Are Men Messier Than Women?

Are men actually messier than women? Or is that just some sexist stereotype? E&B break down the surprising research behind who makes more "ew."

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, this is Emily and this is Bridget, and you're
listening to stuff mom never told you. Now, have you
ever heard, bridget the idea that boys are just messier

(00:25):
than girls, or that men are just slobs who never
clean up after themselves. Not only have I heard of this,
I have been told this by men I have lived
with as a way of getting out of doing housework. Oh. Really,
that's an interesting way to look at it, because for me,
when I think about that stereotype, and it is a
gender stereotype that women are just cleaner or neater than

(00:47):
our male counterparts, a part of my feminist side things
will hold on a second, that is an overarching generalization
based on gender that can't be true, you know, I
immediately and thinking, well, that just feels like a cop
out that makes men feel like they're off the hook
and the bar is low for our expectations of their cleanliness.

(01:07):
And I also immediately think of the best women in
my life, my favorite friends who I know who are
not the tidiest women. Are you thinking of someone in particular,
someone sitting across this table? Perhaps perhaps I also I'm
thinking about my college roommates. I mean, my college roomates
you walk into their room and it was like a

(01:29):
bomb went off. There were clothes all over the floor.
And don't get me wrong, my male collegiate counterparts had
another level of disgusting. And I've lived in group houses
full of all people who identify as women. Those have
not been the neatest places either. Yeah, it sounds like,
especially in college, it sounds like a lot of people

(01:50):
are just messy. You're living on your own, You maybe
don't know how to do laundry, you don't know how
to fold. It just sounds like it's a messy situation
across the board, right, And so part of me thinks
this can't be that simple. That has to be an old,
dated stereotype. Blah blah blah, and the inner feminist part
of me things that can't be true. This is a stereotype.
It's a generalization. And by the way, we know that

(02:11):
gay folks have a totally different stereotype, right, We kind
of assume that gay men are clean, and that's part
of the feminization of the gay man stereotype, and it
totally erases transgender folks. It's putting all of this baggage
on gender that just immediately gets me up in arms,
thinking this can't be true. And yet the more I

(02:32):
looked into it, there's a pretty overwhelming argument, a case
to be made backed up by a whole bunch of research,
that there's some truth to that. Then there might be
some truth to the overwhelming number of women who report
living with men who do not pick up after themselves.
So the first thing I want to acknowledge is that
there is a little bit of a difference that is

(02:54):
hard to account for, I would say pretty much impossible
to account for in all of this data between someone
who's just me see and someone who cleans up after themselves.
Do you know what I'm seeing? Like to me, there's
a difference between people who clean up a lot and
people who might be less messy to be in with.
And oh, I see what you're saying. So that some
people are just sort of naturally a little more messy.

(03:16):
But then if you clean up after yourself, then you're
not really even if you're right predisposed to being a
messy person, if you're cleaning, if you're someone who cleans
up after yourself, you're not really messy, right, So all
of the research is about how much time you spend cleaning,
which to me is a little bit different than who's messy,
because yeah, because I'm I am like, sure, I am
sure it's crab a messy person, but I clean pretty

(03:38):
much every day. Really, nobody, we're not going to do
an investigator follow up on that too carefully. Well, it's
funny that you mentioned college because that's where some of
the research really begins. That got me really interested. There
was a really interesting study done by College Stats and
what they found is that from a bacteria real standpoint,

(04:01):
you just total you. They have a study little infographic
here called the germyst Objects in dorm Rooms, which that
almost feels like too much information, but what they found
is that women have very dirty bathrooms and men the
male dorm rooms have really dirty sheets. Yeah, I know,

(04:24):
that's just too much information. However, Ergo Flex, which is
a UK based mattress company, also commissioned to study, this
time on adult men and women, and they also found
that men between the ages of eighteen to twenty five,
fifty percent of them only changed their sheets four times
a year. Alert alert, do not go home with men.

(04:47):
If you get in their bed they are not changing
the watch out, y'all. And I guess what that really
results in is not only bacterial growth in like literal
fungus that can form in between the threads of your sheets,
but we're also talking about dust mites and bed bugs
and all kinds of nastiness. And the health community really
recommends changing your sheets every two weeks, which, okay, I

(05:10):
don't do that. How often do you change your sheets?
I'm more like a monthly sheet changer. Now. I wish
more regularly because I learned way too much about ever.
I said it, you're gonna change them as soon as
you get home. I know, Well, I just did, and
it made me realize when I first started cohabitating with
Brad the Boom, he never even thought, oh, these sheets
are dirty, we should change them. That was a novel

(05:33):
concept to him that I had to introduce. I have
to say, I'm talking a lot of crap about people
out there that aren't changing their sheets enough, but I
will be remiss to not mentioned that. Maybe Back in
I was at a workplace and I was just sort
of casually talking to a co worker and I said,
is it funny how you wash your T shirts every day,
but then you pretty much never wash your hoodies and
she said, hold the phone, you're not watching your hoodies,

