USC 73% cognitive-labor stat

You have told your partner, more than once, that you are doing more of the household thinking. Your partner has, more than once, asked for evidence. The evidence exists. It's a peer-reviewed paper. It came out of USC. The number is 73%.

There's a name for the number. It's the USC 73% cognitive-labor stat — published in 2024 by Aviv, Waizman, Kim, Liu, Rodsky, and Saxbe in Archives of Women's Mental Health (DOI 10.1007/s00737-024-01490-w). The Saxbe Lab surveyed 322 partnered mothers of young children and measured 30 common household tasks across the four cognitive dimensions — anticipating, identifying, deciding, and monitoring — separately from physical execution. Mothers carried 73% of the cognitive load. Partners carried 27%.

You're not over-claiming. You're not "keeping score." The asymmetry is measured. The same study found that the heavier cognitive share predicted higher depression, stress, burnout, and relationship dissatisfaction — and crucially, that the physical-task split did not carry the same mental-health weight. The thinking is the thing that costs.

Before this paper, parents had Daminger's 2019 finding and lived experience. After this paper, the gap has a defensible number with a peer-reviewed sample and a documented mental-health cost. Weeks and Ruppanner's 2025 paper replicated the gap at 71% in a 3,000-parent sample. The number you've been feeling is not a feeling. It is a finding.