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Are women destroying the Earth?

An interesting story in today's Washington Post takes aim at an unlikely culprit in the battle to stop global warming: U.S. women. According to the Post, U.S. men are much more likely to buy compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFLs), which consume less electricity and last longer than incandescent bulbs, than are their female partners: A ...

By Blake Hounshell

April 30, 2007, 5:55 PM

An interesting story in today's Washington Post takes aim at an unlikely culprit in the battle to stop global warming: U.S. women. According to the Post, U.S. men are much more likely to buy compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFLs), which consume less electricity and last longer than incandescent bulbs, than are their female partners:

A Washington Post-ABC News poll released last week showed that while women are more likely than men to say they are "very willing" to change behavior to help the environment, they are less likely to have CFL bulbs at home […] In groceries and drugstores, where 70 percent to 90 percent of light bulbs historically have been sold and where women usually have been the ones doing the buying, CFLs have not taken off nearly as fast as they have in home-improvement stores such as Home Depot and Lowe's, where men do much of the shopping.

So what explains the gender gap? Energy Star Director Wendy Reed guesses that "women are much more concerned with how things look. We are the nesters." Women are apparently less willing than their husbands to put up with fewer lumens (although the latest CFLs are supposedly just as bright if not brighter than incandescents). But it seems there's also a widespread failure to communicate about this difference in preferences:

The guy typically brings a CFL home and just screws it into a lamp in the bedroom, without discussing it with his wife," [energy efficiency market researcher My] Ton said. "She walks in, turns on the light and boom — there is trouble. That is where the negative impressions begin, especially when the guy puts it into the bedroom or the bathroom, the two most sacred areas of the home."

I'm curious to know if the CFL gender gap exists even in other countries like Germany and Japan, where far more people use the energy-efficient bulbs. And as couples in these places have gone increasingly green in their light bulb choices, have they also had to learn to communicate better?