I still don't think you need to vacuum every week
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I still don't think you need to vacuum every week
Kevin Munger<br>Jun 16, 2026
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Editor’s note: this post is primarily of interest to my academic colleagues, if that’s not you, don’t worry, we’ll be back with more media theory next week. A few quick announcements: I’ve co-authored a book chapter (Forthcoming with Cambridge University Press) on “Public Opinion in the Age of AI,” preprint here. I’m going to be at APSA this year for the first time in a few years (Boston is easier to get to from Europe) — please reach out if you want to hang! Also at APSA, I’m participating in a panel resulting from my work on Peer Review 2027: “Generative AI and Journal Publishing: Challenges, Opportunities, and Policies (APSR Panel)” on Friday at 10am — this is an incredibly pressing topic, glad to have this forum to discuss it.<br>Today I’m presenting two new papers, one of them an extremely dense working paper in the philosophy of science, the other a just-today-published article using AI-powered experiments to study gender and housework. I’m putting the fun one first but please scroll down to the philosophy of science one if that’s your thing.
Hot off the presses at Sociological Science is my article (first author’d by Léa Pessin) “Beyond Text: Using AI-Generated Visual Conjoints to Study Gender and Housework Attribution.” This was a perfect combination of my previous work on visual conjoints and Léa’s substantive expertise on gender and housework.<br>The project began when I was explaining to Léa that we simply have different preferences for the tidiness of domestic spaces — what she thinks of as messy, I think is fine. This is just a question of diverging personal preferences. So really, we’re better off compromising where if she wants it to be super-duper clean, she has to do it herself.<br>In a normal relationship, this would’ve just led to a fight, and not a very productive one. Thankfully, Léa is a sociologist of gender and housework, and had both the theory and data to explain what was wrong with my reasoning (her words). What she argued is that my allegedly personal preference about tidiness was in fact the product of societal gendered expectations about how men and women should behave at home. Women are expected to be responsible for keeping their homes tidy and pay greater social costs for not doing so. Then, she did the one thing that would end the discussion: she served me with a visual survey experiment. This is how this paper started.
Sociology is a breath of fresh air compared to political science because of the range of outcome variables they consider interesting. I’ve long chafed against the imperative that my work be immediately relevant to electoral politics — especially because many of the computational methods I use don’t have many direct applications. We can study voter preferences for hypothetical politicians a million different ways but I feel we’re starting to hit diminishing returns…meanwhile, getting to mock up hypothetical living rooms and think about how to balance the number and diversity of children’s toys strew about was novel and exciting.<br>The substantive findings are really cool. We find, just like in the same 2019 conjoint experiment paper by Sarah Thébaud, Sabino Kornrich and Leah Ruppanner that directly inspired our design, that the myth that “men just don’t see mess” is busted: men were if anything slightly (though non-significantly) more likely to rate rooms as messy than were women. We also find the expected, large effects on housework responsibility: on average, female occupants are rated as more responsible for cleaning up the rooms. And, most importantly, that Léa was right and I still have to do housework.<br>On the other hand, we didn’t find support for the original finding that female occupants suffer greater social consequences for messy rooms than male occupants do; there are a number of explanations for why we might’ve found this different result, we don’t intend to “overturn” the original finding, but it does suggest that it’s less robust than some of the other results.<br>Novel to our setup is the differential effect of children’s versus adult mess. Here, we see that respondents rate children’s mess as more messy than adult’s mess — but that occupants suffer lower social consequences for children’s mess. And finally, Léa’s favorite result (because it’s consistent with earlier qualitative evidence) has to do with the housework/paid work responsibility tradeoff. When one person works full time and the other is either unemployed or a homemaker, the full-time person is less responsible for cleaning, regardless of the gender of the respective parties. It’s when both parties work full time that we see an additional significant allocation of responsibility to women. This is an example of what sociologists call ‘doing gender’ -- people hold women more accountable for the home even when both...