(05:55):
and I was like, no, you don't need to wash hoodies.
That was the first time I found out that people
were watching their entiref to breeze that right. In the
same way about jeans that, oh, you're actually not supposed
to wash sheans you can put them in the freezer.
That well, I don't know that's true. If you put
jeans in the freezer, they stay clean for longer. Look
it up. Yeah, all right, I only wash my jeans

(06:17):
more than that. Like, I don't never wash my jeans.
I only wash my jeans from necessity because I constantly
am spilling up myself. I feel like we're sounding like
messier and messier and grocer and grocer people. I feel
like a confession box. That is what's happening here. It
feels like a burden has been lifted. But we'll also
feel better by the end of this episode. Because another
study was commissioned by Home Adviser amongst over two thousand

(06:40):
adults who live with a person of the opposite gender.
So again, this is super heteronormative. We have to say
that it's not really taking consideration data on same sex couples.
But what they found is that women are much more
likely to subscribe to many cleaning habits, like cleaning up
after themselves in the bathroom, making the bed in the morning.
Women said that they were bothered by clutter and unkempt

(07:03):
things at much higher rates as well. However, men quote
win the kitchen battle, which I found surprising. Men were
more likely to clean their dirty dishes right away after
using them. I think they just put that in there.
It's like a little gold star for the men reading. Yeah,
that even that's probably not even true. I just add
that well, men surveyed said they clean dirty dishes right away,

(07:26):
whereas forty four point four percent of women. So if
you look at the overall statistics, things like vacuuming, picking
up clutter, all of that, wiping down the sink after
brushing your teeth, women are much more likely to report
engaging in those activities, and the research more broadly definitely
bears that out. Even though men are doing more childcare

(07:46):
than ever before, when it comes to housework and just
cleaning up the home, men are still lacking behind, and
that that gap is barely closed definitely. Um. One of
the stats I find so funny. In this study, they
ask about whether or not you think it's acceptable to
leave the toilet sea up, which isn't even really cleaning
first of all, but of men I think it's acceptable,
only sixteen eight percent of women find that acceptable. And

(08:09):
these are men who lived with women. Dang, that is
not cool. Isn't that something that little boys are taught
since the very beginning. It's like drilled into their head,
like you have to put the seat back down. That's
bizarre to me. Um, I'm sure there's a men's rights
podcast out there that's like women even ask us to
put the seat down. That is precious time in my

(08:29):
day that I'm taking out to try to provide women
with above and beyond service and effort. I can see
the argument that way too, and it's insane. Here's the deal.
Apparently women are better smellers than men. Despite having no
physical differences between the nose of your average gal or
guy or the number of receptors they have, women are

(08:50):
apparently better at detecting smells, and studies have shown that
women use a bigger chunk of their brains when processing
smells than men do. Interesting. There are some biological studies
which I'm always annoyed by because I hate the argument that, well,
men are from ours, women are from venus. Throw your
hands up in the air and think, whatever, what are

(09:10):
you gonna do? Exactly? You can't smell that, the sheets
smell like feet from him. It's sort of sins responsibility.
That's the thing that really bugs me about these stats
or the conclusions that you can draw from them, which is, oh, well,
manners messlier than women, what are you gonna do? Shrug.
So this is the exact argument that Dr Gloria Moss,

(09:33):
who is, to be clear, a marketing professional, wrote in
her book called Why Men Like Straight Lines and Women
Like Polka Dots, which was received to mixed reviews in
the UK. She's English. She basically goes to this whole
nature versus nurture argument of how back in caveman days,

(09:54):
because men were hunters looking out across the horizon, scanning
fort cential food in the form of animals, which requires
looking at these like sort of straight line horizon shots
and being able to differentiate on this like vertical or
horizontal access with their eyes, men biologically have become more

(10:16):
sensitive to stripes and things that are straight lines. Yeah,
Bridget has a very quizzical look on her face right
now that I completely agree with. I just don't think
that sounds right. Doesn't sound that doesn't sound sounds to
me as you are wearing a what kind of dress? Right?
I love stripes strep too. So she also goes on
to make this argument that women were gatherers, so we

(10:39):
needed the ability to, I don't know, differentiate between a
red berry and the green foliage behind the berry. This
is literally the argument she's making in her book, and
that's why women like spherical things better. So it's a
kind of, in my opinion, is a very big leap.
But she's drawing from her expertise of branding, packaging for
products and how women seem to like spherical objects. I'm

(11:01):
thinking of the e O s spherical objects. I don't. Well,
here's I don't agree with it, and neither does This
hilarious article in the debrief, which the title is science,
says there's an evolutionary reason why men are messier than women,
and we're calling bull on that one, and they just

(11:22):
take her down argument by argument. But to be clear,
from a marketing perspective, I have a logo that is
a circle for my company, Like I get that I'm
drawn to maybe circular or spherical. I don't know lip
gloss like the e O S evolution of smooth lip gloss,
But that doesn't mean I don't like stripes, and I
sure as hell don't think it means that women are

(11:43):
cleaner than men. I would even argue there's a little
bit of a novelty for everyone when something comes in
a small circular package like those chocolates Ferrero Rochet. Something
about it screams like elegance to be delightful. Whatever. Yeah,
I mean, this is not a gender thing as far
as I'm saying. But this is totally her her argument,
and they take her down in the most hilarious of ways.

