Men often spend a third less time cleaning than women do each day.
Does it mean that women are models of cleanliness while males are unable to recognize the trash around them due to genetics?
The reason why males don’t do as much housekeeping as women is sometimes attributed to this fallacy. Men enter a room but don’t seem to notice the laundry piled up on the sofa or the dust bunnies amassing on the floor.
It absolves males of responsibility for failing to do their fair share of home cleaning.
In contrast, we demonstrate in a recent research that males are not dirt-blind and can perceive messes just as well as women. Simply put, they get less severe punishment for failing to keep their areas clean.
Chore inequality
Despite significant improvements in employment and education, women continue to do more housework than men.
Cooking, cleaning, and washing take women today around an hour and 20 minutes each day on average. One-third of it is devoted only to cleaning. Men, on the other hand, take roughly 30 minutes to complete similar tasks, with just 10 minutes dedicated to cleaning and organizing.
This discrepancy in family chores persists over time, across professions, and even when women put in more hours and earn more money. Women undertake more housework even in Sweden, where government measures are heavily aimed toward fostering gender equality. Even though women are significantly more likely to work full-time than in other nations, Swedish women nonetheless perform twice as much housework each day as men.
Naturally, a woman has less time to spend on other things like sleep, work, and leisure the more time she spends on housework.
The same mess
We asked 327 men and 295 women of diverse ages and backgrounds to evaluate a picture of a little living room and kitchen area for our research, which was just published in Sociological Methods and Research.
By chance, some participants were assigned to review a picture of a messy room with dirty dishes on the counter and clothes scattered about, while others were assigned to judge a much cleaner image of the same area. All participants assessed how cluttered they believed it was and how urgently it required cleaning after looking at the only photograph that was provided.
First, we were interested in determining if respondents who were men and women assessed the rooms differently. Contrary to common belief, men and women both saw the mess as equal; they assessed the clean and untidy rooms as equally messy.
Differing expectations
So why do women do more housework if “dirt blindness” isn’t to blame?
Social expectations for men and women vary, according to one claim. Women may face harsher criticism for having a less-than-immaculate house, and being conscious of these standards may inspire them to put in more effort.
We put this theory to the test by informing participants at random that the image they were seeing was either “John’s” or “Jennifer’s” home. Then, depending on how tidy their house was, we asked them to judge Jennifer’s or John’s character, including how responsible, diligent, careless, caring, and likeable they were.
Additionally, we asked participants to rate how likely they thought Jennifer or John would be to be negatively evaluated by unannounced visitors, such as extended family, coworkers, and friends, as well as how much responsibility they thought they would have for housework if they were working full-time and living alone, married with children, or a married stay-at-home parent.
Then, things started to get interesting. Depending on whether participants were informed that a woman or a male resided there, they gave the photographs varying ratings. It’s interesting to see that respondents had greater expectations for Jennifer’s hygiene than they did for John. Participants, regardless of gender, thought the tidy room was less clean and more likely to elicit negative responses from visitors when they were told it was Jennifer’s than when they were told it was John’s.
We’ve all heard ‘men are lazy’
However, we did discover that keeping a messy house comes with a significant cost for both men and women.
Both Jennifer and John earned far higher character evaluations than their more orderly counterparts, and were hence predicted to obtain significantly higher visitor evaluations.
It’s interesting to note that John’s character received lower ratings than Jennifer’s for having an untidy house, which corresponds to the stereotype that males are inherently sluggish. However, participants did not think John would be more likely than Jennifer to face unfavorable comments from guests, which implies that the stereotype that “guys are lethargic” disadvantages them in a socially significant manner.
Finally, in the hypothetical situation when she or he is a full-time working parent living with a partner, individuals were more inclined to assume that Jennifer would carry major duty for cleaning.
It implies that women are punished for clutter more often than men are, independent of their job condition, since people tend to place more responsibility for housekeeping on women than on men.
Judge not
Women are held to greater standards of cleanliness than males are, and they are also held more accountable for it.
Such ideals may be internalized or embraced by certain women. The main issue, however, for many people may not be a love of cleaning but rather a dread of how a mess would be seen. This may be why many women hastily clean their homes before uninvited guests come.
The good news is that dated societal expectations can be altered with enough group resolve. We may begin by being cautious before passing judgment on someone’s house, particularly our own.