SWIFFER is notorious for this  (personally acknowledged)… it is always a woman cast in cleaning product commercials! I’ve noticed this unconsciously in the past but last night I think I may have seen about 5 within the hour and it hit me- you almost NEVER see a man cleaning the house in these blatantly chauvinist commercials. Let’s get real for a minute, advertising is advertising and not meant to be morally/politically correct okay but seriously it’s 2011 now, let’s see a stay-at-home dad cleaning the house in one of these freaking commercials! They actually DO exist; statistically AND empirically, more men are performing their share of the house work. And why wouldn’t they? Why would that be a woman’s job besides it being an unfair and patriarchal social norm instated centuries ago?! Women these days not only work full-time jobs, but they usually do all of the house work AND take care of the children after coming home from work (imagine the hours-after working-of unpaid labor)!!!! I know this unadulterated, archaic ordinance goes way back in history to when women were not allowed to work so they stayed at home cooking and cleaning all day (what fun!), but really why is it still so acceptable to portray this in the media still? Well, because unfortunately it’s probably still the prevalent familial way of things. Only recently have studies been done (the oldest I could find was from 1976) on this phenomena. Since then of course it shows that single and married women are doing less housework but somehow the responsibility and obligation still lies on the woman’s shoulders. Men are portrayed as “helping” the women. Helping the women with what? Their obligatory duties?! Listen you cavemen and women out there that are producing these commercials and ads, put a dude in your advertisements. Windex is ahead of the curve on this.

Passage from an interesting study taken from here:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1854869/