@anacweeks.bsky.social
Senior Lecturer in Comparative Politics, University of Bath, author of Making Gender Salient: From Gender Quota Laws to Policy bit.ly/3wzcTGM. Editor, LSQ. gender quotas, parties, gender & far right, mental load #academicmama https://anacweeks.github.io/
Congress requires DOD to facilitate Scouts activities but the Secretary can ignore the law in cases where it is “detrimental to national security." Hegseth is preparing to do so because the scouts have become too inclusive of girls.
www.npr.org/2025/11/25/n...
Apropos of nothing (lol jk) I encourage everyone to follow the great work that @johannarickne.bsky.social, @ollefolke.bsky.social & Rune Vammen Lesner are doing on sexual harassment and women's careers.
academic.oup.com/esr/advance-...
www.eui.eu/events?id=58...
A woman reported that Ronaldo assaulted her in Vegas in 2009. "In recent months, Ronaldo has also been part of diplomatic efforts to woo the U.S. President Donald Trump."
17.11.2025 16:14 — 👍 131 🔁 68 💬 8 📌 7🏆 Nominations for the APSA 2026 Franklin L. Burdette/Pi Sigma Alpha (best paper) Award are open!
If you saw (or presented!) an excellent paper at APSA 2025 please use the submission portal to nominate it: apsa.secure-platform.com/a/organizati...
Eligibility: apsanet.org/programs/aps...
When former Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers was pursuing a romantic relationship with a woman he described as a mentee, he turned to a longtime associate for guidance: Jeffrey E. Epstein.
Dhruv T. Patel and Cam N. Srivastava report.
Great to see that the European Parliament voted to allow proxy voting for pregnant women and new mothers (pending approval by member states).
Now, why not extend the same rights to new fathers?
Otherwise, the assumption is again that mother = default parent.
www.france24.com/en/live-news...
I’ll take some good news
www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...
Excellent from @monaeltahawy.bsky.social 👇
www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
Where are we now with gender equality at work?
Join @pennyeast.bsky.social, Chief Executive at @fawcettsociety.bsky.social for a online event on Thursday, November 27 between 6 - 7pm GMT to dig into progress, barriers & action. 🔍
🔗 Register now: buff.ly/pFqZj23
#GenderEquality
I’m lucky to teach a wonderful group of postgrads studying gender & politics at Bath 💫
Send your excellent gender & politics students our way 😊
They can find out more about our MSc in International Relations with Gender Politics at the Virtual Open Day on 12 Nov 👇
www.bath.ac.uk/campaigns/ex...
WOW. 81% of women 18-29 voted for Mamdani, 80% for Sherril, and 78% for Spanberger.
Gen Z women aren't playing around.
So happy to wake up to this news!
05.11.2025 12:01 — 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0New from us today in @aunz.theconversation.com 👇
TL;DR: Turns out, ⏰ time availabilty and💰 household bargaining theories don’t explain moms' 🧠 mental loads.
doi.org/10.64628/AA....
@leahruppanner.bsky.social @helenkowalewska.bsky.social
While mothers who earn more may be able to outsource some of the physical work in the household, the mental load is huge – and remains a barrier to gender equality.
05.11.2025 05:49 — 👍 14 🔁 4 💬 1 📌 1I was laid off from Teen Vogue today along with multiple other staffers, and today is my last day.
certainly more to come from me when the dust has settled more, but to my knowledge, after today, there will be no politics staffers at Teen Vogue.
First in-studio radio interview ✔️
This was a lot of fun! Was it like being on Frasier (my main point of reference)? Kind of!
You can listen to me talk about why I study the mental load and some of our key findings from about 2:10 www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/...
Thanks Alicia! Will message you.
03.11.2025 13:01 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0Delighted to announce we are advertising our first academic post in the Centre for Advanced Social Science Methods (CASSM). The position is Associate Professor in Politics, Technology and Computational Social Science and is joint with Politics, the Oxford Internet Institute, and Reuben College 1/n
03.11.2025 12:08 — 👍 45 🔁 44 💬 1 📌 0
Open access! Ana Catalano Weeks @anacweeks.bsky.social, Helen Kowalewska @helenkowalewska.bsky.social, + Leah Ruppanner @leahruppanner.bsky.social explore how cognitive tasks "stick" to moms more than physical labor, regardless of resources. @sociusjournal.bsky.social
30.10.2025 18:45 — 👍 5 🔁 2 💬 1 📌 0
Who bears the mental load?
@anacweeks.bsky.social, @helenkowalewska.bsky.social, & @leahruppanner.bsky.social's new #Socius research argues that household #cognitive #labor sticks to #women regardless of time & resource constraints.
Read: doi.org/10.1177/2378...
@helenkowalewska.bsky.social fyi
29.10.2025 05:55 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0
Full article is here (open access!):
Take a Load Off? Not for Mothers: Gender, Cognitive Labor, and the Limits of Time and Money
By Ana Catalano Weeks, Helen Kowalewska & Leah Ruppanner
📄 doi.org/10.1177/2378...
Even highly educated, high-earning mothers carry an invisible cognitive burden that limits gender equality at home & work.
What can we do? Awareness is part of the solution, but also policies that enable men to take on more caring work, like well-paid parental leave for both moms and dads.
These results can help explain the stalled gender revolution.
Women have achieved high rates of education and workforce participation. Men’s participation in household work, especially the mental load, has not kept pace.
The hidden mental work of family life remains mostly on women's shoulders.
For fathers, these patterns differ.
For men, employment reduces both physical and mental household work...
but high income fathers report doing *more* of the mental load at home.
That’s encouraging: as norms of involved fatherhood grow & as jobs become more flexible, men are stepping up at home.
Using original survey data from 2,133 partnered, heterosexual U.S. parents, we compare the predictors of physical vs cognitive labor. We find that:
➡️ Employment and earnings reduce women’s physical household labor.
❌ But they don’t move women’s mental load.
So while time and money shape the gender division of physical household work, we do not expect these factors to influence mental load in the same way.
We argue that this cognitive work sticks to women, regardless of their resources or status.
It is also not bound by time or space in the way that physical household work is. It's always ongoing, in the back of one's mind, throughout the day.
This means that time constraints do not limit mental work in the same way as they structure the completion of physical tasks.
We argue that, like physical household labor, cognitive labor is assigned to women by default.
Yet unlike physical household labor, cognitive labor’s invisibility means it often goes unrecognized & thus is far more resistant to negotiation or bargaining between partners as resources shift.
A large literature tells us that time constraints and financial resources help women reduce their time in physical household labor. They are better able to outsource this work and have more bargaining power at home.
But what about the mental load?
