Men urged to train themselves to notice household chores

Gender imbalance in shouldering domestic work is explained by different ways in which men and women perceive chores, philosophers at Britain's Cambridge University suggest.

Women looking at an unclean surface may see something to be wiped whereas men may just observe a crumb-covered countertop, researchers argue in the journal Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.

They say data gathered during the pandemic, when both men and women spent time at the domestic coalface, throw up two important questions - why women continue to take on most housework and why men believe it to be more equally shared than it is.

According to a survey of US households during the pandemic, 70% of women said they were fully or mostly responsible for housework, and 66% for childcare, roughly the same proportion as usual.

Tom McClelland, from Cambridge University's department of history and philosophy of science, said the fact that inequalities persisted and that many men continued to be oblivious meant that traditional explanations were not the whole story.

The researchers say "affordance theory" in which people experience objects and situations as having actions implicitly attached could explain the...