There's a Reason Women Clean More: They're Judged For It

In her piece “Cleaning: The Final Feminist Frontier” in the New Republic, Jessica Grose highlights how women still bear a disproportionate burden of household maintenance. While we're closer to balancing the domestic burdens between the sexes when it comes to child rearing and even cooking, Grose argues, cleaning is still one responsibility feminism hasn’t yet equalized.

Luckily, New York's Jonathan Chait has proposed an easy way to rectify the domestic imbalance: Ladies, chill out and stop being such neat freaks. He believes that Grose has overlooked a critical explanation for the great cleaning gap: "Women in general just have higher standards for cleanliness than men do." Thus, rather than making a big stink about cleaning and trying to get men to actually do more housework, Chait advises women to just "do less of it."

Read more on Slate XX