(12:04):
In the article sort of critiquing Moss's book, they write,
let's forget about all those small details that men obsess
over in the technology masculine roles in which they've flourished,
like science I T and mechanics, and just get to
the truth of the issue. Your boyfriend's not picking up
the scattered cushions, the throw pillows and your on your
couch because he doesn't really fancy doing it. If it

(12:27):
means a lot to you, you should probably just ask
him to clean up after himself, and I'm sure he'd oblige.
If he doesn't, it might be time to get a
new boyfriend. But for an entirely unscientific reason. Okay, I
hate this. I hate this so much. Let me tell
you why. This argument that your boyfriend or whatever just
doesn't want to pick up the cushions on the couch
and that's why he's not doing it, and if it's

(12:48):
important to you, you gotta tell him. That's b s. Well,
it's putting the emotional labor on women exactly because as women,
it shouldn't be up to me to tell a grown
man to pick up the cushion. We live in a house.
You want a house to be nice. This is just
putting the labor back on the woman. And that's just
on top of all the other crap that we deal with.
That's just putting more stuff on us. So I hate,
I hate, I hate this argument that if you want

(13:09):
your boyfriend a pitch in around the house, that you
should just be doling out tasks. No, we should be
a full of fully functioning member of your of your
domestic household, and we're going to come back to that
because I also intrinsically want to get on board with
that rally and cry and think this lady is full
of it. But two things make me saying differently. One,

(13:30):
LGBT couples are doing this better, and there is really
interesting data on having open dialogue and conversations about what
you want and need in terms of cleanliness as being
critical to their success, which we're gonna get to at
the very end of the episode. But Secondly, as much
as I think this sounds like bunk and want to
get on board trashing this theory, actually there's some pretty

(13:53):
compelling evidence that shows men really don't notice the mess,
that the men are less like lead a notice mess
than women are. Emily, can you not rein on my
hate parade? I know I'm usually right there with you.
But here's the deal. Even though it sounds sexist to say,
you know, men are off the hook, there's this whole

(14:14):
hypothesis called the epistemic hypothesis that Alexandra Bradner in The
Atlantic magazine really breaks down. She writes, perhaps men simply
can't see what needs to be done. They didn't see
their fathers doing these tasks and their mothers did their
invisible work quietly and without call for recognition. She's talking
sort of historically, I would say, like a generation or

(14:36):
two ago. In this case, our male partners suffer from
what philosopher nor Would Russell Hanson called seeing as without
the requisite background as a trained scrap booker. For example,
men do not see a pile of old photos as
a distracting project waiting to happen. It's just a pile
of old photos. They live in a different reality. It's

(14:57):
almost like men have a completely different perception of clutter
and mess that might bother women more so than men.
I think that's fascinating, but I still want to push
back a little bit, because I don't think it's okay
to draw those kind of sweeping conclusions about men and
women based on that kind of thing. I still don't
feel super comfortable with that. I totally agree, and to

(15:19):
the extent that it's a nature versus nurture argument. I
think it's much more acceptable to me to think that
men have been conditioned to not have to worry about mess.
But in reality, there's this sort of difference of opinion
in the research. Some people think men have just not
been a cultured or socialized to see mess as their
problem and are less likely to have it in the

(15:41):
foreground of their vision. Sort of recedes to the background
and isn't a focus to them, whereas other scientists literally
say that they have a different cognitive architecture. And there's
some very early selective attention data suggesting that distractions are
costly for women, but when it comes to men, these
same distractions may serve as cues to get men to

(16:03):
pay attention to whole categories of things they might otherwise ignore.
There's this book called Hidden in Plain Sight, The Social
Structure of Irrelevance, which I just kind of love that title,
of which the whole point is that everything we do
depends first and what we define as worth noticing. You
can't care about mess or really anything else if you
don't even see it as your reality. And so there's

(16:26):
this sort of famous invisible guerrilla experiment. I don't know
if you've heard of this. There's this video of basketball
players who are passing a basketball on multiple like they
make like nineteen passes in ten fifteen seconds, and people
are asked to pay attention to how many passes the
team makes during this video, which is something I play

