Former Yahoo chief executive Marissa Mayer believes smart digital assistants could help ease the hidden workload that busy women often carry alone. In a recent conversation with NPR’s Juana Summers, Mayer explored how technology might lighten the burden of emotional labour in both professional and domestic spheres. The discussion arrives at a moment when many women are managing careers, caregiving and household coordination simultaneously.
Mayer, who led Yahoo from 2012 to 2017 after a lengthy career at Google, has consistently argued that product design should reflect the realities of how people actually live. Her interest in digital assistants is not rooted in novelty, she suggested, but in the practical need to reduce the friction of everyday management.
The case for digital support
During the NPR interview, Mayer suggested that digital assistants could take on routine coordination—scheduling appointments, tracking school events, managing grocery lists—freeing up mental space for more demanding work. It is not about replacing human judgment, she implied, but about offloading the administrative friction that accumulates across a day.
These tools, in her view, could act as a second pair of hands in the background.
The idea is not new, but Mayer’s framing places the conversation squarely on the uneven division of invisible work. For women who are often expected to remember everything from PE kit days to project deadlines, the promise is a lighter cognitive load.
Emotional labour and the mental load
Emotional labour describes the unseen effort of anticipating needs, remembering birthdays, noticing when someone is overwhelmed and smoothing over tensions before they erupt. It frequently falls to women, whether they are in the office or at home. Mayer pointed out that this
