Why the 'Fair Play' book doesn't fix labor inequality for most couples

A few lists and conversations just aren't enough to solve household labor inequality

I can’t make a single Facebook post about household inequality without someone telling me to read Fair Play, the supposed Bible of household equality. I see and hear about it everywhere. Just read Fair Play, and somehow centuries of patriarchy and abuse will magically disappear.

It makes sense. It’s a Reese Witherspoon pick. It’s now a documentary, and consultants can train in the method and then charge people to master it. The author is beautiful and bright and charming, and there’s been a massive marketing campaign.

This campaign has worked, but I question whether the book has.

You know what I don’t hear about? Any improvements at all in the state of household inequality in spite of millions reading and promoting this book. It seems that if Fair Play were really the all-in-one solution for this, we’d start to see significant declines in household inequality, but all the data suggest things are moving in the opposite direction.

I’m not buying it. Fair Play is capitalizing on the desperation of women. Its intentions are good, and it gets so much right, but it fails to deliver an actual solution.

That’s because, when you’re trapped in an unequal marriage, there really isn’t a surefire solution. Marriage advantages men, not women, and men hold most of the power in family court. Courts don’t care about men who exploit their wives, and they’ll happily give significant custody to men who have largely neglected their children. Child support awards are inadequate, and women who take time off work to raise children and support their spouses are almost never compensated.

If your spouse is truly unwilling to change, you’re stuck in a terrible bind, with few options. The hard truth is that the time to address labor balance is before marriage, before kids, before women are trapped. For the overwhelming majority of heterosexual couples, the book comes too late.

The entire Fair Play system is premised on the idea that men will change if they’re just asked the right way. This is the same old “you should have asked/don’t nag” double bind dressed up as a revolutionary new approach. The data show that men don’t respond well to being asked to do their fair share, no matter how women ask. They want things this way.

Household inequality exists because men don’t see women as people who matter. Reminding them that things are unbalanced is not going to shift this paradigm, no matter how pretty the deck of cards are or how witty the book is.

Fair Play: A Quick Intro

Fair Play is basically a gamified system for divvying up all household tasks. It’s given birth to a deck of cards and an army of highly paid consultants, but the work basically boils down to a few simple principles. Two of the most important are that if a person takes responsibility for a task, they must take responsibility for the whole thing, and that couples must agree about the tasks that should be completed and to what standard.

Eve Rodsky, the author of Fair Play, has contributed something really valuable to the discussion of household inequity. Her book gathers a ton of data showing exactly how harmful inequity is, and she really is trying to fix it. I’m glad the book exists, and have nothing against her. I think most people should read the book, because it’s an exceptional introduction to the basics of household labor inequality.

But the book has a huge, glaring problem: It devotes pages and pages to outlining the ways that inequality harms women. But then it acts as if that inequality comes out of nowhere. Rodsky insists on referring to husbands who benefit from their wives’ free labor and suffering as “good guys,” as if inequality is something imposed on them from above, not something they are willfully inflicting on their partners.

Why Fair Play Doesn’t Work

I have no doubt that Fair Play might work well in a household with a 60/40 split, where there are small differences in labor and the man really does want things to be equal.

But this is not the typical household. The typical heterosexual couple is a one-way relationship in which the woman gives and the man takes. Our entire culture accepts this as the natural order of things, and treats even small moves toward equality as assaults on male dignity.

Fair Play treats household labor inequality as an oops, as something couples just fall into. Then why does it occur on gendered lines, and why does it so clearly support the wider system of patriarchy? Household labor inequality is a primary vessel through which a misogynistic society limits women’s lives and futures. It’s no accident, and no deck of cards will solve it.

To believe that household inequality is an accident, you have to believe a few things:

• that men are so stupid they’re unable to see that their wives are working when they aren’t, or to comprehend that children and pets need food and someone must feed them;

• that men, upon realizing they are unfairly benefiting from a system, will willingly give that system up without becoming abusive or defensive;

• that women are not already devoting significant portions of their lives to trying to rectify household inequality.

These premises are absurd. My own data show that the average woman broaches household labor inequality an average of 27 times a year, and that some form of abuse is the most common reaction by male partners.

Households are unequal because that’s what men want. Rodsky is right that culturally, we do not value women’s time. What she gets wrong is the solution. Pointing out to a sexist man—and let’s be clear, that’s what Rodsky’s partner and all men benefiting from household labor imbalance are—that a woman’s time matters will not change his mind or his behavior.

Household labor inequality is fundamentally abusive because it requires one person to steal time and sleep and labor from the other person—and to do so knowingly. Men are fully capable of observing that someone is buying food, or that they’re playing video games when their partner is vacuuming, or that their partner cries from exhaustion every holiday. They are not incompetent. They are choosing this.

Worse still, Rodsky never actually advocates for equality. In fact, she says most women are happy if their husbands take on 21 of 100 tasks—21 fucking percent of the labor. Even to the guru of time parity, time parity is impossible, and women’s time doesn’t really matter as much. Under this model, we still exist to serve men, and it’s still assumed that true equality just isn’t happening.

It doesn’t matter how much Rodsky wants to refer to these lazy do-nothing assholes as “good guys.”

They are sexist assholes treating their partners like servants. Even if it were possible to achieve equality with them, they’ve still taken so much. I don’t think there’s any coming back from years of being treated like a servant without some sort of reparations. Is he going to give you extra time to make up for all he has taken? Put money into your retirement account that you could have been earning if his laziness hadn’t thwarted your career? Because if not, he is not repairing the damage he has done, and not taking it seriously as damage.

Ultimately, Rodsky’s book makes one of the same mistakes it is attempting to correct: It treats women’s time as less valuable by never proposing that men who have stolen years of their partners’ time owe them repayment of that time.

But its fatal flaw is its failure to recognize the personal as political. There is a reason so many marriages suffer from the exact same problem: It’s that the man isn’t suffering at all. Sexism generally, and men specifically, have created a world in which women work longer and harder than men, yet still believe they are inadequate.

Men don’t want equality. If they did, we’d have it. In marriages where the man does actually want equality, it already exists (or maybe becomes reality with a few Fair Play-inspired tweaks). It should not take hours of labor and reading and pleading and weeks of work to get your husband to help raise the children he made. He can start doing it right now.

If he doesn’t, it’s because he never wanted to—and is probably never going to.

No matter how many books you read or consultants you hire.