This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.
Chore apps were meant to make mothers’ lives easier. They often don’t.
A few years ago, Jamie Gravell needed help. She was working full time while finishing her dissertation, her son had just turned two, and the housework was piling up, even after she’d repeatedly asked her husband to do more. So she downloaded Cozi. It’s one example of an increasingly popular solution: chore apps designed to help families split housework more fairly. Gravell’s hope was that her husband would do more to lighten her load without her having to keep asking.
It was a disaster. “It doesn’t solve the problem: that you’re nagging someone else or parenting your partner,” she says. “It doesn’t empower or engage the other person to be a part of the family team.” Within a week, Gravell had ditched the app. Cozi “just didn’t work,” she says.
On paper, chore apps could help to solve the very real problem that women in heterosexual couples still shoulder a disproportionate amount of the housework. They could get male partners to become more like, well, partners. But as Gravell discovered, these apps might actually be doing the very opposite, by forcing women—and especially mothers—to take on the additional burden of using technology to assign tasks. Read the full story.
—Tanya Basu