This Woman's Work: On the Relationship Between Creative and Reproductive Cognitive Labor

Persistent gender inequality in creative industries is typically explained through exclusionary networks, precarity, and discrimination. This article shifts focus to the cognitive and temporal dynamics that may influence such inequality. Drawing on dyadic interviews with Canadian parents who work or previously worked in creative fields, it examines how women and men negotiate the mental and temporal demands of caregiving and creative practice. Anchored in feminist theories of care, the analysis reveals that even among ostensibly egalitarian couples who embrace their creative and parental identities, the autonomy and attention required for creative immersion remains unequally distributed. Mothers' creative practices are folded into the rhythms of caregiving, marked by fragmentation and attunement to others, whereas fathers more often preserve continuous uninterrupted creative time. These patterned asymmetries produce gendered conditions of creative possibility: who can withdraw into imaginative focus, and who must remain cognitively on call. By linking creative subjectivity to the unequal distribution of cognitive labor, this article reframes inequality in creative work as a question not only of participation or opportunity, but of whose time and attention counts as their own. In doing so, it extends feminist scholarship on care and work to the cultural field of creativity itself.