you don't realize it's happening to you until it's almost too late. And what I mean by that is that at work, you take those notes once, you sit on your employee resource group once, and then all of a sudden, you're the head of the employee resource group, and then you're wondering why they don't include that in your promotion or why you're being paid less than your male counterpart who does none of those civic tasks or does no mentoring. You end up buying the blueberries because it's what your child likes, and you think your partner can't. You say to yourself, in the time it takes me to tell Seth what to do, I should do it myself. And so all of these things start to build up where you say to yourself, my job is more flexible, so I should do more. In fact, there's a study that shows when women are doctors, they say their job is more flexible than lawyers or their husbands. And then the women are the lawyers, and the men are the doctors, and they say their job is more flexible. So flexibility is in the eye of the beholder, but what happens over time is that because it's a death by a thousand cuts or the boiling frog, when I've been studying women over ten years, what we see ten years later is that they are suffering from physical manifestations of this type of unpaid labor stress. And so women report thyroid issues, they report autoimmune disease, they report insomnia, they report SSRI use, they report self-medication, like edibles are mommy juice. It becomes a bleak picture out there if you believe it's your own problem, because then the only way to deal with that is either you burn out to you're physically sick, or you are medicating your way and numbing your way through your life. So we don't want any of that, and that's why having a community to talk about these issues, to understand it's not your fault. You can love your partner and want more. That's, I think that's the beauty of sort of this Fair Play Movement that it's basically just started in a way because it started in 2019, but it's also pretty far along, and that, I think, things are starting to change.

Missy Modell:
And I think you brought up a really important point of the, I'll just do it, because I think we are really great multitaskers, but potentially not great at delegating. So do you think that's a systemic thing that we've inherited, and how do you counterbalance that? How do you fight against that almost biological urge to just say, oh, I'll handle it, don't worry, And then, as you said, it compounds over time.

