Administrative Burden: The Woman’s Work

29/05/2026

When the State Designs for a Person Who Does Not Exist

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. I also introduced the research on “deservingness”. Today, I turn to gender. The hypothesis that the unpaid labour of navigating 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.

That person, the one at the 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

Herd and Moynihan’s 2025 article in the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory is the first sustained attempt to theorise the relationship between administrative burden and gender.

The central claim is that gendered burdens are not simply a distributional finding. They are 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.

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. The burden, said plainly, is the actual policy.

Second, the policies that support care work, childcare subsidies, parental leave, family tax credits, tend to carry high administrative burdens. 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. Martin, Delaney, and Doyle (2022) found that 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. The state’s demand for compliance does not fall on a gender-neutral household. It lands on a gendered division of labour that 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. Navigating school enrolment. Every one of these interactions generates administrative work. 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.

The psychological cost of knowing that a reporting error could generate a debt to the Inland Revenue is real.

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

And the burden does not 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 (2019) found that Māori, Pacific peoples, people with disabilities, and young people were especially adversely affected by the benefit system’s administrative demands.

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, 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 or being held accountable for what it has done.

A Subsidy Extracted in Silence

The fundamental problem is not that the work is difficult. It is that the work is invisible. Cost-benefit analyses do not include a line item for the hours that mothers will spend navigating the application process. Regulatory impact statements do not estimate the cognitive load imposed on women who must reconcile entitlements across multiple agencies. And 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. She has a whakapapa. 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.

But if the state’s systems were consolidated, if the access points were drawn into a single platform, 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 promise of digital government is not that the work disappears. It is that the system might, at last, stop asking her for what it already knows, over and over again.

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

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.

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.

Martin, L., Delaney, L., & Doyle, O. (2022). Everyday administrative burdens and inequality. UCD Working Paper WP22/05. (Published 2024 in Public Administration Review, 84(4), 660–673.)

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.