This Woman's Work: On the Relationship Between Creative and Reproductive Cognitive Labor
本文通过访谈加拿大创意工作者父母，发现即使平等观念强的夫妻中，母亲因照料责任导致创作时间碎片化，父亲则能保持连续创作时间，从而揭示了认知劳动分配不公如何加剧创意行业的性别不平等。
ABSTRACT 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.