Eve Rodsky:
Yeah. Well, it's such a great question because I think that was what I wanted to find out. I was on a quest ten years ago to actually figure out whether it was a biological urge, and it turns out it's not. And in fact, multitasking or task switching is one of the reasons we do get sick, because people don't task switch well. So the ability to focus and to not multitask is actually a huge privilege. Virginia Woolf talked about it and said, like, you know, women deserve a room of one's own. Women's boundaries are not held, our time is interrupted, we have to multitask, and I'll tell you why. Because the big aha moment for me was that as a lawyer and a behavior designer, because that's sort of what lawyers do, right? We want you to stop at a stop sign, we pass a law. I look at the world through sort of behavior design. And so when I started to build Fair Play, not as a therapist, but as a lawyer and someone who works in organizational management, I knew that I wanted all homes, regardless of whether they had children, even with roommates, to be considered organizations, and I wanted them to be thriving organizations. And to be a thriving organization, which is my day job, I work on that as a lawyer for highly, highly complex families is, you need three things. The secret formula for a healthy organization is you need boundaries, you need systems, and you need communication, for any organization. So the system is what Fair Play became. And we're not going to go into big detail about that because, obviously, you can hear the Timeout Podcast about Fair Play, you could read the book, you can go online buy the cards, like you'll see the system. The system part is where I started, Missy, because that was easy. I could build, I knew I could design a system that could help people divide up unpaid labor to treat their home as a most important organization. It requires, just like the workplace ownership. You know, when you hold a task, you own it. You don't say, Hey, Missy, I just came to work for you. What should I be doing today? I'll just sit here till you tell me what to do, right? We don't do that. So people understood the system, this ownership system of housework. That's what Fair Play is based on that, you know, there's 100 cards in the Fair Play system. It's a card game, and when you hold a card, you hold it with full ownership the way you would in the workplace from start to finish. So that was understandable. But ironically, it was the communication and the boundaries, Missy, that ended up being really, really hard, and it's because of what you just said. The biggest realization for me was that I can't get people to adopt a system of partnership in the home, especially if it's men and women being partnered, unless women are willing to assert a boundary over their time. And so the number one thing I heard from women, or why they didn't assert that boundary was, I'm a better multitasker. I'm better, I'm wired differently to notice that the toilet paper is out. And so I went to my favorite neuroscientist, a good friend of mine, and we really unpacked this issue. And I don't really go into detail often, but I feel like we're going pretty deep today. And what this neuroscientist said to me was, well, what's your question, Eve? And I said, well, my question is, right, are women better multitaskers? That's what I've told myself my whole life to justify why I'm noticing that the toilet paper is out. And he looked at me, and he said, do you mean neurologically or behaviorally? And I said, well, what are you talking about? And he said, well, do you want me to answer as a neuroscientist, or do you want me to answer as a man married to a woman? And I said, well, answer as a neuroscientist first. So he said, there's no gender difference in the brain for how we task switch, like zero. But he said, if my wife believes that she is the one who is better at wiping asses and doing dishes. Then I don't have to do it. And how great for my golf game and my tenure. So this is maybe a bigger issue than the neuroscience, because he wanted me to understand that if I debunked that women are not better multitaskers than men, that all of a sudden, the world would change. And he's saying, I'm not sure it's going to change because women have convinced themselves, because society has made us believe our time is worthless and men's time is valuable, that we're better multitaskers. We've been gaslit to believe that, and we've also been gaslit to believe that in the time it takes me to tell Seth what to do, I should do it myself. We've also been gaslit to say that our job is more flexible. We've also been gaslit to say, well, my partner makes more money than me, so I should do more unpaid labor. So all of I call these toxic time messages. They come from not holding a boundary over our time of saying, my time is a diamond. It's worth a lot, just as much as my male counterparts, and so I'm not going to take notes, or my time is really, really worth it. So I'm not going to take on this mentorship until my male counterparts do, or I'm not going to go and find my son's shoe because my partner is going to learn also where those shoes are, right? That requires a boundary that I think, unfortunately, because we've been told since birth, things like breastfeeding is free when it's really 1800 hours a year, it's a full-time job. We watch women enter male professions where salaries go down. Unfortunately, everywhere we look, we're told our time is less valuable than men's time. So that's why Fair Play has become a movement. If I could have just designed a system for dividing labor, that would have been great. But unfortunately, the healthy organizations require boundaries, systems, and communication, and women were not feeling like they had the agency to set that boundary or communicate that boundary because of the position society has put us in.

Missy Modell:
So it just made me think. So we talked before about not choosing a supportive partner. That shouldn't be. What should we be looking for? What would translate into Fair Play, you know, approved behavior?

Eve Rodsky:
Okay. Fair Play approved behavior, to me, is literally a willingness to understand and learn your perspective. So if you're looking out there for somebody, right, what I want to see from that person is that they either had caregiving responsibility or a willingness to learn. So again, if you're a woman out there looking to date a man, women dating women, it's a little bit more complicated because we're so taught to do everything. Lesbian relationships, it's almost like, what I see over and over again is that there's a double-up on everything, so there's a control issue going on there, so that's for a different episode. But if you're a woman and you're looking to partner with a man, what I would say is, for that man, what you would like to see is an openness and a willingness to value care, to have to, ask that person, Do you think holding your child's hand on the pediatrician would be as important to you as an hour in your office? To go through and tell each other stories, so what I would love to hear is that somebody, and again, you don't have to buy the card, you can just go to Fair Play Life. But you're on a date, and you say to somebody, tell me your experience with groceries going up. And if that person's like, well, fuck that. Like, who cares? Why does that matter, right? That's a red flag. If someone is willing to say to you, oh my God, Missy, I remember going to the grocery store with my mom, and always having to wait in the car with my younger brothers because she wanted to go in, and go, this is actually a true story of one man saying this to me, she wanted to go in and grab the groceries fast. And so it was late at night, and it was always a little bit scary for me, because back then, we didn't have cell phones, and I was in charge of the baby in the back seat,,you know, of the Dodge Aries or Chevy Nova or whatever it was. And I remember always waiting like, please, please, please, you know, let my mom return. Almost like that, are you my mother or, you know, or our baby? There's all these, like, cute stories like that. So, you know, hearing that vulnerability, understanding that that mattered. Those are the things I want to hear. So what I would say is a fun dating exercise out there is to maybe at the first date, but, you know, on a fifth date to say, oh, yeah, like I heard this podcast, you know, this really crazy woman says, like, it's really important for us to tell each other stories about the weird things growing up, like who did the dishes in your home, and just hearing what that person says. What are their relationship with dishes? Did they ever do it from start to finish? Were they just the ones responsible for unpacking the groceries, but their mother was the one always going to the store? You're going to learn a lot about, did they have birthday parties? Did they helped plan their own birthday parties? Did they plan them as they got older? Did they care about celebrations? Does that mean that they care about emotional labor? You know, so you start to hear a lot about somebody when you ask them these very strange questions, like who did the dishes in your home, Or what do you remember about grocery shopping growing up? You can learn about somebody really, really quickly. Did you go to summer camp? What did you do in that summer camp? Do you remember your bunk inspection? So, what you're trying to get at is the story, caregiving stories, and whether this person grew up valuing caregiving. And if not, do they want something different for themselves, and do they want to learn?

