A Fair Share

(A) Are you dong your fair share around the house? (B) Do you think you're doing your fair share? These are, for better or worse, not the same question. To many folks, it's obvious that (A) is a different question from (C) Do other people in the house think you're doing your fair share, and that (B) and (C) are likely to be mismatched, but realizing that (A) and (B) are different often takes some practice to really get used to.

That's not to say that people don't try. I know many folks who use the rule of thumb

"If it doesn't feel like you're doing more than your share, you're doing less than your share".

I've used it. I think it's often appropriate. It's kept me from accidentally complaining about doing more than was fair when, in actuality, I wasn't even pulling my own weight. As a first approximation goes, I think it's a good one, but I don't think it's spot-on.

Since a post here wouldn't be a post here without a good digression or tangent, I'd like to take a minute to talk about cake. Cake is a classic object for "how do you fairly divide something" problem, and for a homogenous cake, the "you cut, I choose" or "I cut, you choose" strategies work just fine for two people. But what about when you've got more people? For homogenous cakes, there are similar strategies that ensure that 'fairness' is satisfied, at least in the form of "If I cut an unfairly sized piece, I'm the one who'll end up with the unfairly sized piece."

But what about a non-homogenous cake? What about a chocolate/vanilla marble cake with frosting (thick in some places, thin in other), walnuts in most of it, some pieces with strawberries on top, some pieces with candlewax drippings and a candlehole, and let's toss a lovely edible candy effigy on the top. Suddenly, the scene changes, because different pieces of the cake can be more desirable to different people. Perhaps you're allergic to walnuts: you'd probably rather have a small portion without walnuts than a large portion that's stuffed with nuts. Perhaps I reaaaaally like strawberries. I could happily pass up a large piece without fruit if it meant I could get a small piece with fruit. Some third person might have a moderate preference for chocolate to vanilla, so would be just as happy with a medium-small chocolate piece as a medium-large vanilla piece.

With a heterogeneous cake and two people, "You cut, I choose" isn't symmetric with "I cut, you choose" any more, because where that cut falls can be important! You might cut things in a way that presents me with two equally bad options from your point of view, but I might like one option far more than the other. In the sense of "You suffer if you cut unfairly", you still have that issue, but in the sense of "If you cut fairly, I don't care which piece I get either", the situation has changed! On the other hand, you might be able to cut the cake in a way that you felt one piece was better than the other, and I thought the other piece was better than the one, so unless I'm a masochist, we both end up getting more than our 'fair share' of goodness.

Reeling the tangent back in closer to reality, consider the 'cake' of housework. Pretend, for the sake of argument, that while you may not exactly enjoy mopping floors, you find it far less onerous than balancing checkbooks. For the same argument, I'll also pretend that I don't like balancing checkbooks. I don't have to pretend that I prefer that activity to mopping, because it's true. We could split up the chores by having you do the books and me do the floors. According the the rule of thumb, that would be a good solution, since I'd feel like I was doing the harder/less pleasant part, and you'd feel the same way. And, indeed, if there really were some objective way of measuring bookkeeping against cleaning, we might indeed each be doing our fair share. But, if that were the case, if we switched roles, we'd also be doing our fair share.

The rule of thumb, however, would throw a red flag. "You're doing the easier stuff!" it would say, "You're not pulling your weight!" Even if both of you were pulling your weight (with reversed roles or not), the rule of thumb would give a false negative. Lacking enough communication to get a broader picture of what's going on, this could lead to switching roles (not so great, because while still fair, everyone's stuck with more than their share instead of less), or it could lead to rule of thumb indoctrinees building up a resevoir of guilt over getting away with doing less than their fair share, or it could lead to anti-guilt defensive anticipation due to expecting the other person to eventually complain about doing more than their fair share.

So, as a second approximation... another rule of thumb that still isn't exactly on the mark but gets closer... I'd suggest the following:

"If nobody wants to swap workloads with you, you're not doing less than your share."

Of course, this requires communicating with other people, so automatically involves more work than the first rule of thumb, but weighed against alternatives like "everyone doing one of the fair shares they dislike most" and "feeling unnecessarily guilty" and "becoming unnecessarily pre-emptively defensive", perhaps it'd be worth the extra effort sometimes.