Microfeminism, if you’ve not come across the term, is the small stuff. Addressing the email to the woman in the room first. Asking the dad how he juggles it all. CCing her boss when she’s the one who did the work. Tiny, everyday nudges against tiny, everyday defaults.
I’d like to add one to the list: teaching a machine to do the remembering.
Stay with me, I promise this isn’t a stretch.
The remembering is the work
There’s a job in most households that has no name, no hours and no pay, and it’s this: being the one who knows. Who knows it’s mufti day on Friday. Who knows the dentist is overdue. Who knows there’s nothing in for packed lunches, that the school email needs answering by Thursday, that it’s your mother-in-law’s birthday a week on Tuesday.
The mental load. And it defaults to women so reliably that we’ve all watched perfectly fair-minded, modern households drift into “oh, she just remembers things better”. She doesn’t. She just never got the option to forget.
Now run a business on top of that. Because if you’re a woman founder, you didn’t swap one load for the other, did you. You stacked them. The client follow-up, the invoice that needs chasing, the tax deadline, the workshop you said you’d plan, all living in the same overworked head that’s also tracking the mufti day.
And the productivity advice never fit us, because most of it was written by men who had someone at home doing their remembering for them. Nobody was doing mine. I was the someone.
So I gave the remembering away
Not to my husband. Well, some of it, we’ve renegotiated plenty, but that’s a different post. Not to my VAs either, though they’re gold. I gave it to a machine. A thing that never gets tired, never forgets, and never needs me to feel guilty for asking.
My AI runs my morning briefing. It fishes school emails out of the pile before I lose them. It knows what I promised this week and who’s waiting on a reply. It takes the 2am spiral and turns it into a list with an order. The business remembers so you don’t have to. That’s not a slogan I dreamt up at a branding workshop, it’s a description of my actual Tuesday.
Here’s why I’m calling that microfeminism and not just productivity.
When a woman stops being the default reminder system, something shifts. Small, but structural. The remembering becomes visible, because it now lives somewhere everyone can see it, instead of invisibly inside her. The household stops running on her unpaid cognitive labour. The business stops needing her at 100% every day, which no human is.
Every system I build takes a piece of wife-work, the noticing, the tracking, the holding, and hands it to something that was actually built for the job. That’s a small rebellion against a very old arrangement. Do it enough times and it stops being small.
What this is not
This is not “AI will liberate women”. No tool ever liberated anyone on its own, and hype is the last thing I’ll ever sell you.
It’s smaller than that, and better. It’s one woman at a time deciding her brain is not the family filing cabinet, or the business server, or both. It’s noticing how much of your exhaustion isn’t the work itself, it’s the carrying of the work in your head. And then refusing to keep doing that bit for free.
You are not behind. You are overwhelmed. And a decent chunk of the overwhelm is remembering-work that a machine could be holding by this time next week.
So put it down. Quietly, politely, one system at a time. It’s the most radical unradical thing I know.
If you want to know where to start putting it down, my free workbook is exactly that. The first pieces of your business to hand over, in order.