Meta-communication, dishes, and justice

With Twitterpocalypse upon us, another captured thread.

It starts with a gendered norm about working on shared tasks, and a word of advice:

Fellas, come correct at dinnertime by jumping on washing dishes earlier than feels natural. You should feel like you are being pushy about seizing the dishes.

The tricky thing is that white American men and women learn different patterns for working together. (Keep the usual caveats in mind about generalizations as I break down how this is harder than it sounds.)

When men work on a task together, there is a whole territorial thing; one cannot join in without an invitation, and there is a lot of explicit discussion of who is doing what. Women have different norms. Among women, a good citizen just steps in and shares the work.

Men must resist an impulse to ask “Can I help with the dishes?” When women ask each other if help is necessary with these kinds of chores, they are signaling that they want to be excused from doing it; the ritual reply is, “no, it’s fine, I’ve got it”. So asking that gets read as double-unhelpful: not only not-helping but asking for approval for not-helping. Plus, women working together on a routine task do not talk about the task itself, they talk about something else, so men must also resist a tendency to confuse things by getting into anything more than than minimal necessary discussion of who will load the dishwasher or whatever. Add these communication disjoints to deep sexist assumptions and simple laziness, and you get women doing all the dishes yet again.

I find that the best way to outfox this communication pattern stuff is to clear a few dishes before everyone has finished eating. If you wait until everyone is done and had a moment, women will suddenly do it when you blink and you are that lazy shmuck.

There is a reverse version of this, when women jump into working on a task with a group of men uninvited. It disrupts men’s expectations of how one should do those things, and the surprised men say, “Hey, hold it a second, don’t mess with that.” Women come away reading the communication pattern as a demonstration that the men are just sexist shmucks hostile to women working with them.

When one leaves one’s gendered lane, the meta-communication patterns push back and people misread each other as “rude”, reïnforcing a gendered division of labor even among people who reject an expectation that some work is for men and other work is for women. None of which is to say that there are not also conscious and unconscious sexist biases in play in these situations; of course there are. The meta-communication gap compounds those biases and is compounded by them.

This fits together with what work is gendered and how. Men are given Changing A Tire type stuff one does infrequently, making it more important to discuss explicitly. Women are expected to do routine, familiar, repetitive work. Through a feminist lens, one sees how The Patriarchy wants the work it assigns to women to stay socially invisible: don’t talk about it, and say you don’t need help, et cetera.

Erika Hall observes:

This happens in the workplace as well. When we were doing gender bias workshops, some of the biggest problems we encountered were around invisible work and structural incentives. That’s the biggest flaw in most unconscious bias training, the assumption that the issues are totally cognitive and interpersonal, and not at all structural.

Marco Rogers describes another example on Twitter:

Here’s something I've been studying on here for a bit. A lot of men, seem to have been conditioned to think that telling someone that you disagree is the same as asking them a question. Like the way they learn to engage is by creating a conflict. I don’t think this is a small thing. In fact, I think it is the source of a lot of the unintentional frustration that men cause on here. (I’m only talking about those who actually “mean well”.)

It has been helpful for me to see this as unintentional conditioning separate from intent. At least for some men (including myself). Ever since this occurred to me, I’ve noticed how even when men intend to ask “sincere” questions, it often comes in the form of a challenge.

This has a bunch of negative effects. It’s easily misunderstood as a bad faith challenge rather than an attempt to engage. There are a lot of bad faith challenges out there and they sound exactly the same. In fact those bad actors always hide behind “good intent”.

Engaging in the form of a challenge also puts all of the burden on the receiver to unpack what you mean to ask and what kind of response would be appropriate. You are implicitly asking for a tremendous amount of grace when you ask someone to navigate this unexpectedly.

I wanna be clear that even though we can give the benefit of the doubt in seeing this as a an unintentional learned behavior, that doesn’t the people who do this are off the hook. We still need to do better. We can learn to do better.

How do you disagree with somebody when you legit “don’t agree?” Do you think it's as simple as, “I disagree because ?” I guess I'm asking if you think disagreeing with an actual argument is sufficient to make it good faith? Seems like it, but what’s your experience?

I’m glad this thread is resonating with so many people. I wanna spend a little time on this question, which I’ve gotten a number of times today. Essentially what’s “the right way” to disagree? Be warned that a lot of this is gonna feel unsatisfying.

The first question a lot of us need to ask is “why does this person need to hear that I disagree?” Twitter is still largely a uni-directional medium. People post a tweet because they want to express themselves. Not because they’re asking each individual if they agree or disagree.

I’ve talked about this a lot in the past. This is hard because there’s this subculture of men that have decided Twitter is some kinda Thunderdome of ideas and direct debate. “Why post something if you didn't want a response?” Please stop doing this.

Instead, ask yourself what it is that you actually want out of this exchange. Start by framing the conversation you want to have. Do you want them to help you understand their comments? Try saying that first. “I’m not sure I understand, would you be willing to expand on this?”

Taking the time to set context and frame conversations before diving in is a huge part of effective communication. More so, it gives the other person the opportunity to reframe the conversation or tell you they're not interested.