(16:46):
often in my training actually on mindfulness. During this video,
a person in a guerrilla suit moonwalks through the middle
of the video. Have you seen? This was viral after
being used in the UK as a pedestrian or cyclist
awareness campaign on TV, and they basically said, you can't
look out for what you're not seeing, and so it

(17:07):
helps you change your perception and be more mindfully aware
of how context and and attention shapes reality. And basically
the point here is that relevance isn't always objective. Men
might see different things as relevant as women, But to me,
there are certain things in your foreground that for men
might be in the background. I think that makes so

(17:28):
much sense. And even though I'm I overall don't like
the sort of putting men and women in different categories
like that, but in terms of how I am at home,
if my room is messy, I can't ignore it, right,
I can't. Even I don't. I don't feel like I
have the option. Like I'm a messy person and I'm
pretty comfortable with a certain level of clutter, and in
fact feel comfortable in clutter um, but there's sort of

(17:52):
a tipping point where if it's q cluttered it's all
I can see when I walk into a room, it's
like all I can see. And so sometimes I get
into a place where I'll have to be late because
I had to pick the recycling out because I can't
I can't look at it anymore. It's kind of like
ruining my whole day. Yeah, and you know what's funny
is that this journalist, John Chait wrote a pretty controversial

(18:12):
column all about this, saying, listen, while I agree in
general that domestic life requires more gender equality dot dot dot,
this always starts off well, right, the housework problem has
a partial solution that's simpler and more elegant, do less
of it. So he's basically saying, you know, women just
have higher standards that are too outrageous of cleanliness. Not

(18:34):
only should men do more on the household, maybe women
should lower their standards. That's first of all, I know,
I'm familiar with State's work. That's a classic shade argument. Hey, ladies,
ever considered living in filth? Yeah, which is funny, but
then obviously from him as the messenger, that sounds offensive.
And trust me, we're going to cover a really hilarious
response that someone else wrote to that in a minute.

(18:56):
But what I find interesting is that a friend of
mine whom I respect, a ton who is a C
suite executive black woman who wrote a book recently called
Drop the Ball, Tiffany Doofu, basically says the same thing,
but in a much more palatable way to mainstream feminists.
After all, the subtitle of her book, Dropped the Ball,

(19:18):
is how women can achieve more by doing less. I
love how I'm so much more receptive when it comes
from a black feminist. I'm like when I'm like, oh,
go away, Well, isn't it funny how our perception shapes
a reality. Be Here's the thing. Even though I think
some people have this foreground background thing, I refuse to

(19:38):
believe it falls equally along gender lines. I still believe
that maybe the overwhelming majority of men are less able
to see mess. But I think that socialization has a
ton to do with that. Did you grow up in
a household where that was noticeable or talked about, or
chores were expected? What was the cleanliness standards of your
household in general? And did you see dad picking up

(19:59):
as much as you saw mom? If that's the kind
of household you lived in, I think we can change
our perception by changing how we're basically socializing our kids.
I want to talk through a couple more theories behind
this huge disparity between who's cleaning up more and who's messier.
After a quick word from our sponsors, and we're back

(20:24):
and we're talking through why the heck the stereotype that
men are messier and women are cleaner is maybe not
so much of a stereotype but in fact a reality.
And here's an interesting piece from Oliver Berkman in The Guardian.
He writes that, as it turns out, when it comes
to childcare and cooking, those kinds of tasks are much
more evenly shared between men and women than they were,

(20:47):
you know, fifty years ago, but women are still far
more likely to be shouldering the housework that it takes
to keep your home relatively clean. What is interesting in
the first theory we just broke down is that maybe
men don't see the mess. And one study even found
that single men with no one else to shoulder the

(21:07):
burden of cleaning up did half as much as single
women when it came to ours spent on cleaning. So
there is evidence to suggest that maybe they just don't
see the mess. Or are less bothered by it than
your average woman. That sounds super, super super true to me.
First of all, I've known some men, some single men
who live alone, where you go into their bathroom and

(21:28):
you think, how can you live like this doesn't just
bother you, it's just driving you up the wall, and
they don't even see what you're referring to. I know
some guys out there who I guarantee have never scrubbed
their bathroom floor ever in the existence of them living
in their places. A friend of mine badly, badly, badly
wanted to hire a housekeeper, but her husband was very
much a posed because his mom was a housekeeper and
they had grown up seeing their mom, you know, scrub floors,

(21:51):
and he said, no, you're not going to be the
kind of family that that outsources our housework. So basically
she was like, I'm gonna do a little experiment. She
hired a house keeper who came every day. Every day.
Every day this person came cleaned up it for them
and their kids. She would let them in because she
worked from home, and her husband never even noticed. So
after about a month or so, he ends up bumping

