Spring Cleaning

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Ah yes, spring. The season of blooming flowers, of salubrious weather, and sunny days. And infamously: the season plastered on every lifestyle magazine right next to the word, “cleaning”. 

As today marks the Spring Equinox and the beginning of said Spring Cleaning, it’s hard to ignore the gender disparities between men and women when it comes to housework. 

Although it can’t be ignored that men do outdoor chores like lawn mowing or car repair, the frequency of such upkeep pales in comparison to the daily chores women are expected to do such as cooking, cleaning, and laundry. 

And these responsibilities don’t just go away once women are the sole provider of the family. According to American Time Use surveys from 2008-2012, even after a day of working a full time job, married mothers who are breadwinners do an average of 1 hour of housework compared to the 11 minutes of their male counterparts. According to The Atlantic, one possible explanation of this is that these women are "correcting" for their frequently male-dominated jobs by asserting their femininity through housework. 

But why is femininity so in line with housework? Does one have to spend their whole life cooking and cleaning to be a woman?

A study from Sociological Methods and Research surveyed 624 people, who were each presented with a messy room. When respondents were told it was occupied by a woman, she was viewed as unpleasant to visitors. While men were also viewed negatively for having messy spaces, they bore little social consequence for this, as we are no stranger to the perpetuated notion of “boys will be boys”. However, since housework is often seen as parallel to a woman’s identity, women did. 

Furthermore, the results of the study proved that men were as competent as women when it came to noticing the clutter that filled the rooms-- effectively debunking the excuse that women clean more because of their lower tolerance for messiness.

However, the expectations of women to clean don’t start at adulthood. In fact, UNICEF projects that girls spend 40% more time than boys their age doing household chores every day.  According to one of our own panel members, from personal experience, she has been expected to stay home and take care of her younger brother. Coupled with schoolwork and her own personal endeavors, she [may] feel[s] limited to what she can do.

Living life to the fullest should be a universal experience-- so putting in the effort to maintain such life should be one too. 

How about, in the future, in addition to spring-cleaning our homes, we also spring-clean these gender norms?