Administrative Burden: The Woman’s Work

04/10/2026

I look at how the unpaid labour of dealing with the state falls for the most part on women, drawing on Herd and Moynihan’s theory of gendered burden and on what raising a child in Aotearoa demands of mothers.

This is the fourth post in a series about what it actually costs to navigate the state. Last month I examined how burdens fall hardest on the least resourced, and I introduced the research on “deservingness”. Today I turn to gender, and to the hypothesis that the unpaid labour of dealing with the state falls disproportionately on women and remains almost entirely invisible to the policymakers who design the systems that demand it.

There is a person at the centre of most service design who, in fact, does not exist. This person has a stable address, reliable internet, a single employer, a working printer, and up-to-date knowledge of how agencies organise their business. This person does not have a child to collect from school at three o’clock. This person does not spend Sunday evening at the kitchen table with a pile of documents, trying to work out which of three agencies needs to be told that the family’s circumstances have changed, and in what order, and using which form.

The person who does sit at that kitchen table is overwhelmingly a woman, and the work she is doing is work the state depends upon but does not count.

The gendered theory

The first sustained attempt to theorise the relationship between administrative burden and gender is, in my reading, a 2025 article in the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory (Herd & Moynihan, 2025).

Its central claim is that gendered burdens go beyond a distributional finding and act as a means by which the state regulates gender itself: controlling bodies, allocating labour, and reinforcing particular constructions of identity (Herd & Moynihan, 2025).

The article identifies four mechanisms through which this happens.

First, burdens regulate reproductive bodies. In the United States, so-called TRAP laws used compliance requirements as a deliberate strategy to restrict access to abortion: mandatory waiting periods, multiple clinic visits, and infrastructure regulations with no medical justification. In these cases the burden is, said plainly, the policy itself.

Second, the policies that support care work (childcare subsidies, parental leave, family tax credits) tend to carry high administrative burdens, and accessing the support designed to recognise care labour itself requires a further, uncounted form of care labour.

Third, in what the authors call “rights-depriving venues,” such as child protective services, administrative processes exert direct control over how care is performed, subjecting families to surveillance and compliance regimes that dictate the terms under which they may continue to care for their own children.

Fourth, administrative systems regulate gendered identity. For transgender and non-binary individuals, the process of changing a legal gender marker is, by design, onerous: a form of social control dressed as paperwork and administrative neutrality.

The invisible shift

What gives this framework its force is the concept of invisibility. Sociologists have documented what they call “cognitive labour”: the thinking work required to anticipate and monitor household needs. Women perform the majority of it, even in households where physical tasks are shared relatively equally (Daminger, 2019). A 2024 study across European countries found that women performed more of this work and that the tasks they performed were associated with higher levels of stress (Haupt & Gelbgiser, 2024).

Administrative burden extends this into the public sphere. When a government service requires a form, a document, an appointment, or a phone call, it is generating a task that must be absorbed by someone in the household.

The research is clear about who: women in the United Kingdom spend more time managing administrative tasks related to health, care, and routine household management, while men direct more time towards financial matters (Martin et al., 2024). The state’s demand for compliance falls on households where a gendered division of labour was already in place before the form arrived.

What this looks like here

The data in Aotearoa is unambiguous. Women average 264 minutes of unpaid work each day, compared with 141 minutes for men. Approximately 63 per cent of women’s total work is unpaid, compared with 35 per cent of men’s. The Westpac Sharing the Load report (2021) estimated that if the domestic load were shared more equally, the economy could grow by $1.5 billion per year.

Now consider the administrative architecture of raising a child in Aotearoa: enrolling in early childhood education, applying for the childcare subsidy, registering with a GP, scheduling Well Child Tamariki Ora visits, applying for Working for Families, managing the Inland Revenue interface for Best Start payments, and working through school enrolment. Every one of these interactions generates administrative work, and in most households it is the mother who does it.

The childcare subsidy is an instructive case. My recollection is that it requires income verification, evidence of enrolment, provider details, and hours of care.

Changes in circumstances must be reported and the application updated. For a mum working irregular hours across two part-time jobs, with care arrangements that shift from week to week, the compliance burden is substantial.

The learning cost of understanding which subsidy applies is high, and the psychological cost of knowing that a reporting error could generate a debt to Inland Revenue is real.

The subsidy exists to support women’s participation in the workforce, yet the burden of accessing it runs counter to that very purpose.

Nor does the burden fall equally on all women. Wāhine Māori and Pacific women sit at the intersection of gender, poverty, and the institutional arrangements of colonisation. They are more likely to be in insecure work, more likely to be single parents, and more likely to encounter the state as a regulator of whānau life through systems like Oranga Tamariki.

Indeed, the Whakamana Tāngata report found that Māori, Pacific peoples, people with disabilities, and young people were especially adversely affected by the benefit system’s administrative demands (Welfare Expert Advisory Group, 2019).

These local findings sit squarely within the gendered administrative burden framework. When a single mother on Jobseeker Support is required to attend a seminar, provide evidence of job applications, bank account statements and bill payments, and report any change in household composition, all while managing the care of young children, she is bearing a bucket of costs that the system has decided to allocate to her without ever naming what it has done or being held accountable for it.

A subsidy extracted in silence

The fundamental problem, in my view, lies less in the difficulty of the work than in its invisibility. Cost-benefit analyses do not include a line item for the hours that mothers will spend working through the application process. Regulatory impact statements do not estimate the cognitive load imposed on women who must reconcile entitlements across multiple agencies. Because the work is invisible, it is free. The state can design processes of almost any complexity, safe in the knowledge that someone will absorb the cost. That someone has a gender and a whakapapa, and she has children to feed and a job to get to in the morning.

Digitisation will not, by itself, undo what decades of institutional design have made structural. If the state’s systems were consolidated, if the access points were drawn into a single platform, and if the information a mother has already provided to one agency did not have to be repeated to the next, then some of that burden would begin to lift.

The most digital government can offer, in my view, is a system that might, at last, stop asking her for what it already knows, over and over again, even though the work itself will remain.

A system that genuinely valued gender equity would ask a very specific question when designing digital platforms: who, in practice, will do this work? If the answer is “mostly women,” then the system has an obligation either to reduce the burden or to count and compensate the labour, and anything else is a subsidy extracted in silence.

Next month we turn to the role of Weavers and Whānau Ora navigators in reducing administrative burden, one of the most distinctive responses to emerge from Aotearoa and one the international literature has yet to fully reckon with.

References

Daminger, A. (2019). The cognitive dimension of household labor. American Sociological Review, 84(4), 609–633. https://doi.org/10.1177/0003122419859007

Haupt, A., & Gelbgiser, D. (2024). The gendered division of cognitive household labor, mental load, and family–work conflict in European countries. European Societies, 26(3), 828–854. https://doi.org/10.1080/14616696.2023.2271963

Herd, P., & Moynihan, D. (2025). Gendered administrative burden: Regulating gendered bodies, labor, and identity. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 35(1), 45–57. https://doi.org/10.1093/jopart/muae021

Martin, L., Delaney, L., & Doyle, O. (2024). Everyday administrative burdens and inequality. Public Administration Review, 84(4), 660–673. https://doi.org/10.1111/puar.13709

Welfare Expert Advisory Group. (2019). Whakamana Tāngata: Restoring dignity to social security in New Zealand. New Zealand Government.

Westpac New Zealand. (2021). Sharing the Load. Westpac New Zealand.