“You’re Just a Housewife”: Recognizing the Value of Making a House a Home | Lori Sugarman-Li

The ManFlu | Exploring Gender Dynamics, Partnerships & Raising Boys Who Care

In this episode of 'The ManFlu,' host Lucy McAfee speaks with Lori Sugarman-Li, a family systems strategist and author of the children's book 'Our Home,' about the undervalued labor of homemaking and parenting.

Key takeaways

• Domestic work is often dismissed as 'just a housewife' role despite its immense value to family well-being.
• Children internalize gender roles early—girls aged 5–14 already do three times more unpaid labor than boys.

Main topics

• Invisible labor and the mental load
• Gender dynamics in parenting and household responsibilities

Notable quotes

"You're just a housewife. If something happens to you, there's no loss." – Insurance agent's dismissal of Lori's value.

Conclusion

Lori Sugarman-Li's journey from being dismissed as 'just a housewife' to becoming a leading voice in

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) Welcome to the man flu, where the flu is just the metaphor. We're not here to hand out tissues. We're here to challenge the cultural norms that keep relationships off balance. I'm Lucy McAfee. I've spent years studying how gender dynamics play out at home. And as a wife and boy mom, I'm living them too. Each week we dig into the old scripts and unspoken rules that often go unquestioned. but still end up running the show in our marriages and in how we are raising our kids. You'll hear perspectives from researchers, thinkers, and parents, and leave with one small shift to try with your family. Hi, everyone. This is Lucy. Welcome back to the Man Flu Podcast. What is a mother's work actually worth? A few years ago, my guest went looking for a literal answer. She applied for disability insurance. Speaker 1 (0:52) And the agent took one look at everything she did to keep her family running and told her she didn't fall on his algorithm. In his words, you're just a housewife. If something happens to you, there's no loss. Lori Sugarman Lee is the author of the children's book, Our Home, and a certified Fair Play facilitator. After 15 years in marketing at Kraft and Four Seasons, she shifted full-time into what she calls the economy of care and made it her mission to give that invisible work its language, its value, and its due. We get into the great rebrand, why chores is the wrong word for the work that actually nourishes a family. Speaker 1 (1:34) and why she does her best not to use the word help in her own house. She also shares some eye-opening research on how early the gap starts. Girls aged 5 to 14 already do three and a half times more unpaid work than boys their age, and what she's doing as a mom of two teenage sons to break that cycle. We also come back around to fair play and the idea of leisure time, but Lori puts her own twist on it, and her framing of equal joy really resonated with me. I think it will with you too. Stick around for the one small shift at the end. We know it's tough to get into this headspace when you're just trying to get through the day, but if you can, it just might give you a little hope and a new perspective for the week ahead. Lori, welcome to the show. I'm so happy to have you here today. Thank you so much. I'm thrilled. I love talking about how we all came to this work. Speaker 1 (2:30) And so I'd love to start with your journey to becoming a Fair Play facilitator, writing the amazing book, Our Home, and really digging into unpaid labor and how we manage everything it takes to make a house a home. Great. So I had an MBA in marketing and strategy and a 15-year career working for two fabulous Canadian-based companies. Kraft Foods and Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts. And I became pregnant with my first child while I was working for Four Seasons. And in Canada, where I was living at the time in Toronto, we have really quite a fabulous one year maternity leave. And I sort of. Speaker 1 (3:15) sunk into this experience quite surprised at how much I was enjoying it and thriving in it. But when the year was over, it came time to go back to work. I tried to negotiate with Four Seasons, sort of a different vibe because before I had my child, I was traveling a ton. It was really a fabulous gig before baby. And I was looking for a different role that was more based in the home office with a little bit more flexibility so I could keep working. It just wasn't on offer at the time. And so my husband and I had the big conversation that many couples did and still do that. I would shift from. Speaker 1 (3:53) this role in the economy of commerce to really focusing on the economy of care and full-time leadership of our family and extending that leadership into community and charity work. And I was really quite, I have to use the word naive at the time because I said to him, listen, you make the money, I'll do everything else. And little did I know how much that really was being in service of your family from dawn till dusk. But I took that sort of high performing persona that I had in my professional career and applied it to this family life. And it so happened that my husband's career offered us an opportunity to move abroad. So we moved from Toronto to London, England, which was a heap of. Speaker 1 (4:43) unpaid labor that I did in support of his career, really starting our family fresh. And while we were there, again, that involvement in family leadership and community leadership, really reestablishing us and securing it. everything that we needed from scratch, new doctors, new hairdressers, everything. And then we did a second move from London to Chicago. And it was, again, the same effort by me, all that sort of behind the scenes, unpaid family support to get us here. And when we