Sometimes its hard to keep your desk clean and tidy. It turns out men seem to find it a bigger problem, because a recent study suggests that men have far, far dirtier desks than women.
To establish that, a team of researchers from the University of San Diego sampled bacteria from offices in New York, San Francisco, and Tucson, Arizona. They took swabs from everywhere — chairs, phones, keyboards, desks, you name it — and made a note of the gender of the person using the particular space the sample was taken from. From there, they analysed the levels and types of bacteria present in the samples.
The results, which are published in PLoS One, show that the areas inhabited by men are, well, just plain dirtier. Scott Kelly, one of the researchers, explains to Live Sceince:
“The surfaces inhabited by men tended to have more bacterial cells and more abundance of cells than those inhabited by women.”
So why is that? The researchers offer up two suggestions. First, and most flattering, is that men are, on average, are larger than women, so they have a bigger surface area on which bacteria can grow. They simply carry more filth because they have larger frames.
However, previous research has also shown that men don’t wash their hands or brush their teeth as often as women. Actually, they are the dirtier sex, and they smear the results all across their desks. Nice. [PLoS ONE via Live Science]
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