Missy Modell:
And I think also just switching gears a little bit, the idea of kin keeping and women also needing to hold each other accountable because you see a football game on TV and all the women are in the kitchen preparing the food while the men are slumped on the couch. What is a Fair Play revision to that story?

Eve Rodsky:
Well, I think for me, the Fair Play revision to that story is setting expectations up front, because part of the issue, I think with Fair Play, why it's a movement, like I said, and not just the game, is that this idea of inviting men into their full power in the home so that women can step out into their full power in the world, can happen in your own relationship, but you may get pushback from in-laws, definitely from schools. When you have kids, they'll still keep calling you first, even if you ask them a hundred times to call your partner. Again, because we don't like to bother men because their time is diamonds, and women's time is sand, That's the boundary breach. So what I will say is that, when you're starting to play, and the good news is I think more people, Fair Play has become a whisper network. We actually had like a really beautiful article in the New York Times come out yesterday about how it keeps growing because there are more people who will know about it. So hopefully, you won't be the only one who's looking for a more equal partnership over time. Because again, like I said this, the Fair Play concepts are getting bigger and bigger, and now we're in 17 countries and translations. But what I think for kin keeping is understanding that, in those gatherings, that you set some expectations upfront. And so it can be as simple as when you talk to your partner, how do we want to show up here? I noticed that we're amazing together, We're amazing with your parents, We're amazing with my parents, But when you're with these types of friends, I see you regressing to certain behaviors where you're my ass is up, and your ass is down. You can sort of make it funny. That makes me feel devalued and sad. And so we can't change other people's behaviors, but your behavior today can signal for other people how you respect and treat me. And that's really all I ask for people, is that they show up. They can't change other people. You're not going to change the schools that call you. Hopefully, over time, we will. That's my job out there as the activist. But for your cultural warrior job, it's having that conversation in advance when your emotion is low, and your cognition is high, and you say, I want to think about how we show up at this gathering. And so, typically, that's, Seth and I did that for years for Sunday night dinner with his parents. Like, how are you going to show up at this gathering? Are you going to disappear? He loved to disappear and like, take naps. Am I going to be in charge of taking care of the kids every time or your parents? Like, and so over, it took, it was over time that we changed some of those dynamics. And most weekends now on Sunday nights, I just stay home, chill, watch my show, get ready for the week, and Seth will take the kids to his parents, and I show up sometimes. But again, those dynamics will shift only with boundaries systems and communication, which is this practice. Unfortunately, it's like exercise. I can't tell you that you can exercise once in 2005 and be fit forever. These boundary systems and communication we're talking about, they are a lifelong practice, just like exercise.