I happen to know a particular consequence of this one which crops up a lot in science eduction. There is a gendered pattern in how people tend to prompt for help when they half-understand something. Men tend to ask a more directly challenging prompt: “It does ... X? Why doesn’t it Y?” Women tend to prompt for an explanation in a positive form: “So it does ... X?” This leads male teachers acting in good faith to still fail to support women students. They hear the prompt they recognize from male students, and offer further explanation, but misread the common prompt from women, hearing it simply as uncertainty, unhelpfully saying, “yes, that’s right”, and moving on. The teacher sincerely attempting to address female students nonetheless ends up answering men’s questions and brushing off women’s questions.

I have a related example from a website about these kinds of breakdowns.

Another study reported that a male science teacher who managed to create an atmosphere in which girls and boys contributed more equally to discussion felt that he was devoting 90 per cent of his attention to the girls. And so did his male pupils. They complained vociferously that the girls were getting too much talking time.

In other public contexts, too, such as seminars and debates, when women and men are deliberately given an equal amount of the highly valued talking time, there is often a perception that they are getting more than their fair share. Dale Spender explains this as follows:

The talkativeness of women has been gauged in comparison not with men but with silence. Women have not been judged on the grounds of whether they talk more than men, but of whether they talk more than silent women.

In other words, if women talk at all, this may be perceived as 'too much' by men who expect them to provide a silent, decorative background in many social contexts. This may sound outrageous, but think about how you react when precocious children dominate the talk at an adult party. As women begin to make inroads into formerly 'male' domains such as business and professional contexts, we should not be surprised to find that their contributions are not always perceived positively or even accurately.

It is a teacher’s responsibility to have the skill to overcome these meta-communication challenges with students and support them all equally, but it is very hard, requiring skill and grit even if one knows what to look for.

Consider how the ask-by-challenging pattern plays in the other direction, when a woman is describing her situation and a man experiences sincere confusion and wants to ask for help understanding better. When a fella asks “you say you are experiencing ... X? why isn’t it Y?” women have every reason to read that as a challenge, a refusal to believe and accept their experiences. Not least because of course it all too often is!

One of the tough problems in social justice in our moment is grappling with even registering the difference between good faith and bad faith engagement. We have a lot of bad faith actors deliberately feigning good faith engagement. The particular meta-communication pattern I am talking about comes across a lot like the annoying, deliberately time-wasting troll tactic of sealioning. Part of the perniciousness of sealioning and other anti-social-justice trolling is that it is a deliberate attempt to train all of us to jump to a presumption that others are speaking in bad faith, which throws sand in the gears of all of our ability to talk.

The corrosion of our ability to presume good faith is very severe. I have made the “I hope it’s okay if I push back on this a little. I’m not sure if it makes sense because of X. Am I misunderstanding something?” move Rogers recommends many times and been read as disingenuous. I respect why so many people are in that place but it does not make it any less frustrating for all involved.

And while Rogers describes how fellas should re-tune how we communicate — and I agree with his recommendations — I also have to confess how tricky and discomforting that adjustment plays out. Something deep in me objects that if I don’t frame some questions as “why is it X, why isn’t it Y” I am depriving the other person of clarity about where my confusion lies. Not using my deep-seated pattern feels clumsy, evasive, and rude. Even knowing it is not rude but polite, it still feels wrong every time I do it.

This visceral discomfort one feels stepping outside of one’s culturally-inscribed meta-communication patterns is part of why re-training them in one’s self is so hard — and part of why the skill abandons us in the fraught conversations when we need it most.

Even knowing that meta-communication is a thing at all is itself a difficult competency to develop. Describing these kinds of breakdowns to someone who does not already recognize the type sounds like a bullshit rationalization: “no, what I said was fine, you don’t understand what I really mean”.

In these meta-communication frictions, it is hard to resist the feeling that other people are stubbornly refusing to communicate and act in the natural, easy way … while they experience you as the stubborn, awkward, demanding one! Shifting to a radically different meta-communication pattern is very, very difficult. It requires both vigorous will to do consistency and sophisticated skill to do well. Even having first registered the thing with washing dishes back in the 20^th century, I still have all too many inattentive moments when I screw it up.

People who call for others to use their preferred meta-communication rarely register how much they are asking. It requires a cultural competence in knowing that meta-communication is a thing, a skill in knowing the particular pattern which creates the particular error, and a skill in recognizing the pattern in the heat of conversation. There are a zillion of these little gendered meta-communication patterns. And a zillion more racial and cultural patterns. And a zillion more social class patterns. And so on. However dedicated one is, one cannot learn them all.

All this is political. Who has to adapt to whose meta-communication patterns to prosper? Having one’s deep-seated meta-communication patterns match those of people in positions of power is a profound form of privilege. Code-switching — taking on different meta-communication patterns than the ones one grew up with — is difficult to learn and demanding to do day-to-day.

And while I would like social justice advocacy to better address disjoints in meta-communication patterns, I also want to raise a yellow flag of caution about leaning too heavily on this account of why things go wrong. I am galled by examples like a fella claiming that women are misreading meta-communication when they register “mansplaining” … without him having bothered to look up the meaning of the term “mansplaining”, which is almost too on the nose.

