Mr. Clean? Not On Your Life

James Bowman identifies another gender gap:

Like most people who have lived with members of the opposite sex, I have always taken it for granted that women in general will care more about keeping clean than men in general. Of course this too may be "only" on account of social conditioning -- as if social conditioning were merely arbitrary and alterable at will -- but it is hard to see when and how such conditioning takes place. Even back in the bad old days of the 1950s when I was growing up, children of both sexes were enjoined to keep their rooms clean, but my sister cared about this without prompting while my brothers and I did not. Even threats rarely moved us. In every survey, women are found still to do the vast majority of the housework that is done in America. Is this only because of "sexism"? Or is it because the women by nature find it as hard not to care as men do to care that housework should be done? I'm only asking. But there seems enough of a doubt in this case, as in that of the women scientists, for people of good will to wish that politics might not bring its coercive force to the matter of making people do what they are disinclined to do.

Perhaps Larry Summers might have gotten out of hot water at Harvard had he simply distracted the women present by dropping crumbs on the floor during his speech.