During the pandemic years when we heard endlessly about the metaverse, I wrote a question on my whiteboard that’s still there today: Who will do the laundry in the metaverse? I was hearing all these tech guys talk with excitement about how we could live our lives in a virtual world. As a mom who was in the midst of working from home full time while homeschooling my two sons whose public school closed for a year, and also feeding the whole family at home all day every with the associated increase in dirty dishes to handle … all I could think in response to the tech bros was “is your actual laundry going to get done in the metaverse, or is there someone at home doing it for you in the real, boring world while you’re optimizing your digital reality”. This is an extreme example of a common phenomenon in which solutions coming out of the tech world seem to come from a typically male experience. We can send people to space, but I still have to physically move laundry from the washer to the dryer at the right time multiple days a week…

One thing I appreciate about having mothers in leadership at tech companies is that they sometimes mention things that make it clear that they, too, have to manage their household. And sometimes professional skills help! I use agile practices quite a bit at home (and I know my husband is tired of me talking about iteration with respect to home renovations). Emilie Schario, who I got to know from the dbt analytics engineering community, is one of these people who mentions her mom-related tasks in the context of work – like this post using laundry as a lead in to sprint planning.