What if the reason why women do most of the emotional labour is that we don't count it as emotional labour when men do it? (I was surprisingly reluctant to tweet this even on alt)
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As a side note, I'm somewhat sceptical of the idea that it's only women who do the "free therapist" thing and think this is a thing where most couples help each other process emotions and it's more acceptable for women to complain when it's disproportionate (which it often is).
I don't know what the skew is - could easily believe it skews heavily towards women doing it, default assumption would be that it skews that way at least a bit - but I'd be at least a bit surprised if it were overwhelmingly women doing it.
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(Certainly I find myself in the role of free therapist a *lot*, both with friends and partners. It's generally in relationships where that's at least somewhat reciprocal, but that has not always been the case and I've had bad experiences of providing a *lot* of it in the past)
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Also it's true that we don't have a paid equivalent of the the things I'm highlighting as typical male emotional labour, but I think that's because it's more self-directed - it's about not doing the thing you really want to rather than doing something for other people.
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