(22:12):
into the housekeeper and she's like, oh, aren't you the
you're the husband of the woman who has hired me,
and he's like, what's she talking about? He didn't even
notice that somebody had been coming to carefully and meticulously
clean their house every day. So it's really like they
don't see the mess. They don't see or the conliness.
So it's like all of that effort is invisible. So

(22:33):
it could have been done by the wife, right, all
of that effort, or by the house cleaner, or not
at all, or not at all, and he wouldn't even
them notice. There's a really great video where this guy
assumes that his coffee table is being cleaned by magic
every night. He says, pabe, did you know our coffee
table is magic? I leave cups and dishes and magazines
on this coffee table every night, and when I wake up,

(22:54):
they're magically gone. Oh my god. That sounds like, yeah,
it's like the tooth fairy of house cleaning, and it's
called being a woman. It's awful. That's not the kind
of labor we're asking for. But if it's like choosing
between just clean less ladies, like John Shaite says, or
the what obviously happens, which is the passive aggressive spiral
that I fall into. I don't know if you feel

(23:14):
this way, but I think, Okay, we're down to one
toilet paper roll left in the house. What's his next move?
That's what I do. I if I if I'm if
I'm brad the boo, I might take some interesting actions there.
Let me just say I have willingly gone to the
point of having no toilet paper in the house, as
opposed to setting the standard of me being the household

(23:38):
supplies manager and reordering to the point where just two
days ago, an Amazon box arrives that he ordered that
included toilet paper. Well, you know, Emily, anything in the
toilet paper, if you wanted that enough, exactly. I was
willing to sacrifice just so I wouldn't fall into the
habit of I'm the only one who's going to even

(24:00):
notice these things and do something about it. But funny enough,
I had already reordered toilet paper because I was like, fine,
I'm just gonna do I guess you just won't notice.
And then it arrived and I was like, oh my god,
you ordered this one two days ago. It got primed here.
I ordered it today, and I said to him, I
was like, do you know why I love this so much?
Do you know why that means so much to me?
He's like, because we have toilet paper in the house,

(24:20):
and I'm like, no, because you noticed it. You noticed
we were running out. I love that. Brad's person inclination
is to be like, it makes you happy because you
don't have to wipe your butt, not surprising, it's like
a reasonable conclusion happy. But I was just like, no,
it's that you noticed, And it's to me like a

(24:41):
positive framing of the negative reality, which is you don't notice.
The bed isn't you know, doesn't make itself. So I'll
make the bed when I'm coming home from a business trip.
And I recently said to him, Wow, I love that
you made the bed. Isn't it nicer when you have
a made bed all day? And He's like, no, I
just make it down the days I know you're coming home.
You just actually brought up another point that I find
that I've found with my entanglements with men is that

(25:04):
they do expect a lot of ass kissing for stuff
that we do all the time. Right, So if a
man happens to notice, it's like the sea has parted
and it's like, you know, they need to parade well
in defense. He's not expecting that. I'm just literally trying
to provide positive reinforcement because he wouldn't know what made
me feel good about that. It's that he noticed and
he cared, and he does it just because he knows

(25:26):
I care about it, but not because it's important. He's
doing it because he knows it's important to you, not
because he has seen it and it's bothers him to him,
which actually goes back to the data exactly. It's not
that he doesn't notice it. He does, but only because
I care about it, not because he cares about it.
And now this man is known to vacuum the whole
apartment when I'm coming home. Is that romantic? I feel

(25:46):
like that might be kind of romantic. I'm not gonna
go into details, but anyway, let me just there's also
data that Cheryl Sandberg has talked about on occasion, and
I think in lean in saying that men who do
more on the house have more fulfilling sex lives. Oh,
I have no trouble believing that or how things play
out in my household, let me tell you. And I
was actually just reading something that says that couples that

(26:07):
can't afford it, who end up outsourcing and stuff like this,
who get housekeepers or get take outer delivery, actually report
having happier lives and happier relationships for sure, and especially
those women. I sure women in those relationships feel the
same way. So here's the deal. There's two other theories
I want to break down. The first theory is that
men just don't notice these things, whether you think it's
by nature or by nurture. I think there's a good

(26:30):
amount of data that backs up that theory. The second theory,
I'm not so sure I buy into. And to sum
it up, it's it's called the motivational hypothesis. But to me,
it's really about this, they see it, but they don't care.
It's the idea that men have an inkling of what
supposedly needs to be done, but they don't really think
that those tasks are valuable enough to justify it taking

(26:53):
up their time at all. That sounds awful. I gotta
say that actually sounds a little bit like me not
not to like right, Yeah, Because I mean I think
about so when I was in graduate school and I
was trying to finish my my PhD, which I never
end up ended up finishing. My apartment was very, very messy,
and it became a thing where I had made a choice.

