Unscientific generalization: Women are worse at loading the dishwasher

[Acsenray]

Because of various circumstances, including a period of ill health, I found myself in need of help cleaning, so I accepted the recommendation of a cleaning service. I found the service to be largely satisfactory. Actually, that's an understatement. It was heavenly. However, I was not impressed with the way the cleaners loaded the dishwasher -- several of the dishes had to be rewashed as a result of the way they had been positioned.

I mentioned this observation to someone, who told me "Women can't load dishwashers." Taking an informal poll of an unscientific selection of people, I found that all the men agreed with this statement, whereas the women were generally just offended by the notion.

What are your unscientific generalizations on this topic?

[Ludy]

In my household whoever starts loading the dishwasher has to finish. I hate how my husband loads it, and he hates how I load it. So I guess we are even.

[Alice The Goon]

I can generalize on a lot of topics, as I believe there are many, many innate differences between men and women and in general, the sexes can be split up fairly well into who does what better.

However, in this case, I think that there are just too many variables to generalize. I load my dishwasher like a freaking engineer- I am very specific and thoughtful about it. Might sound like a man's style, but I am a woman. Your housecleaners are, in general, from a low socio-economic background and not exactly genuises, or they wouldn't be housecleaners, therefore I'd expect them to not load a dishwasher in the most efficient way possible. (Not saying I am a genius, I'm not, just that I do load my dishwasher like one.) My ex-husband is a real nerd, and thinks like an engineer, but he couldn't load the dishwasher very well because he has ADD and couldn't focus and organize well. I can think of tons of other situations which would affect one's ability to load a dishwasher well, so I'd say no, you can't generalize in this situation.

[WhyNot]

No. Your housecleaners didn't load the dishwasher as well as you do because it's not their dishwasher. Dishwashers are persnickety things, and it takes a few weeks, in my experience, before you really learn what works where. Plus, they just probably didn't care all that much. They're interested in being quick as well as clean, and it's quicker to wash a couple of rejects than to carefully and slowly load the dishwasher optimally.

My ex-husband couldn't load the dishwasher to save his life. He's a crammer with no sense of where the water will flow. Of course, he accused me of running the dishwasher "half-empty" because I leave enough space between the dishes for water to get at all surfaces. He ended up running the dang thing two or three times per "load" just to get all the rejects clean, whereas my "half-empty" loads would come out spotless. In reality, I fit in about 75% of the dishes he did, so my way was a far more efficient use of resources.

[elfkin477]

THere are men who load the dishwasher? Not in my family...

[Zsofia]

Ha! The boyfriend doesn't even try anymore and refuses to take a little lesson in it. What's so freaking hard about it?

[Not a Platypus]

In my household whoever starts loading the dishwasher has to finish. I hate how my husband loads it, and he hates how I load it. So I guess we are even.

Yeah, that's how it is in my home, too.

[dangermom]

No. Your housecleaners didn't load the dishwasher as well as you do because it's not their dishwasher. Dishwashers are persnickety things, and it takes a few weeks, in my experience, before you really learn what works where. Plus, they just probably didn't care all that much. This. My husband and I are equally picky about how to load our dishwasher--we have a system. No one else can do it right, and I wouldn't expect to do a good job with someone else's dishwasher.

[Hilarity N. Suze]

I am just happy that I don't have to load it. I load it differently from my husband, and sometimes I will rearrange things to get more in, but in general, I'm not going to complain about the way he does any job I want him to continue doing.

My cleaning service does not do this well, though. But they are excellent at other things. So loading the dishwasher is not something the cleaning service needs to worry about. They are experts at a lot of things, but I can't really expect them to have read the manual on every dishwasher in creation. (I am not wild about the way the clean the microwave, either, but nobody else wants to clean the microwave, or ever does. So.)

[Justin_Bailey]

I love my wife with all my heart, but she cannot load a dishwasher to save her life. There's food still stuck to the plates. Silverware (including knives) is pointing up in the bin. Stuff is backwards with the top of the plate pointed away from the sprayer.

It's madness.

[KarlGrenze]

They probably don't have a dishwasher, even.

I grew up without one, and when I finally moved into a place that had one, my roomate had to teach me how to load. Of course, she was also the type that would wash before loading into the dishwasher (which makes little sense to me)... So I ended up washing most of the mundane things by hand, anyways, avoiding the dishwasher unless it was ready for a run or it was a big messy thing that I had prewashed and would be served by the dishwasher.

It probably wouldn't take me long to figure out how to work a specific dishwasher... but I wouldn't dedicate time to know about it unless it was... well... mine to use!

[FairyChatMom]

In my teensy-tiny sample, men (my husband) can't load a dishwasher, but women (me) can. He crams everything he can in there, with no regard for the path of the water. Considering he dealt with fluid dynamics for a large part of his engineering career, you'd think he'd be better at that.

[BigT]

I've never seen these other ways to load a dishwasher. I'm perplexed at what other way it can be done, at least with ours. Cups on top, as they'll block the water on bottom. Plates on bottom, as there are racks for them. Silverware in the little silverware thing. Bowls on their side, facing where the water comes out.

