"He'll never see it"
"He'll never see it"
Why am I the only one who notices the mess?
When I asked Colleen, a 40-something lawyer and mother of two tweens, to recall any disagreements she’d had with her husband Ted about housework, she identified one major gripe: “He’s not great about self-starting house stuff.” Ted works from home, whereas Colleen has an hour-plus commute. Colleen acknowledged that Ted handles many of the truly urgent daytime activities in her absence: “People get fed, and dogs get walked.” But beyond that, “It’s never once been that I come home to a house that was better than I left [it]. And so, like, nothing ever gets better on its own if I don’t do it.”
To underscore her point, Colleen gestured toward an air mattress pump lying on the floor across the living room. Their daughters had a sleepover several nights earlier, and the pump hadn’t yet been returned to its rightful spot. “It’s just as easy as walking it in the other room,” Colleen explained, “But Ted wouldn’t even notice it. He’ll never see it.”
Growing up, a recurring (and, in retrospect, somewhat problematic) family joke was that my grandfather was “selectively deaf.” He wore hearing aides for most of my childhood, and my sister and I learned early on to raise our voices and slow our cadence when speaking with Grandpop. Yet there were curious aberrations. He always seemed to hear just fine when we were talking about him, for instance, whereas his deafness was magnified when the conversation turned to topics that bored him.
I thought of Grandpop as I listened to Colleen’s story. Ted, unlike my grandfather, had no history of sensory impairment. In literal terms, he most certainly could see the pump just as well as Colleen. The difference was that Colleen identified the pump as an object in need of putting away; Ted simply saw an object.
In philosophical terms, Colleen and Ted perceived distinct affordances. This is a jargon-y way of saying they saw different possibilities for action. For Colleen, the pump “afforded” an action: move pump to closet. For Ted, the pump “afforded” no such action.
In a recent paper, Tom McClelland and Paulina Sliwa argue that Colleen’s dilemma is common: women consistently perceive more “possible actions” (i.e., affordances) related to household tasks, and those affordances spur them more insistently toward action.
Imagine walking into your kitchen in search of an afternoon snack. On the way to the fridge, you note some crumbs strewn across the counter. If you think to yourself, “I should wipe those up,” you’ve perceived an affordance. If you can’t help but pull out a sponge then and there, that affordance is particularly strong. Now imagine your spouse passed through the same kitchen a half hour earlier. They walked past the same crumbs, but the crumbs failed to register, let alone trigger an urge to clean. Same situation, very different perceptions of action.
McClelland and Sliwa argue that some version of this scenario happens often among heterosexual couples, and it helps explain both the persistence of gender inequality in housework and men’s frequent underestimation of labor gaps. Men don’t see the metaphorical crumbs in the first place, so they genuinely don’t notice that a woman has come behind to clean them up. Meanwhile, women are damned either way, forced to choose among doing the work, tolerating the discomfort that comes with suppressing an urge, or nagging their spouse.
In the wrong hands, this theory could do more harm than good (not to go all superhero-movie on you): Sorry, honey, it’s not my fault I’m a mess. My brain just cannot afford the possibility of cleaning up! But McClelland and Sliwa do a nice job preempting that facile counterargument. These gendered perception patterns are more likely the product of socialization than biological sex differences, they argue. Further, there are plenty of things we don’t “naturally” do. No one I know was born with the ability to ride a bike, solve an equation, or bake cookies. With some instruction and the application of a little effort, though, most of us have the capacity to develop these skills.
I suspect something similar is true of affordance perceptions for housework. Set an alarm on your phone with a reminder to wash the dishes before bed. Put “wipe down counters” on your daily to-do list. Most habits begin as anything but habitual. But with time, conscious effort gives way to instinct as new neural pathways are formed and daily rhythms acquired.
It’s been a minute, I know. In fact, it’s been several minutes. Learning to navigate a new city, a new institution, and a new role has taken up all my brain space and then some. I’ve missed this space, though, and hope that as I start to reach a new equilibrium I’ll have the time and mental wherewithal to post semi-regularly. As always, if you have questions or post ideas, I welcome your feedback!