(27:13):
I knew I was living in squalor, but I made
a choice that my time could be better spent focused
on work, and if I wasn't working, I was to
be sleeping or having a rare night out, and that
I could tell that my apartment was a mess, but
I had just de prioritize how important that mess was
for me, and so I just said, I see the mess.
I see it's very messy, but my time is better
spent focus on something that's not cleaning my apartment. So

(27:35):
my apartment was filthy and I never had guests for
like four months. I also think that's a very proactive
and conscious priority that you sent, and I think that
makes sense. That's me and my exercise regimen right now.
I think exercise is important, but not right now, it's
not because that's not one of the things that fits
into my schedule for this particular month or week or whatever.
And I'm just giving myself permission to feel a little

(27:56):
bit bad, but not really that bad about it. And
I think sometimes you have to do that, and that
was my biggest problem with this theory. You know, even
if this motivational hypothesis does have some bearing, I don't
think there's any evidence that it's gendered. I think this
thought process, this philosophy of I'm not cleaning up or
I'm not doing the dishes right now because my time
is better spent elsewhere, isn't super connected to your gender identity.

(28:19):
I don't think it is either. I would even argue
that one. It's the kind of thing that's probably really
difficult to prove in research, and too, I think it
probably has more to do with your temperament, what you're
up to, what you what you consider valuable and not valuable,
what you consider productive and not productive. I agree. Now,
the third theory that is broken down in this great
Atlantic piece that I think is much more backed up

(28:42):
by research, is this idea that men are held to
standards other than cleanliness more so than women. Think of
it this way, right, When we think of a messy
dude's desk, it's like he must be a genius. He
must be so busy that he doesn't have time to
clean his desk, which is piled up with paperwork, and
he's focused on building client relations or doing his job

(29:03):
super well. It's some sort of mad scientist genius. Dude.
When we think of women who are slobs in the office,
we think she's a hot mess. She's like a Bridget
Jones character. I thought you were going to say a
Bridget Todd. Never, he's one of those Bridget Todds you're
always hearing about. Total club. Just one commonality there. The

(29:25):
name is all I'm talking about. But it's this idea
that actually being a messy woman comes with some really
negative assumptions from your colleagues. Yeah, I've definitely felt that
I've been on the receiving end of of being a
woman who always at a messy desk. First of all,
I'm someone who works better when things are a little
bit cluttered. It can it can look like a big
pile of garbage, but I know where things are, like,

(29:46):
I know this pile is this kind of thing I can.
I know that this thing on top of this pile
means X y Z. So it definitely looks ridiculous. But
I don't think anyone is looking at my desk and thinking, oh,
she's probably changing the world. Look how messy her desk is.
And I bet that for men, they probably are thinking
that sometimes. Yeah. I mean, it's just a different standard

(30:06):
that we hold men and women to. Cheryl Sandberg and
Adam Grant actually break this down in the New York
Times when they wrote about office housework, which is the
idea that women are expected to clean up around the office,
whereas when men chip in and are extra helpful around
the office, they're doing what is above and beyond expected

(30:27):
of them, so they get rewarded with this like social boost,
social praise, whereas women who basically don't help. She's a
team player, she's expected to be communal. But really, when
a man says no to office house work, he's assumed
to be busy. A woman is assumed to be selfish.
It blows my mind how gendered these things are. And

(30:48):
that sounds like so many other things. The episode that
we did around the Daddy Bump, where when a man
has a child, it's assumed that he's his great dad
blah blah blah, and it actually improves his status at work.
And how that's not true for women, it's quite true
for women's It's time and time and time again we
see these things of expectations for women that if they
don't meet there, they're falling behind and dinged port. But

(31:11):
if men just do the bare minimum, they get a
parade and their honor for it exactly I mean. New
York University psychologist Madeline Heilman found that staying late and
helping another employee or colleague prepare for an important meeting
earned men a fourteen percentage point increase in favorability ratings
than a woman. So, thinking about how helpful is your colleague,

(31:34):
if he stayed late to help out with your presentation,
and he's a dude, you're going to rate him fourteen
percent more helpful, favorable positive than women. Whereas, when both
people in this experiment declined staying late and being helpful,
a woman was rated twelve percentage points lower than a
man when it came to favorability. Wow. But I found

(31:56):
even more fascinating about that is this idea that when
men do actually help in those ways, they're more likely
to do so in public. Well, women are more likely
to do so behind the scenes. Thus they probably don't
even get credit at all, so they're much more likely
to take the helping option that you know, it's kind
of flashy, gets some public praise everyone can see it,
whereas a woman could be behind the scenes helping and

(32:16):
no one might even ever know exactly, and even if
they did know, they don't seem to care as much.
And this is what brings us back to John Chait's
argument that you should just care less and clean less
because maybe your standards are just too high in the
workplace environment. Women who do that risk being penalized. And
this is exactly what Emily Shyer wrote about in Slate
when she wrote an article titled There's a reason why