I'm usually the person with the least common sense in the family, and even I picked this up.

ETA: wait, we do do this think where we run the dishwasher once rather than rinse them by hand. We have harder water, and it takes longer to work. Usually takes two packets.

[Cat Whisperer]

Oh my God - women are still doing the majority of the housework in spite of all the changes to what else is expected of women, and you're going to criticize how we do it?

[j666]

Why would anyone think women can't load dishwashers?

I did wonder briefly if men had some chromosomal defect that prevented a clear understanding of fluid dynamics, gravity, permeability, and the concept that two objects cannot occupy the same space at the same time, but this was based on a small sample (i.e. one).

Then I saw how my beloved's sister and mother loaded a dishwasher. I extended my research to include all individuals in my research group (my beloved's brothers, as reported by their beloveds).

In short, the chromosomal defect is on an autosome; no member of at least two generations of my beloved's family has a clue as to how to load a dishwasher.

Of four brothers - one does not have dishwasher, one is not allowed to load a dishwasher, one has 'help', and one married a woman with the same defect. (One the other hand, three of the four do most of the cooking.)

In short, the inability to load a dishwasher does not appear to be a gender-linked trait.

The refusal to unload a dishwasher? Well, I don't want things to get ugly here ...

[thelurkinghorror]

Of course, she was also the type that would wash before loading into the dishwasher (which makes little sense to me)...

That's a major pet peeve. You rinse if there's obvious large chunks of food, or if food is crusted on and will probably otherwise stay after the wash. Everything else will be taken care of by the disposal grinder. It does seem that more women are unaware of this than men, although my sample size is small.

I don't know the answer to this generalization. However, if true it may have something to do with the fact that men are better at spatial tasks (this is a fact, not a generalization). Perhaps they are better at dish Tetris than women.

[Umbriel2]

My wife and I would agree that I'm better at it than her (and it's my one more-or-less assigned domestic maintenance chore), but I have no basis for generalization.

For what it's worth, I also rinse, and generally wipe down with a washcloth, everything going into the dishwasher, since I find that annoying residue remains here and there if I don't. Actually washing with soap pre-machine, however, seems ridiculous to me.

[Justin_Bailey]

Oh my God - women are still doing the majority of the housework in spite of all the changes to what else is expected of women, and you're going to criticize how we do it?

Yeah, how dare men say something bad about women. The nerve! We could hurt the delicate flower's feelings. :rolleyes:

[Scotty Mo]

Well I work in a big restraunt and all of the dishwashers are male. Yeah, we have some female cooks, but not nearly as many. Goes to show.

[Suburban Plankton]

Everyone is worse at loading the dishwasher than I am.

Because nobody else does it the way I do it. If there was a better method for loading the dishes then I would use it; since I don't, then logically anyone doing it differently than me must be doing it 'wrong'.


I didn't vote in the poll because I didn't think any of the answers really applied. It's not a case of 'I can't generalize'...it's more that the matter is far too subjective to draw any conclusions from.

[Nava]

Depends, among other things, on your definitions.

One of my brothers loads it faster than I do, but can't get in as much stuff and never notices that it's due (it may be due because we're out of forks, even though there is enough space for dinner's dishes - or there would be, if we had clean forks to eat dinner with). The other one loads it faster than I do and knows when it's due, but he loads it with a bass soundtrack. Bum! Bum! Bum! Crash! When they replaced their first dishwasher, his wife would specifically ask salespeople for "a husband-resistant model". The one they have has all-metal or all-plastic pieces, none that are plastic-on-metal like they were in that first model. Neither brother pre-cleans the dishes as well as I do (they're likely to leave fishbones or small pieces of food; Spanish dishwashers have no disposal grinder), so whenever they're in charge of a dishwasher it needs more maintenance than if I'm in charge of it.

So if you go for speed, either brother is better than me. But if you want the dishwasher to last longer and the handwashing to last less, I'm better.

[GargoyleWB]

I'm objectively better than Mrs G, but she is far superior at leveraging confirmation bias to cast doubt on my record.

Me: Whaddya mean, I'm great at loading...
Mrs G: There was a fleck of parsley on my plate in the cupboard last week. Parsley!
Me: An aberration, nothing more
Mrs G: (randomly pulls plate from cupboard) Listen to this! (scritch scritch scritch)
Me: Look, you're not giving me credit for the vast expanses of clean surface area on those...
Mrs G: (pulls down a glass) Hello...can you see me through this? Is it foggy in here, it's so hazy...

[olivesmarch4th]

*hangs head in shame*

It took me a full-on year to figure out how to load our current dishwasher properly.

To my credit (okay... not), I didn't have much practice.

[Eyebrows 0f Doom]

I'm female and I chose "women are worse." That's only in my small sample size, but yes, the female roommates I've had are bad at loading the dishwasher, while my current male roommate (as well as my father) load it correctly. It annoys me just as much as my male roommate when one of the other girls puts a pot the wrong way, or puts sharp knives in pointy side up, or a cup right-side up so it fills with nasty dishwasher water.