More commentaries on this stuff worth a look:

• Deborah Tannen writes about meta-communication patterns; her books You Just Don’t Understand and That’s Not What I Meant! deserve the credit for me noticing the dishes-and-shared-tasks pattern in the first place.
• You Should Have Asked comes directly at how the cycle of reïnforcement of sexism.
• Women Aren’t Nags--We’re Just Fed Up digs into how the ways that men try to break out of the pattern of laziness about domestic labor tend to feel like demanding emotional labor.
• Do Men Expect Women To Do Everything?
• The Politics Of Housework comes directly at the invisibility of work we tend to assign to women.
• Are you an Asker or a Guesser? explores a broader meta-communication split exemplified in the specific example of gendered norms for shared tasks.
• Black And White Styles In Conflict is packed with heartbreaking examples of causes for conversational death spirals. A painful read I highly recommend.

On Twitter, Rickesh Lakhani addresses related stuff around housework and communication:

Hey, men who are with women. Ever say things like… “Have you seen the …” “Tell me what to do and I’ll do it” “But I do so much around here” “Why didn’t you ask me to do it?” “I do more than my friends” “Let me know if I can help” Then let’s talk about mental load.

Mental load is having to remember and plan for all of things it takes to run a household, which is a huge part of the work outside of the actual tasks. Normally, it's women who primarily take this on, and it's exhausting.

And it’s usually for tasks that are not as celebrated and often go unnoticed. Things like changing the sheets and towels. Planning out what meals are going to be for the week. Making sure there are the right sizes of clothes available for the children. While you are probably carrying out a lot of tasks and perceive that the workload is equal, it’s likely not when you factor in the thinking work. If you aren’t thinking, planning, coordinating, then it’s not equal.

I’m not saying that this is all men or all relationships, or that it hasn’t gotten better over time. But the mass exit of women from the workforce in the last 2 years is largely because of the household responsibilities that have defaulted to women, like childcare.

So what can you do? Take an active role in managing the household. Make a schedule or a list. Have regular conversations. Don’t wait to be told. Don’t assume that everything just magically happens. And celebrate all support of the household, even the unglamorous things.

I’m far from perfect here. I’m still practicing and catching when I find myself doing these things, which is more often than I would like. But I’m trying. It’s not easy unlearning decades of conditioning. But we have to because right now, it’s totally unfair.

There’s a whole other important recognition needed here, which is all of the single folks, lone parent families, and others who do it all solo. Big respect to all of you who make it work.

Some very insightful responses that warrant a couple of additions here: Sometimes couples agree to have one person do more of the planning. As long as the conversations are happening and each person truly agrees to what is happening and is happy with it, that’s what matters.

I’m speaking as a cishet married man with children, but this for sure plays out in other relationships as well. There are so many beautiful different relationships and families (LGBTQ2SIA+, siblings caring for elders, roommates) where mental load needs to be openly discussed.

Have had a few neurodiverse and disabled folks sharing that their relationships or households do things differently, or that they sometimes struggle with executive function. Thank you for sharing this. Hopefully, open conversations are happening that help to make things work.

There are other types of invisible labour too. Emotional labour (investing in the relationship), kinship labour which I just learned about (maintaining ties outside of the home, remembering birthdays), and others, again often taken on by women.

On Twitter That Electrical Engineer has a thread with a lot about the intersections of gendered meta-communication, decision fatigue, neurodivergency, and work which does and does not pay wages:

Someone has asked me what else I’ve observed. And oh boy — there’s another really messed up one. Men outsourcing mundane decision making to women and causing decision fatigue — meanwhile they get to preserve their brains for work. Let me look for the thread.

Then joking about “how women can’t decide what to eat" like it's a cutesy thing. Sir, your {insert} has been making so many decisions that her brain has shut down and won’t let her make any more. She's literally struggling with comprehending the stuff on the menu. Help her!

The human brain doesn’t have limitless decision making capacity - it has a bandwidth which when exhausted, someone struggles to think even the most basic thoughts. It’s why you’ll get shouted at for asking “where can I find the spoon”. That “I don’t know” is honest. The brain, at that moment, doesn’t have bandwidth to figure out where the spoon is - even when it's something they put somewhere every day. It's super easy for Autistics to realize this in themselves because our social bandwidth is near non existent - we guard the little we have.

And do you know what happens when women show up sick in hospital? They are told they are anxious. They are told “it’s all in your head”. Then when we talk about the things that make women anxious and affect their mental health, there’s clowns who want to center themselves.

This isn’t about me. Repeat that to yourself enough times. It’s about people who should start caring for themselves as much as they care for others. Because few people ask “how is the person caring for me doing?” They just take and drain. And that causes health problems.

We are anxious. We are fatigued. Some are burned out. Some are severely burned out. Someone decides to tweet likely explanations to other women. You get offended because “that’s not the case in my life as a man”. Well, great. Clap for your exceptional self and keep moving.

Articles I found useful on the topic:

• What doctors wish patients knew about decision fatigue
• Do You Suffer From Decision Fatigue?
• Why Women Do The Household Worrying