(32:38):
women clean more They're judged for it. She writes about
how President Obama described his first DC apartment when he
was a junior senator here being piled with pizza boxes,
and how culturally or sort of socially, we look at
stories like that about messy men as lovable, kind of
absent minded professor type care acters. But for women in

(33:02):
pop culture, on the other hand, or just in common
sort of society that we talk about, messiness is related
to one's life being in total disarray. And let me
tell you, as a kind of messy woman, I can totally,
totally totally confirm that. By the way, I've got a
lot better confirmed that it's connected to your life being
in disarray, or that other people assume your life is

(33:23):
in disarray. Maybe a little bit of both. No, I'm kidding.
I mean definitely people look at messy women in a
different way. Um. I'll never forget. Once I was I
was having my bag checks trying to go into a
nightclub for a concert, and my bag I had this
I was traveling to. My bag was huge and it
was full of a lot of different stuff, like contact
solution and I think, like a notebook, and like just

(33:43):
a bunch of random crap. And the bouncer said, are
you living out of your car? It was just because
my person is a mess doesn't mean I'm living out
of a car. Much judge much? Yeah, jeez, I think
you're totally spot on on this. Bridget and Emily in
the Slate goes on to sort of take down John
Chade's argument by writing, before chit begins telling women how

(34:06):
easy it is to let go of their uptight tidiness
and lower their standards for clean living, he should think
hard about who's going to be judged for all that sloppiness,
and then maybe he should pick up the duster. I
love that takedown so much. First at all, I could
read anybody takedown chit and love it. But I love
that she reminds him, Hey, you don't know what it's

(34:26):
like to be judged. You don't know how harshly women
are judged for this kind of thing. Think about when
you have children. If your children's clothes are filthy, they're
not looking good. It isn't the dad that reflects bad,
it's the mom, right, And those double standards permeate personal
and professional settings. When we come back from this next
quick break, we're going to talk through what can be

(34:47):
done to make this a little easier and maybe a
little cleaner for all of us. And we're back, and
we've been breaking down some of the truth and some
of the truth e components to the stereotype that women

(35:09):
are cleaner and men just are messier. But here's the deal.
At the end of the day, despite the research that
does reinforce those stereotypes and basically show us and men
really don't clean up after themselves as much as women do,
I refuse to believe that the status quo is unchangeable.
So what can be done to change the status quo? Well,
something that I really found really funny from the Atlantic

(35:30):
is they actually break it down in a checklist for
men for fathers to ask yourselves, are you doing these things?
Some of the questions they suggest that men ask themselves
to get a sense of how much they're contributing in
the household are questions like do I do half of
the laundry and half of the dishes every day? Do
I buy half of the clothes and toys? Do I
take on half of the management of my care providers?

(35:52):
Do I write up half of the list and notes?
Do I plan half to travel? Do I change half
the diapers? I don't people think to bet if if
people were really that's with themselves and this checklist, they
would probably find the answer to a lot of these
questions is no. And it's one of those checklists that
can be so helpful to talk through with a partner
and whatever the gender of your partner is. Having these

(36:12):
honest conversations about sharing responsibilities can be a good place
to start because for a lot of us, and I'll
admit myself included, I can be the first one to
jump up and assume responsibility. For instance, our dog Teddy,
on occasion has the middle of the night I need
to go out type emergency, and he'll scratch at the
door and wake us up because he's polite, like that

(36:34):
little teddy. The dog's kind of a genius in my
unbiased opinion. But he'll wake us up and let us
know that he has to go out. And in the
past I always jumped up and did it. And now
I'm getting in the habit of just whacking brat a
little bit and being like, the dog needs to go out.
It's four o'clock in the morning. I did this the
last time. It was a thing, and now he's like
learning to jump up and take care of it. I

(36:55):
love it. I mean it was I had first recognized that,
oh I've been assuming all the responsibilit be on this
and actually ask for the help bunny. Yeah. I like that.
Not only should we be asking ourselves these questions in
terms of our our houses and our domestic situations, but
the same quid of question can be useful and translated
in the workplace as well. Grant and Sandberg talk about
the ways that we can really be thinking about the

(37:15):
same kind of thing in the workplace. You know, are
you the one who does the dishes in the office,
or are you the one who leaves your mug on
the counter and you just assume someone else is gonna
do it. Are you the one who's assuming responsibility for
the various kinds of alphice housework that pile up, or
are you just just assuming it's going to be someone
else's problem. Wasn't there an office episode about like a

(37:36):
chore wheel that Pam came up with you like illustrated
like a chore wheel to try and have different people
take different responsibilities for different chores and on different days.
For me, that whole experience is so universal to every
office I have ever worked in, except we didn't have
a chore wheel, and it resulted in a bunch of
passive aggressive emails about who's left their dirty dishes in

