My Take | Study finds men ignore dirt at home, women feel compulsion to clean

Not only are our actions and beliefs gender-normed, but also our perceptions of dirty dishes and an empty fridge are so conditioned

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View of messy home with scattered stuff. Credit: Shutterstock

Published: 9:30pm, 10 Jan 2023

We have many cats in our house. When the conditions of litter boxes become unbearable, I just pour more litter over them. My wife, however, completely replaces them with new, clean and fresh-smelling litter, and all the cats rejoice.

I never thought this needed explaining: I am just a lazy, selfish person, perhaps even sexist by action, if not by belief. But apparently, there is something more to it, according to a new study by a pair of philosophers from Cambridge University.

We men may simply not perceive domestic chores as needing doing in the same way as women. We can ignore them and let the dirty dishes or clothes pile up, without feeling psychological pressure to do something about them. Women, however, may feel a compulsion to clean up.

Cue “affordance”, a lovely theory in psychology that I had never heard of until now, but which I will cite from now on every time my wife complains that I am not helping out with housework.

In “Gendered affordance perception and unequal domestic labour”, Tom McClelland and Paulina Sliwa argue that where men see avoidance, women perceive affordance.

They wrote in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research: “We propose an important gender disparity in the perception of affordances for domestic tasks such as the dishwasher affording emptying, the floor affording sweeping and a mess affording tidying.

“We argue that this contributes not only to the inequitable distribution of domestic labour but to the frequent invisibility of that labour.”