“Affordances pull on your attention,” McClelland says. “Tasks may irritate the perceiver until done, or distract them from other plans. If resisted, it can create a felt tension. This puts women in a catch-22 situation, either inequality of labour or inequality of cognitive load.”

He concedes, also, that certain domestic tasks are just naturally perceived by all as a woman’s job. “Some skills are explicitly gendered, such cleaning or grooming, and girls are expected to do more domestic chores than boys,” he says. “This trains their ways of seeing the domestic environment, to see a counter as ‘to be wiped’.”

So how can this wildly unequal domestic pattern be fixed, so women aren’t forever feeling inclined to clean up after everyone?

“Men should be encouraged to resist gendered norms by improving their sensitivity to domestic task affordances,” McClelland says. “A man might adopt a resolution to sweep for crumbs every time he waits for the kettle to boil, for example.

“Not only would this help [men] to do the tasks they don’t see, it would gradually retrain their perception so they start to see the affordance in the future.”

Images: Getty

Experts have a new theory for why women may feel more inclined than men to do domestic labour