(37:58):
the office sink? Once again, that's so classic office. Well.
According to Grant and Sandberg, a signing these kinds of
tasks evenly, rather than just relying on somebody volunteering, can
really help that work get shared notice and valued. And importantly,
further research shows that having cleaner workspaces and really just
cleaner public spaces can be really important for helping us

(38:20):
all to be our best selves, something I totally didn't anticipate.
Stumbling upon in researching for this episode is that some
studies have shown chaotic spaces spur racial stereotyping. Dutch researcher
Sigwart Lindenberg conducted multiple experiments attempting to connect disorder to

(38:40):
bias to really us stereotyping other people and making unfair assumptions.
In one experiment, volunteers were asked to fill out a
survey at a train station with another person sitting nearby.
Half we're at a clean train station and half were
at a dirty station. At the dirty station, participants set
further away from a white person than a black person
while completing the survey. They also chose more stereotypical answers.

(39:05):
So first of all, their behavior changed in terms of
where they sat, and the responses they got changed based
on that environment too, in a really racially messed up way. Wow.
And that's part of the reason I think it's important
that we don't necessarily lower our standards. I think what
it means is we have to have open, honest dialogue
with her coworkers about office housework and with our domestic partners.

(39:30):
If you so choose to have someone with whom you cohabitate,
and unsurprisingly LGBTQ people seem to be getting this better. Yeah, basically,
on pretty much all issues we are in seventeen, the
gays are pretty much across the board. A small study
looking at how gain straight couples negotiate shores found that,

(39:50):
surprise surprise, same sex couples are better at discussing and
negotiating a fair division of labor, which in turn at
least both parties more satisfied. So this really kind of
goes act to this idea of open communication and expressing
the kind of thing that you were describing with Brad,
expressing what it is that you find important and what
it is that you need in a domestic situation. Yeah, exactly.

(40:11):
And because same sex couples are less likely to fall
into constraining sort of gender roles and economic privileges that
men tend to experience over women, for instance, it makes
sense that they would divide household chores more fairly. Researchers
asked a mix of two couples. What they found is

(40:31):
that of same sex dual earner couples shared equally and
laundry responsibilities versus thirty one of heterosexual couples Furthermore, sixty
two percent of same sex dual earner couples indicated that
they share sick childcare responsibilities, versus only thirty of straight couples.

(40:52):
I know, earlier in the episode, I was raging against
the idea that we should be doling out responsibilities. But
if you never have that conversation about how this stuff
is can to be divided up, you never have that
conversation and it just gets left to whoever. This seems
like a much better way to do it. But I
also find really interesting is that, according to the author
of that study, men and gay partnerships are much more
likely to discuss these things, whereas women in straight partnerships

(41:14):
aren't much more lucky to say they wanted to but didn't. Yeah,
and that was me for a long time. There are
still chore sharing conversations that I want to have with
my partner. But it's just a good reminder that when
you fall into gender stereotypes, it's easy to assume you
don't need to have that conversation. So unless we're proactive
about having the day in conversation and stop biting our tongues,

(41:37):
we're gonna have less satisfying household division of labor. And
when it comes to measuring satisfaction around the division of labor,
the researchers found that it's not necessarily about perfectly equal
division of labor, because that's not really something that's easy
to strive towards. Necessarily plausible, it's not always possible. But

(41:58):
the difference is whether you felt like you had a voice,
did you say what you wanted to say, or did
you just let it evolve and feel like it just
sort of happened that way, or did you just get
really passive aggressive and stop buying toilet paper and just
kind of see what happens. Sometimes those passive aggressive games
are part of a more assertive strategy. No, it's not
like I'm playing the game Chess, not checkers. Let me

(42:22):
tell you, it didn't feel like chess when I'm sitting
on the toilet thinking, oh dear, I may have won
the battle, but I have lost the war. Oh I
love it. This is good, all right, cynthy listeners, and
we want to hear from you on this. How does
the division of household chores look in your household? Are
you a very neat and tidy lady who lives with

(42:44):
a slob of a dude Or are you a dude
who likes it neat and tidy and gets annoyed when
people make assumptions about your sexuality for your cleanliness or
wanting to look put together? Are you a woman who
lives like a filthy pirate like myself? Honestly, I actually
wouldn't bud being tagged in some really liberating Instagram photos
of a messy ass apartment make us feel better about ourselves.

(43:07):
Either way, we want to hear from you. What did
you think about today's conversation. Do you feel like it's
a nature or a nurture argument? I'm really curious to
hear from your experiences on that, and especially from our
male listeners. Do you run into the stereotype? Do you
feel like you're helping? Are you doing fifty of the
household chores at work and at home? Uh? And do

(43:29):
you think that your perception of that is actually in reality?
So tag us on those filthy apartment photos at stuff
Mom Never Told You on Instagram, tweet at us at
mom Stuff podcast on Twitter, or send us a good
old fashioned email at mom Stuff at health stuff works
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