Social media, as it always does, views the world through a tiny ideological keyhole. This language of memes, tweets, six second skits, and tiny blocks of text, is hardly conducive to useful discourse, and yet so many treat this kind of content as the singular and absolute gospel truth. Recently – More and more I’ve been seeing this weird AI generated content, that shows various women (typically mums) bent double, trudging down the long road of life, carrying (literally) various blocks of responsibility on her shoulders – be that ‘childcare’, ‘work’, ‘housekeeping’, ‘family’ etc. Beside her, is another AI generated character. This one is a gormless looking father, walking next to the mother, and typically several feet ahead. Resting on his shoulders is one or two small blocks of ‘responsibility’ (or none at all), as he strides confidently ahead, leaving in his wake the poor, back-broken mother, now crushed beneath a monumental weight of ever increasing blocks. It may well be a newly fangled piece of AI slop, but the narrative it paints is one we’ve seen many times before – that mothers do everything, and fathers, well… do nothing at all. But is it true? We’ve watched the provocative AI generated meme (several of them) but is it time to look at the data, to see if such an image is reflective of reality? Well, let’s take a look – What do you think? - ATUS  Pew Research NYT Poll  BJS

2026-05-11