The A.I. Gender Gap Meets the Parenting Gender Gap

Labor-saving technology tends to create domestic systems that are far more efficient over all, but not necessarily easier for the people doing the labor. As the historian Ruth Schwartz Cowan wrote in “More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave,” from 1983, innovations such as the modern stove, the washer-dryer, and the vacuum cleaner simplified chores that previously had been shared among multiple family members or contracted out to paid help, placing them instead in the hands of a single unpaid worker. Consumer tech made it possible for the twentieth-century housewife to prepare meals and handle the laundry solo, but it also raised the bar for how elaborate her dinners could be and for how often she was expected to change the sheets.

This paradox of household tech found a millennial counterpart in the advent of e-mail, the personal digital assistant, and the smartphone, which added welcome flexibility to the lives of working parents, but also raised bosses’ expectations for their employees’ availability and productivity. In the twenty-tens, the mobile-app marketplace began wrapping its prehensile tail around kids’ sports and school activities. Family logistics that were once maintained easily enough via printouts and PDFs became the provenance of dozens of atomized apps—and, unlike printouts and PDFs, many of these apps make you watch ads and want your bank’s routing info. Unless and until A.I. family assistants can take over Whac-a-Mole duties on countless proprietary apps, many parents may hesitate over the wisdom of solving too much tech with yet more tech.

Daminger, who is the mother of a toddler, told me that parents who use A.I. must contemplate both the limits of what the technology can do and the limits they want to place on how deeply A.I. reaches into their lives. Recently, she tried to train Claude to help with meal planning for her family of three, but gave up after a couple of months. “It would leave crucial ingredients out, it would get the proportions totally wrong, it would suggest the same five things over and over,” she said. It might have done a better job, Daminger went on, if she’d added more layers of tech—if she had a smart pantry and smart fridge for Claude to peek inside—or if she’d done more to keep Claude updated on her child’s “ever-changing food preferences.” Then again, these private textures of family life, she said, “are something that I don’t necessarily want to feed to A.I.”

Katherine Goldstein, a friend of mine who’s a writer and the mother of three young boys in Durham, North Carolina, gives Claude access to her e-mail, so that it can create travel itineraries and populate the shared family calendar with events and reminders. But, she told me, she tries to treat it as a deterministic algorithm, and not as “a character in the family’s life”—she doesn’t talk to Claude about her kids or ask it for parenting advice, and she has conditioned it not to praise her or offer unsolicited help. Goldstein sees the appeal of an A.I. family assistant but rejects its premise. Tools such as Ollie, she told me, “feel like just another way to raise the bar on what families are supposed to be able to accomplish, in a way that makes me want to put a blanket over my head.”

What Goldstein is resisting—and what A.I. family assistants both address and reinforce—is the cultural hegemony of intensive parenting, the time- and research-intensive mode of family life that helps to explain why, for example, working mothers of the early twenty-first century report spending a comparable amount of time engaged in child care as their stay-at-home counterparts of the nineteen-seventies. Juliet Schor, an economist and sociologist at Boston College, told me that there is “a kind of intractability to the cultural imperative of so-called intensive mothering.” It’s one that she doubts an A.I. family assistant can dislodge. These women “can’t use A.I. to give themselves ‘me time’ because they think they’re not supposed to have ‘me time,’ ” Schor said.