landed in Chicago, my husband and I sort of had this moment of realization. We have no one here. We have no family. We don't have a safety net of friends yet. And he said to me, listen. Speaker 1 (5:25) You're doing so much for the family. What if, God forbid, something happened to you? He said, I would have to take a leave and head up the family, look after the kids, get them to all the places that they need to go. He said, we should get you disability insurance in case something happens. I didn't give it a thought. I was like, sure. To me, insurance was like, if you pay the premiums, you have the insurance. So we filled in all the forms and did all the health exams and all the rigmarole to get me disability insurance. Speaker 1 (5:53) And I was rejected. The insurance agent saying to me, I don't understand. You're just a housewife. If something happens to you, there's no loss. And he was, of course, referring to a financial loss because in that role, I was not compensated monetarily. And it was such a bubble bursting moment for me, for him to say to me, lady, you don't fall on our algorithm. You're not doing paid work. You're not doing work that is counted. You're not doing work that is recognized. And I sort of thought to myself, sir, you have no idea what a woman does in a day, whether she's full-time in support of her family or whether she's working outside the home and carrying this work on top of everything else. And it was like one of those cartoon moments where the smoke was coming out of my nose and out of my ears. And I was like, I can't. Speaker 1 (6:53) unhear and unknow that this is the perception of what a quote unquote stay at home mother is worth. And so I began to sort of look at my own little bubble and how I could impact change. And then beyond that, the first thing I did was actually go to LinkedIn. And I said, if I want other people to see what I'm doing as work, I need to be able to articulate it. as work. And so I made myself a LinkedIn profile as a stay-at-home mom, identifying all of my achievements, my growth, my contributions, and using the same words that I would have in any kind of professional review. I just sort of started writing and I wrote this article, posted again on LinkedIn, a reflection really called, I don't get paid, so what am I worth? Speaker 1 (7:44) And it was this conversation starter that really got a lot of attention in the LinkedIn environment. And it led to me sort of being invited on my first podcast, which was such a big moment. I was like, me on a podcast? But you recognize this is sort of like thought leadership and idea leadership and you're sparking new conversations. And it became really empowering for me to recognize that I had an opportunity to make a difference. I also recognize that I really didn't as a stay-at-home mom have much of a platform. And so I needed to develop that. And so I took a course at Stanford called Motherhood and Work, and I became an accredited facilitator of the Fair Play method, which just in case your listeners aren't familiar with Fair Play, Fair Play is, it's a book by Eve Rodsky. It's a system. It's a... Speaker 1 (8:37) concept of moving your family toward equity and domestic labor. And really, it's all about family wellness. And so I became sort of a coach and an accredited facilitator in that. And it was really, really a thrill to be able to share my experience and impact other families. But I knew there was still more that I wanted to do. And one of the things that I kept hearing from Eve Rodsky, who wrote Fair Play, was A lot of people were coming to her and saying, this is great for me and my partner, but how do I involve my kids? Because there's nothing really in Fair Play that relates to speaking to children about this work, this unpaid labor and the value that we give to it and how we can all share it to lead to family wellness. And I thought, well, if we want to break this cycle and foster a new future, we have to talk to kids. Speaker 1 (9:27) And so I decided in that moment that I was going to write a children's book. And this is it, our home, the love, work, and heart of family. And really my goal here is to remove gendering from the work of home and care and reposition it not as chores, but as expressions of gratitude that a whole family shares. That's so great. And I noticed as you were speaking in the beginning, how you did use those words to describe the unpaid labor that you're doing at home, but all of that leadership and taking those skills of leading a department, but instead leading your family. And it's really interesting to me how important the language is for the way we look at this, because yes, we all acknowledge that it is unpaid. Speaker 1 (10:25) which we could have a whole conversation about how that's a bunch of crap as it is. But the fact that you are told by institutions, well, it doesn't have any worth. I can't insure you for that. How do we move forward as a country, as a society, when this is how we value the work that it takes? The beautiful thing about the work that I do is, yes. The challenges and the ills, if you will, are still to be tackled at a societal level, but the real solve is in our home. And if we change the language that we use in our own families, if we impact how we work as a team and how we position ourselves in our home as an organization, then that will trickle out. Speaker 1 (11:21) and have an impact on society. So the beautiful thing is that we don't have to wait for someone else to make changes. And you raised such a good point as it relates to language. And it's interesting because I had this career in marketing, I really do approach so much of this issue as a rebrand because I think so much of it is it's misplaced language and perception. This whole idea that we call all of this work and of