Several years ago while Christmas shopping, I came across a shop selling a reusable cloth grocery bag. On the front of the bag written in bold capital letters was the message: “I use this bag because my wife cares about the environment.”

The implication was clear: men don’t care about making eco-friendly choices, but with appropriate wifely pressure it might be possible to browbeat them into doing so.

It was funny at the time – especially since my own then husband was notoriously reluctant to engage in any sort of eco-friendly behaviour – but it was also a hard sentiment to argue with. My own anecdotal experiences backed it up, as do numerous studies of eco-friendly behaviour.

Simply put, the research confirms that women recycle more, are more likely to support environmental regulations, know more about the scientific aspects of climate change and are more likely to express concern about its effects.

By all measures, men just seem to care less.

It’s not that they are engaging in aggressively anti-environmental actions necessarily; but on average they simply don’t appear as concerned as my female friends about excess packaging, carbon emissions, reducing plastic products, the zero-waste movement, or sustainability in general.

A 2016 study published in Journal of Consumer Research went beyond just establishing the existence of this gendered gap in environmental behaviour, however, and tried to shed some light on why.

I spoke with one of the study’s authors, Dr Aaron Brough, who described the story. “We asked one group of men to imagine that their colleagues gave them a pink gift card with a floral design with a note saying: ‘We thought this card was perfect for you,’” he explained. “A different group of men was shown a gender-neutral gift card. We then asked the men which products they would purchase with the gift card.”

The results of the study were telling. Men who received the floral gift card – along with their colleague’s declaration that it suited them – were less likely to choose the environmentally friendly option in each category of lamps, batteries, backpacks, etc.

It was as though a man could stomach either the floral gift card or some rechargeable batteries – but not both.

Dr Brough theorizes that these results come from our perceptions of eco-friendly behavior as feminine, saying: “Both men and women judge a person who is behaving in an eco-friendly manner as more feminine, and they even see themselves as more feminine when they recall having performed green actions.”

The outcome is that men subconsciously chose to perform fewer environmentally friendly actions in order to protect their masculinity.

This choice has dire consequences. We’ve now reached a stage of environmental catastrophe so severe that some experts warn we’re fast approaching the point of no return. Virtually every corner of the world is reporting either record heatwaves, voracious wildfires, catastrophic flooding, or mammoth hurricanes – sometimes all four in quick succession.

Have we truly doomed future generations simply because we’ve been too slow to change – and men too reluctant to change, lest they seem less manly?

Brough wasn’t so sure men deserved the brunt of the blame. “I think both men and women are susceptible to cues that threaten their vulnerabilities,” he said. “And nothing in our research suggested that men generally desire negative environmental outcomes.”

His study indicates that men do care about making environmental choices; after all, if they didn’t, they wouldn’t have chosen the eco-friendly option in either scenario. And, in the second part of Brough’s study, men who were told they scored “off the charts” in masculinity based on a writing sample were more likely to choose environmentally friendly options afterwards – floral gift card or not.

Perhaps this really shouldn’t be so surprising. We each weigh hundreds of factors in the decisions we make, many of them unconsciously. Gender identity is a rather large factor, and we women aren’t blameless either.

Recycled … and pink too. Photograph: MediaWorldImages/Alamy Stock Photo

We might recycle more, but women are also responsible for almost single-handedly supporting the $445bn-a-year beauty industry and $2.4tn-a-year fashion industry, both of which create an astounding amount of waste and environmental destruction to enhance and display our own feminine gender identity. We too are complicit.

A different study published in 2011 attributes the difference in environmental consciousness not purely to gender, however, but to empathy. Or rather, the lack thereof.

Conducted by Steven Arnocky of McMaster University and Mirella L Stroink of Lakehead University, the study found that gender differences in environmental attitudes could be explained by the presence or absence of emotional empathy. Essentially, men who were more empathetic were more likely to care about the environment while women who lacked empathy were less likely to do so.

Though the study was small (just 200 participants), its authors began with another premise consistently borne out by research – women are more empathetic than men and are socialized from birth to better understand and value the needs of others. Their study found that “[w]omen expressed greater levels of altruistic concern and cooperation for the sake of the ecosystem, while men expressed more competitiveness for resources”.

When controlling for levels of empathy, however, the difference in environmental attitudes disappeared. Empathetic men were just as likely to express care and concern for the environment as their female counterparts.

The picture that begins to emerge when you combine these studies isn’t one where men are just too thoughtless or irresponsible to do the right thing; it’s one where men are acting exactly the way you’d expect a person to act when raised within a culture hell-bent on ruthlessly beating out of them any shred of compassion, nurturing, or cooperative instinct.

It’s one where men can (and do) make better choices, as long as it doesn’t make them look too feminine – a trait we as a society actively discourage in men and often punish them for displaying.

It’s one where men are consistently kneecapped in their ability to make eco-friendly decisions either because of our white-knuckled attachment to rigid gender roles – or our historical reluctance to teach our sons to care about others in the same way we teach our daughters.