Missy Modell:
And it's just really complicated to having these difficult conversations. And I'm just going to go into a bit of a different moment before we wrap up, but the idea of toxic time that you chatted about earlier, and for me, the biggest example is Gisele and Tom Brady and how, yeah, I just love you to briefly chat about that, because even in 2020, I don't know when that happened, 2021 or just throughout her whole career, she had this massive career, but just instinctively, the man gets the privilege of having the career. So are there certain structures that can be broken as it relates to this, or can we fix this eventually?

Eve Rodsky:
Well, my favorite data to see was, and this is again, back to 2013. This is ten years now, was interviewing men and women in the same job who were married. That was my favorite cohort. So I literally, in Fair Play, asked one woman and a man to give me their schedules of their day, and it's a side-by-side of the schedule of the woman versus the man, they were both producers, literally, they co-founded their company together. So you will see is that the woman is doing all of the unpaid labor. They were relocating to Toronto for a shoot, and so she was signing up their kids for school. She was packing up everybody. She was hiring an au pair. She was getting their medical, everything set up, and I asked her partner, like, so what's going on with you? And he's like, just really busy on the film. And I was like, well, what about, you know, the transition to Canada? Oh, well, thank God. You know, my wife is just, you know, the best, and she's has it handled, you know? So this blind privilege, like you said. And so the most beautiful thing about that is that it's the easiest to prove and the easiest to interrupt, and it's the easiest for my sons to see. And so that's those are the examples that my sons have, I've used to show them the unfairness of what it feels like to be a woman, because they can fall into the trap. Well, dad makes more money than you, so shouldn't you do more for us, right? So, and I say, well, dad makes more money than me because I put my career on hold so that we could build up dad's career, and that's why the cycle continues, guys, right? So you want to keep having these conversations. With Gisele and Tom Brady, this is not new. It's same shit, different decade. There were women I interviewed for Fair Play that were in their 80s who were both biology professors at major universities, who co-wrote papers together, who were both doctors in the same healthcare system, two colorectal surgeons, and the life of the woman was so different than the life of their partner. And so, again, the beauty of Fair Play is that, Missy, you can take agency in your own life, and your listeners can. That's your cultural warrior role. My role is not, is unpacking what the change will take. And so we know now that part of the change for the colorectal surgeons to have the man step up and hold as many cards as the woman in our Fair Play vernacular is paid paternity leave. We can predict how many cards, how much ownership a man will take over the home sphere based on how much paternity leave that he has been granted. So in a country where we don't offer a lot, only 14% of companies, I think right now, offer paid paternity leave. We have a long way to go, so we can fight for that. We can fight for governmental paid leave, for federal paid leave. One thing I'm fighting for in California right now is something called the FRD rules, which is the family responsibilities discrimination. So a lot of the reason men won't take on more responsibility in the home is because they feel like they're going to be penalized at work, which makes me laugh because that's, why we've had a pay gap for the past 50, 100 years, men. But they don't want what's happening to us, so get the promotion if they take the paid leave either. And so instead of saying, let's race to the bottom and don't do it, it's the more that we all do it. That collective action was what, is what's going to change things. So I talk about Fair Play, which is inviting men into their full power in the home so women can step out into their full power in the world, but it's also Fair Day, which is that we want to just keep those companies accountable for better schedules for their hourly workers, and to allow people the remote flexibility to work in the white collar jobs. That's Fair Day. We have Fair Say, we want to look at who's in leadership. If the people in leadership in your company are all white men with stay-at-home wives or white women with stay-at-home dads, you should be alarmed because that's a family structure that doesn't provide a lot of empathy for people who are dual-earner households often. You want a diversity of experience that's Fair Say. And then, Fair Pay is, obviously, you can always ask the company, what are you doing to rectify the pay gap and to make sure the mother had penalty doesn't affect me.

Missy Modell:
And just one last thing I want to say that, that just came up for me, is that I think we view being a good partner, being a good wife as having sacrifices. What would be your final rebuttal to that? Like, I'm a good wife. I'm a good partner because I do all this because I care. I'm feminine. I'm in my maternal power. What's the new lens on that?