[DiosaBellissima]

My two female roommates are just awful at loading the dishwasher. Cups in the plate part, silverware going every which way, pots and pans that DON'T BELONG IN THE FREAKING DISHWASHER in the dishwasher. Argh.

[Procrustus]

My lovely g.f. doesn't think about not putting something in that would take up 1/3 of the bottom shelf and leaving insufficient room for the many dirty dishes. A large bowl, for example, that needs very little rinsing in the sink, can be dispensed with in about 10 seconds, or it can be placed in the dishwasher leaving no room for everything else.

[Lakai]

To bring some science into this - there is some evidence (http://newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/psychologists-report-a-gender-72612.aspx) that women are worse at mental rotation than men:

Men tend to perform better than women at tasks that require rotating an object mentally, studies have indicated. Now, developmental psychologists at Pitzer College and UCLA have discovered that this type of spatial skill is present in infancy and can be found in boys as young as 5 months old.

While women tend to be stronger verbally than men, many studies have shown that adult men have an advantage in the ability to imagine complex objects visually and to mentally rotate them.

[crazyjoe]

I know my mom was a pretty mean dishwasher loader...she knew how to organize things in there like no one's business. I also am good at this. My wife, however, is not. So based on my sample, I'd say....no comment?

[Mean Mr. Mustard]

Mrs. Mustard not only cannot properly load a dishwasher, she also has no clue how to place items in the refrigerator.

No freakin' clue whatsoever.

mmm

[Diogenes the Cynic]

I can't generalize, but completely anecdotally, my wife does it totally wrong. She's also got the nerve to say I'm the one doing it wrong, but I can pack in a lot more than she can.

[alice_in_wonderland]

Dunno - my husband and I load the dishwasher exactly the same and the dishes come out clean.

I had a former male roommate who made a mess and a former female roommate who made a mess, so I have no real opinion.

Generally, I suspect whomever loads the dishwasher the most probably tends to be the best at it.

[NinetyWt]

To bring some science into this - there is some evidence (http://newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/psychologists-report-a-gender-72612.aspx) that women are worse at mental rotation than men:

This was the kind of thing I thought of; spatial reasoning like that seems to be more common in males than in females. One of the reasons I went into Civil Engineering is because I showed a high aptitude for spatial reasoning (despite the fact that I'm female).

It's kind of at cross purposes with another thing which is that women tend to do better at detailed work than men do. So perhaps it's a wash. (HA HA).

I don't know that the statement is any more offensive than others , but in the interest of being polite I try not to use any generalizations. Besides, the one time I come out with one, I'm sure someone will promptly come along and prove me wrong.

[Serenata67]

Mr. Serenata is terrible at loading the dishwasher. He seems to lack the spatial reasoning to do it. He also sucks at Tetris.

My dad was terrible at it. He had great spatial reasoning, but still sucked at it.

My brothers, on the other hand, are good at it. Then again, they used to run the dishwasher at a couple large restaurants in the area.

So in my experience, unless the guy has actual training on how to use and properly load a dishwasher, he stinks at it.

I clearly don't know all the men in the world, but from those I do know, that's my opinion.

[Caprese]

That's a major pet peeve. You rinse if there's obvious large chunks of food, or if food is crusted on and will probably otherwise stay after the wash. Everything else will be taken care of by the disposal grinder. It does seem that more women are unaware of this than men, although my sample size is small.



hah
You should meet my husband.
Loading the dishwasher, once a non-event, has been a source of friction between us ever since we moved into our home 3 years ago. The Kitchenaid dishwasher came with the home, and I have not been happy with it.
At our old house we had an Asko, and all you had to do was one brief scrape of the plate, and stick it into the dishwasher any way you liked.
The Kitchenaid, or I should say, its rack, is MUCH less forgiving.
The husband says it is all in the loading, but he carefully scrapes, and then rinses off each plate or bowl before it ever goes into the dishwasher.

I can't generalize about this. I do think some people take more time to load scientifically, but I don't think this tendency is gender-specific.

[Salem]

I'll let you know as soon as I find a man that can FIND the dishwasher..... (small sample of two male adults used to generate this statement.)

Actually, my 9 year old son not only finds the dishwasher, but is fairly good at loading it- as long as you don't mind a few chips and broken handles when he gets a bit, well, enthusiastic about the chore.

[kelly5078]

I base my opinion on a sample of one man and one woman. My wife can get more dishes into the dishwasher than I can, but I consider this a negative, as it then takes longer to put them away. I have no problem running a half-full dishwasher; she can't abide it.

[Stink Fish Pot]

My wife and I just discussed this last week. She has no concept of the back to front loading methodology.

This seems like a no-brainer to me, but silly me. Even after explaining the merits of this loading method, my wife refused to admit it. So, I shook my head and walked away. I mean, is it worth it?

I think she knows I'm right, but to admit it might break some sort of a female code. Personally, I don't even think it's debatable, so I decided not to debate it. I made my point. She disagreed. What can you do? I even gave her a visual demo, but to no avail.

I am going to send this thread to her as a link in email. At least she will know that I am not the only one that thinks she has an issue with loading the dishwasher.