ThirdShift Blog

A reality check on the world we live in on IWD 2021 It’s International Women’s Day again – the one day a year when we check in on women. And the last year has been particularly bad. New research from the Female Lead led by Cambridge University psychologist Dr Terri…

A few years ago, I saw Miriam González Durántez, a successful international trade lawyer, speak at a Stylist event in London. During the Q&A someone asked her how she managed the challenges of having a career, children, and supporting her partner at the same time. Her partner was the Deputy…

A common response to the Multi-Player Housework Preferences quiz is worry that it will start a fight. The last year has not been a great time for many relationships – between lockdowns, school closures, cabin fever and social isolation, we’re all feeling a bit frayed. And housework can be fertile…

Today we’re launching our latest quiz to help households understand imbalances and how to fix them – but with a twist. The new Housework Preference quiz is multi-player and helps you and your partner work together to find the quick-wins for how you can correct household imbalances and improve your…

ThirdShift started as an idea: an app to make inequality more visible, helping households to create a better balance of unpaid housework, care work and mental load. We quickly narrowed our focus to creating a solution for parents, who have the highest workload and most need help managing it. Over…

Women have been calling for housework to be paid work for 120 years. So let’s look at the history of women’s unpaid work, particularly how the Wages for Housework movement from the 1970s is still relevant today – increasingly so as this economic crisis deepens. Read on to explore the …

ThirdShift uses data to make gender inequality in the home more visible, so we can fix it. This blog explores what the problem looks like in 2021, and how it is affecting us all.  It should not come as a surprise in the midst of a global pandemic and economic…

According to Oxfam, the economic value of the unpaid housework done by women globally in 2019 was $10.9 trillion. This is more than the combined 2018 revenue of the world’s 50 largest companies. Or, put another way, bigger than the GDP of every country in the world except the US,…

Do you do too much of the housework and childcare? Have you taken the ThirdShift Quiz? Here’s why it’s time for your partner to take the Quiz as well, to start having better conversations about creating a better balance at home. We launched the ThirdShift Quiz this week, and we’ve…

Today we’re excited to announce the launch of the ThirdShift Quiz, a free tool to help you understand your housework – how much you’re working, what you’re doing, and what your work is worth. You may be surprised to learn just how much work you do each week, and the…

About a year ago I bought a robot vacuum. It may just be the single best thing I have ever bought. Because I feel literal joy every time I hear it switch itself on automatically to clean my house, or come home (pre-coronavirus) to find it’s cleaned while I’ve been…

In many households coronavirus lockdown has revealed cracks. Whose job gets prioritised when someone needs to take care of children? If there’s a meltdown while you’re both on conference calls, who steps out to deal with it? Your kid needs help with a school task, who gets interrupted first? Who…