Eve Rodsky:
The new lens to me is that martyrdom leads to death. I mean, all martyrs do, whether you're, you know, like Joan of Arc or, I don't know, whatever the whoever the martyrs are out there that but really this idea of martyrdom, right, that we have to suffer in order to have value. It's a very puritanical and very ingrained in our religion way to live. And so what I would say to that is if martyrdom, if sacrifice, if duty and obligation is part of your worth, that makes sense, because I think a lot of the values that women have been instilled with are be seen and not heard. Even my good friend who is in the, a sect of the Mormon religion, it's the vernacular, is helpers and priests. So women are the helpers, right? Men are the priests. My family are Orthodox Jews, so women are expected to be subjugated to men's learning, to be the ones to raise the children and to work.

Missy Modell:
And fully separated.

Eve Rodsky:
And men can learn all day, right? So what I would say is duty, obligation, martyrdom. If you feel those things, it's pretty natural to feel those things, because again, they've been floating around and inculcating us in our society. And so the best thing to do is just to say that those can be part of your value system, but they're not your entire value system. And so if you want to find out your real value system, I'll give you all homework. We can end on some homework here.

Missy Modell:
Yes.

Eve Rodsky:
I want you to all of your listeners to close their eyes and think about an activity that brings them joy. Or when they're finished, they say, I can't believe I just did that. So whether it's like jumping into the Atlantic Ocean as a polar bear, doing flash mob dance on Fifth Avenue and a trapeze class, and then think backwards for why you love that activity, and then you're going to then ask yourself and answer, what values are brought up? So I'll give you an example. One woman I just spoke to said her favorite thing to think about is extreme travel. Like she thinks, I can't believe I just did that when she's in Namibia or climbing a mountain, that. And so when I said that to her, I said, well, tell me the values those brings up for you. And she said, it brings up freedom, lifelong learning, spontaneity, romance, and humor. That's what travel brings for her. So we can still have duty and obligation as some of our values and family and friends and love. But the values, when you think about the things that make you come alive, and you work backwards into them, will give you some new values to focus on as well. And so what I said to her is keep your families and friends and duty and obligation, remember you also deserve to ask yourself, have you felt freedom this month? Have you felt ability to be a lifelong learner this month? Have you felt spontaneity this month? Have you had a romance this month? Have you felt humor this month or chance to be funny? And so adding those in, as opposed to feeling like you have to start from scratch, I think is a great place to start.

Missy Modell:
That's incredible advice. Thank you so much. And just to wrap up, final question, what are you sorry for apologizing for?

Eve Rodsky:
Oh my God. I am sorry for apologizing for literally anything related to my kids and my family. I'm a fucking good enough mother. I am a good enough wife. I don't have to bring your fucking blueberries. I don't have to have, like, a meal on the table. I don't need to be the one to get the backpack ready for school. And so what I will say is, I will never apologize for being a distracted parent or partner. So I will say anything related to being guilty around parenting, around partnership. We are good enough. We are good enough the way we are, and we do not have to serve others to be better.

Missy Modell:
Perfect. Where can we find you? Where can I find you?

Eve Rodsky:
Yes, please sign up for the Fair Play Life newsletter. We have lots of really cool tips, tricks, science, storytelling, and then of course, @FairPlayLife is our Instagram channel. @EveRodsky, if you want to just see more personal political rants against the Empire Strikes Back regime that I feel like we're we're fighting all the time right now against women. So I'd say @EveRodsky for fun, personal stuff, @FairPlayLife, for all the stuff we talked about today.

Missy Modell:
You're amazing. I'm so glad we did this. Thank you, Eve.

Eve Rodsky:
Thanks, Missy.

Missy Modell:
Thank you for listening to Sorry for Apologizing, brought to you by Rescripted. If you enjoyed this week's episode, be sure to check out the show notes to learn more about our amazing guests. To stay in the know, follow me at @MissyModell on Instagram and TikTok, or head to Rescripted.com, and don't forget to like and subscribe!

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