Decision Fatigue As A 21st Century Woman

I am lying in bed at 11pm again, mentally planning the next family get together, thinking about the chicken that needs to be cooked before it goes off, and debating what my hormone results might mean. I open my eyes in the morning, and immediately I’m planning when I’m going to the food shop, returning calls from the doctor, throwing a load of washing in the machine, and making coffee for myself and my partner.

Women in the 21st century take on a huge decision-load.

Historically, women have been seen as caring, compassionate, and family-oriented. I think that’s why, in my experience as a 21st century woman, I feel the expectation of making decisions for others, as well as myself and my career.

For example, my mothers birthday gift and plans always fell to me to decide on, not my brother or father. Cleaning around the house was always something that felt like my responsibility more so than male family members. My mother was always doing the food shop after a full day of work, and I find myself taking on that role now, same goes for remembering everyone's plans and appointments for them.

Harvard sociologist Allison Daminger's 2019 research on household labour identified something she called cognitive labour: the anticipating, researching, deciding, and monitoring that keeps a household and the people in it running. Her interviews found this work sits disproportionately with women, and much of it is invisible even to the people doing it.

I do not have children yet, but I already carry a version of this. Ensuring my reproductive health is okay. What that means for how I eat, train, and sleep now, in case I want a family down the line. If I do have children, I know that list will not shrink. It will multiply, because I will be making decisions for a second life, not just my own. Both during pregnancy and when the child is born.

Add to that the decisions that come with simply how you look as a woman.

Whether you have done enough to look put together, whether your skincare routine is preventing the wrinkles that are apparently not okay to have, what you are wearing, if you look attractive enough. Decisions that social media has made constant.

To be clear, all of this is not a complaint about the freedom that has come with being able to make these decisions. It’s also not a complaint about the men in my life. My partner, my brother, and my dad share more of the physical and mental load than any generation before them did, and that shift matters. But even in the most equal households, some of these categories, particularly the ones tied to fertility, appearance, and family memory, still land disproportionately on women. The load is not what it was, but it also is not gone.

So this is an acknowledgement to every woman carrying this. For the emotionally loaded, selfless, societally dictated decisions you're making before your day even reaches your career.

The cognitive load that your calendar can see is being undertaken by a brain that already spent a chunk of its capacity on decisions that go unnoticed. And because that spend is invisible, the exhaustion that follows gets misread, not as depleted capacity, but as being disorganised, oversensitive, or bad at switching off.

Unlike many generations of women before us, our power to choose is not limited in the way it previously has been by law, custom, and social class. We get to make decisions, and I wouldn’t want to take that away. But I’d be lying if I said my brain doesn’t struggle to manage the load at times.

We should strive to share the household decision-load, even when that's not always possible. We should reject the marketing that turns how we look into one more daily decision. Both of those things are true, and neither one erases the load we're still carrying.

So that's where I'd support my own brain. To make sure that after everything I've already decided today, for other people, I'm still making the decisions I actually want to make, from a brain that has something left to give.

I do not have this figured out. Some days I catch myself trying to make a decision about something three years in the future before I have made my bed.

But naming the load, even the parts that never show up anywhere official, feels like the first real step toward carrying it differently.