Who Does the Dishes?

Sociocracy at Family Level

We recently moved from a community household to largely a nuclear family household. In a community house, care is more visible, (ideally) more distributed, and more easily shared (though I have written about the issues that plagued our community here, and here). As a household of two, it became obvious how quickly old gendered patterns can settle in. The issue was not just who cooked or cleaned. It was who noticed, remembered, anticipated, coordinated, and made sure daily life kept moving.

In a perfect storm involving PMS irritability and a forgotten coffee mug, it quickly became clear that my blowout about said mug was not really about the object, but revealing an underlying issue.

Household inequality is a governance problem. And in a long-term, hetero-presenting couple, it is also a feminist issue. Care work does not become apolitical because it happens inside love. Patriarchy thrives in informality. When responsibilities stay vague, women are still the ones who too often end up carrying roughly two-thirds of the reproductive labour: the labour of feeding, organizing, soothing, planning, repairing, and keeping life going. And this is not to put any blame on my partner, far from it: we were coming out of very heavy weeks with a lot of stress at his workplace, and we just drifted somewhere oddly familiar…

What helped us was borrowing from sociocracy. The most useful concept for us was the domain. A domain is not a chore. It is a whole area of responsibility with real decision-making authority. Food, garden, animals, admin and money, repair and maintenance, cleaning, etc.: each domain includes the visible tasks and the invisible work around them.

That distinction changed a lot. If one person holds the food domain, that does not just mean cooking. It means planning, noticing what is missing, keeping basic supplies in mind, and making sure that part of the household works. The same applies to appointments, forms, bills, laundry cycles, or whatever else keeps everyday life from collapsing.

The other key word is accountability. In our case, accountability means that if a domain is yours, you are answerable for its functioning. The other person should not have to manage your responsibility for you. We still make decisions together about priorities, constraints, and rebalancing. But once a domain is clear, it should not silently slide back onto the woman through reminders, prompts, and backup coordination.

We now do short household check-ins rather than talking about the logistics of the weeks on Sunday night. We name tensions early, review whether the domains are still fair, and adjust when work, energy, or family needs change. We do not aim for a perfect fifty-fifty split. We aim for explicit, revisable, politically conscious fairness. I, for instance, do very little of the cooking and food/kitchen domain stuff, while my partner doesn’t do much gardening or processing.

For me, that is what makes sociocracy useful in a couple. It does not just redistribute chores. It redistributes initiative, authority, and mental load. And that matters, because equity in a household is not only about being nice to each other. It is about refusing to let patriarchy hide inside intimacy.