Researchers believe men don’t see mess the same way women do

Women do most of the chores around the home because men do not see disarray in the same way, University of Cambridge academics believe.

While men will look at a pile of dishes in the sink or crumbs on the counter as disorder, women view it as a job in need of doing and feel an urge to do so.

The researchers found females are instilled with an instinctive urge to tidy if they see clutter whereas men never get this compulsion.Credit:Shutterstock

This comes from deep-rooted social training that wires the brains of men and women differently from a young age, it is thought.

Females are instilled with an instinctive urge to tidy if they see clutter whereas men never get this compulsion and are therefore able to look at a pile of laundry in a messy room without feeling a need to fix it.

This, the philosophers say, leads to a situation where a woman is trapped between doing the chores as soon as possible and also ensuring she is not solely shouldering the domestic burden.

Cambridge philosophers investigated why women, on the whole, are left to do more housework than men and why men fail to see this imbalance.

The issue, they believe, is that men and women see everything in different ways. They have dubbed this phenomenon the “affordance theory”. The philosophers write in their paper: “A floor can afford sweeping, dishes can afford cleaning, mess can afford tidying, a crying infant can afford nappy-changing, and so on. We suggest that for many domestic tasks, women are more likely to perceive the corresponding domestic task affordance.”

Professor Paulina Sliwa, a philosopher at the University of Vienna who worked on the topic while at the University of Cambridge, said this mechanism is backed up by science.

“Neuroscience has shown that perceiving an affordance can trigger neural processes preparing you for physical action,” she said. “This can range from a slight urge to overwhelming compulsion, but it often takes mental effort not to act on an affordance.”

Every person sees a specific thing and perceives it differently. For example, one person might see a gap between two objects as jumpable, or a tree as climbable, while another might think both things are impossible.

Dr Tom McClelland, from Cambridge University’s Department of History and Philosophy of Science, says that applying this theory to the home might explain the inequality in chore workload. The team believe that men and women see the domestic situation in a different way as a result of how they were raised.

“This puts women in a catch-22 situation: either inequality of labour or inequality of cognitive load,” Sliwa said. “Some skills are explicitly gendered, such as cleaning or grooming, and girls are expected to do more domestic chores than boys. This trains their ways of seeing the domestic environment, to see a counter as ‘to be wiped’,” McClelland said.

The “gendered affordance perception hypothesis”, as it has been called, is not about absolving men, the philosophers emphasise.

Just because men do not instinctively make the leap from mess to task and feel the impulse to tidy does not mean they are incapable of making the decision manually.

“We can change how we perceive the world through continued conscious effort and habit cultivation,” said McClelland. The research is published in the journal Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.

The Telegraph, London

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