Why men don't help out around the house

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Header images come from me putting the headline or some body copy when the headline violates the TOS into OpenAI’s DALL-E. Today’s prompt was “surrealist painting of a man wiping a counter.”

On Medium, SG Buckley writes about a Cambridge study on why men partnered with women don’t clean up after themselves or anyone else. They call it say “affordance theory.”

The academics define “affordance” as a “possibility for action” and suggest that this perception of affordance depends on gender. In a home with a man and a woman, the woman is more likely to feel an urge to act than a man when seeing domestic work to be done.

Okay, but why is this gendered? In Science Times, Margaret Davis summarizes co-author Dr. Tom McClelland as saying women are expected to be good at and do more cleaning than men. These expectations train women to be irritated until their homes are clean.

Women cook and clean and take care of the kids and inside the house. Men bring home a paycheck and take out the trash and maintain the outside of the house and cars.

This was all fine and good while men could bring home the bacon. But now women have to bring home some bacon too, and then cook it up, clean up after, and be the primary parents.

I think it was this podcast (love) where the host said the only way for a modern mother to get a break is to get divorced.

Let that sink in for a moment.

She found (and she’s likely not alone), single motherhood less exhausting than being married. If you’re sharing custody, you get a regularly scheduled actual break. I mean it’s trite, but the old canard about how when women take care of their kids it’s parenting but when a man does it it’s babysitting is telling.

And we wonder why women initiate most divorces. (I don’t.) Actually datepsych has threaded about why women get divorced, and things like alcoholism and abuse are pretty common. But still.

“Researchers said that men should be encouraged to improve their sensitivity to seeing the possibilities for action, like adopting a resolution to sweep for crumbs while waiting for the kettle to boil,” Davis writes.

Encouraged by whomst? This is why I hate the passive voice. (Ask anyone I’ve edited.) I’m sorry, but trying to train my theoretical husband to sweep for crumbs while waiting for the kettle to boil just sounds like more work for very little payoff.

Gendered expectations are a structural, cultural problem. They are deeply ingrained. I remember being married and ex-husband’s mother coming over to our house. She asked me about the state of it, despite the fact that I worked full-time and he did not. Why not ask him? Because women cook and clean and take care of the kids.

Men don’t spend as much time cooking and cleaning and doing childcare as women, on average, because no one expects them to. Because their parents taught them to expect to be breadwinners, but in adulthood they find the economy has other plans. And then they don’t readjust their value proposition.

This is what I feel is often missing in many of the conversations about sexism. Many people seem to think sexism is no longer a problem because people sometimes get fired from their jobs for being openly, explicitly sexist and it’s illegal to discriminate on the basis of gender.

But this ignores the way sexism actually works in the real world. And it absolutely kills me when women say things like, “I’ve never personally experienced sexism.” The vast majority of sexism doesn’t look like a man telling you he’s not going to hire you because you’re female. It looks like medical misogyny. Like the likability gap. Like the fact that fewer than 10% of rape allegations turn out to be false but the average person thinks it’s more like 30% and the vast majority of rapes go unreported, those that are reported aren’t investigated, and the those that go to trial usually don’t result in a conviction.

You think you haven’t experienced sexism because the vast majority of sexism you’ll encounter will be subtle and subconscious, especially if you’re white, able-bodied, high-income, and otherwise privileged.

And it’s why the gender wage gap conversation is so stupid. Yes, it’s true that the gulf between average wages for men and women decreases significantly (though doesn’t go away entirely) when you correct for things like college major, years in the workforce, and hours per week.

But why do those gaps exist? Because most people expect men to major in STEM, never take time off for caretaking, and to work long hours while the woman handles things at home. That’s why men’s average wages increase after getting married and having kids and women’s decrease. One study found that the majority of married women who graduated from Harvard Business School chose to prioritize their husbands’ careers over their own.

Men not doing anywhere near half their fair share of domestic labor, even when they’re unemployed, isn’t a problem of individual men being shitbags. Women earning less than men on average isn’t the result of men deciding to pay women less money for the same work. Doctors assuming women are exaggerating their symptoms while men are underplaying theirs isn’t the result of doctors wanting women to suffer.

These all result from the subtle, unconscious sexism of gendered expectations.

The sexism we need to defeat isn’t mostly men hating women or women hating men. It’s everyone inheriting sexist scripts and following them uncritically.

I’m thinking about what to do here. I think what Richard Reeves wrote about, which I was reminded of when he was on a podcast recently, is relevant.

Feminism gave women a new script. Yes, you can be a housewife if you want. But you can also be a doctor or lawyer or whatever you want to be. Men need a new script. Which I think honestly looks like, yes, you can be a doctor or lawyer or whatever if you want to be. But you can also be a househusband. It’s masculine and noble and worthy of respect to notice the counter is dirty and wipe it off.

I don’t know, my babies. I’m open to ideas.

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