One of the major stress points for many relationships is how the chores get divided. Who ends up doing what to help the home stay clean and tidy can be a source of real problems. It's not hard for one partner to feel taken for granted if they find themselves constantly cleaning and cooking while the other one doesn't.
Now, how the labor gets divided is entirely up to the couple involved, but as one study shows, how things appear to those outside the relationship can have a huge effect.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor, women spend about a third more of their day on household chores.
And according to a group of researchers studying the relationship between gender and household chores, there's a common myth that men just see the mess less than women do - that pile of dirty laundry or the sink full of dishes just passes beneath a man's notice, the myth holds.
So, the researchers set out to see if that myth held any water. Their study, published in Sociological Methods and Research, men can see the mess just as well as women - they just don't face the same consequences for not cleaning it up.
They asked 327 men and 295 women of a variety of ages and backgrounds to examine a picture of a living room and kitchen. There were two different versions of the same room - one messy, and one tidy. Some randomly got the clean room, while the rest got the dirty room. To find out if men and women viewed the messiness of a room differently, all participants were asked to rate how urgently the room needed to be cleaned up, whether it was really clean or not.
In the end, the men and the women scored the messy room as equally messy, and the clean room as equally clean. So, men and women can both see messes.
The researchers' hypothesis was that women face different expectations than men - visitors would think that a messy house was more expected of a man than a woman, and would judge her more harshly for not keeping a tidier home.
So, they added an element to the photo, labeling it either "John's" or "Jennifer's" house and asking the participants to describe their character based on the space's messiness. They also asked how visitors might react to each space, and how much John or Jennifer was responsible for keeping it tidy, while factoring in things like having kids or working full time.
The participants rated the clean version of the room labeled as Jennifer's space as less clean than John's space and described her character more negatively.
Mind you, the messy versions of both John and Jennifer sparked considerable negative reactions as well. John's character was viewed more harshly for the messy room, too - but the participants also noted that visitors would be more forgiving of his mess than Jennifer's.
And, when the participants were told that Jennifer was a mom working full-time, with a spouse, they believed she bore the most responsibility for keeping the room clean.
So, it's not so much that men don't see a mess as it is that they can get away with not cleaning thanks to lowered expectations. And, women spend more of their time cleaning because of the higher expectations placed upon them, even if they only imagine those expectations.
"For many, it is unlikely a love of cleaning but rather a fear of how mess will be perceived that is the real problem," the authors wrote.
h/t: The Conversation
