“And still expected to arrive at the hole with a smile, a casserole, and everyone’s socks paired.”
It started, as all great revelations do, on a golf course I have never voluntarily stepped onto. A friend was explaining why women get to hit their ball from a tee placed slightly closer to the hole. “It’s not patronising,” he insisted. “It’s just a handicap — a way of recognising that women aren’t driving the ball with the same force as men. It levels the field.”
This would have been a lovely sentiment, except I suddenly realised something: in actual life, women aren’t given a handicap. Women are the handicap. We’re expected to tee off from the carpark, carry everyone’s bags, run the café, teach the juniors, and organise the raffle… all while the men glide past in a shiny electric golf buggy, waving merrily as we drag three generations of human responsibility behind us like a caravan with two flat tyres.
The dominant narrative for years has been a gentle, smiling gaslight disguised as admiration. “You’re amazing.” “You’re a supermum.” “You’re doing it all.” Women have spent decades being applauded for surviving a domestic obstacle course that nobody else is required to run. And because we’ve been praised for it, we’ve internalised it as normal. Like, of course I should be coordinating everyone’s schedules, emotions, and dental check-ups while also trying to maintain a career, a personality, and one single working adrenal gland. That’s womanhood, right?
The CWA lens (which is basically women finally writing the rulebook instead of being ruled by it) takes one look at this and says: absolutely not. This isn’t inspirational. It’s infrastructural failure dressed in glitter. So we created something deceptively simple: the Domestic Load Handicap — the DLH — a 0–100 score inspired by golf, justified by evidence, and designed to explain why so many women feel like they’re one load of washing away from walking into the wilderness forever. The DLH measures the real stuff: number of dependants, hours of unpaid work, complexity of care, commuting, sleep deprivation, and that intangible-but-very-real force field called The Mental Load. You don’t need a psychologist to identify it. You can diagnose it instantly by observing a woman staring blankly into her pantry wondering what she came in for, while simultaneously planning dinner, a school form, and her escape to a small fishing village in Greece.
When you calculate a DLH score accurately, it’s confronting. You get four categories. Low Load (0–20): these are the people who post photos of their brunch on weekdays. Medium Load (21–40): the regular jugglers. High Load (41–60): the “mum I can tell you haven’t sat down since 2013” demographic. And Critical Load (61–100): women who are basically running five unpaid departments while operating on three hours of sleep and the hope that maybe one day someone else might replace the toilet paper.
And here’s the thing nobody talks about: we already do this for disability, for injury, for workplace capacity — but we’ve never done it for the one load carried almost entirely by women. DLH isn’t therapy. It’s infrastructure. It’s the first time women can point to a number and say, “See? I’m not overwhelmed because I’m weak. I’m overwhelmed because I’m carrying the workload of a mid-size NGO.”
The reframe becomes funny the moment you realise how ridiculous the old system was. Imagine if golf worked the way society does. Women show up to tee off, and instead of being moved closer to the hole, they’re told: “Actually, could you start from the highway? And also, your bag now includes everyone else’s clubs, plus three missing socks, a thermos, and the emotional wellbeing of your entire family.” When she expresses that the task seems… excessive, she is told to lean in, manifest, stay grateful, practise self-care, or “manage her time better.” Meanwhile, the men are wondering why she’s so stressed when the weather is perfect.
A fully functioning DLH system changes the entire landscape. Low-load women get preventative support and relationship check-ins. Moderate-load women get flexibility, family-friendly structures, and tax settings designed for shared care, not maternal sacrifice. High-load women get subsidised domestic help — not as a luxury, but as preventive health. And critical-load women get fast-tracked wrap-around support. This is not radical. This is just women finally getting the structural relief that men have implicitly received for centuries through the simple mechanism of not doing the domestic work.
CWA is bringing humour to this conversation because humour is the Trojan horse that carries truth straight into the public imagination. Women don’t need more lectures about balance; they need structural recognition of the fact that they have been playing an 18-hole championship course with two toddlers, a pram, and a shopping trolley—while everyone else has been practising their swing. DLH turns the invisible into the visible. It shows that most “women’s issues” are not personal failings; they’re predictable outcomes of measurable overload.
The real punchline? Once load becomes measurable, institutions actually have to do something about it. And that, in a nutshell, is why DLH exists. Not to shame, not to blame, not to moralise — but to quantify. Because once something is quantified, it cannot be dismissed. Once it is measured, it cannot be minimised. And once women stop being framed as the problem and start being recognised as the infrastructure, the entire system has to grow up. That’s not feminism. That’s maths.
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