Esther McCarthy: The dirty truth about who does housework

Esther McCarthy: "Some jobs take a minute, like feeding the cat and dog, filling or emptying the dishwasher. Others take longer; cleaning the bathroom, making dinner, hoovering the stairs."

Who does more housework in your house? I’ll bet dollars to doughnuts (mmm, doughnuts) that it’s the mam. 

Why is that, I wonder, as I push the clean laundry off the sofa — where it has been waiting to be folded for the last three days — so I can sit down and watch reruns of Dermot Bannon getting sexily exasperated about patios on Room to Improve, and my new favourite, Your Home Made Perfect with Angela Scanlon.

Two designers battle it out to remodel the house, but the owners get to see it through VR goggles first. It’s so cool. That’s my aspirational TV sorted. Then I throw on an episode of Britain’s Biggest Hoarders to make myself feel better. My little pile of laundry isn’t so bad! And I have TWO pathways through the floor to my bed. I am grand. 

But my real bugbear is when the lads give out about the place being messy.“It’s not just my job,” I say.

“We all use the toilet,” I point out. “I will murder you all and not a (female) jury in the world would convict me,” I smile, sincerely.

Ah, to be fair, they’re good. The older two take sole responsibility for their own laundry. Is this because they prefer not to have my over-the-shoulder-boulder- holders mixed in with their GAA gear? Possibly. Is it because some items occasionally come out of the washing machine a completely different colour than they went in? Most definitely.

We’ve tried all sorts of innovative approaches to motivate/scare them into helping around the house. One friend shared a hack she uses: She creates a poll on the family WhatsApp where everyone votes on what jobs they’ll do. I forgot to ask her what she does when they simply… ignore it. Not even a rolling eyes emoji. “People died for the right to vote,” I messaged them sadly at the end of the day, while scooping the poop out of the cat litter.

Currently, we have a weekly jobs sheet pinned to the noticeboard. For every job you do, you put your initial next to it. At the end of the week, we tot them up.

Some jobs take a minute, like feeding the cat and dog, filling or emptying the dishwasher. Others take longer; cleaning the bathroom, making dinner, hoovering the stairs. But they all get the same tick. This is good and bad. Good, because they rush to do the easy ones, like clearing the table. Bad, because it has exposed the deeply inconvenient gender dynamics lurking in my very own home — aka I’m the only effing one who scrubs the toilet.

There’s a fascinating study by Sarah Thébaud, Sabino Kornrich, and Leah Ruppanner, called Good Housekeeping, Great Expectations: Gender and Housework Norms.

They wanted to understand why women end up doing more housework than men. They showed people photos of tidy or messy rooms, and said the room belonged to either a man or a woman.

People rated the mess the same no matter who lived there — let’s call them Eoin and Elizabeth — BUT their judgments changed wildly depending on the gender of the occupant. When the room was fairly clean, Elizabeth was held to much higher standards.

Viewers thought women would face harsher social judgment if their room wasn’t spotless, and assumed Elizabeth should take more responsibility for cleaning. Poor Lizzie.

When the room was actually unkempt, the gender gap shrank, partly because people tend to expect men to be messy, so the judgment was less harsh.

“The gender of the room occupant has strong and significant effects on housework perceptions, moral judgments, perceived social consequences, and allocations of responsibility,” the researchers write.

Overall, the study suggests that social expectations and gendered beliefs — not just individual habits, like me forgetting to unplug the hairball from the shower drain — shape who is seen as responsible for housework. And that reinforces the unequal patterns we see every day. So Eoin can live in filth without consequence, but Elizabeth will not be invited to the team-building lunch next quarter and called Messy Bessy behind her back. BUT THEY BOTH HAD THE SAME ROOM.

Isn’t it interesting — and annoying — that we judge women more harshly for having a messy space? So, obviously, women feel more pressure to take on the jobs. And let me tell you, this study wasn’t done back in the 1950s.

No! This study was done in 2011. The fact we still carry these ideas shows how powerful they are (and why we’re all freaking out about what content our kids are consuming on their phones).

I have found a way to motivate them to do housework, though. They’ve realised if I start a lecture about how social expectations and gendered beliefs shaping responsibility ... the hoover is the only thing loud enough to drown me out.