I've been making a conscious effort not to see this as a "male / female" thing recently and realise that it is just different standards, and that it is unreasonable of me to insist on my standards rather than attempt a compromise.
For instance, DH will eat a bowl of cereal in the living room in the morning and leave his bowl there. I spent months becoming obsessed with this and going absolutely postal about it - "you're going to the kitchen anyway, how hard is it to just take the bowl with you? It's what I would do!" - and to be fair to him he made a pretty game effort, but his argument - a bit like the OP's husband's - was that just because he didn't do it in the exact way and timeframe that I would have, didn't mean he wasn't going to do it at all. So eventually I tested that theory and just ignored the bowls, and sure enough, they eventually made their way downstairs, sometimes on the same day, sometimes in gangs of two or three, but it did get done. So the fairest conclusion is that if it really matters to me that it gets done immediately then I can do it myself, or I can chill out a tiny bit and let him take care of it.
I still struggle with this a bit, because it's so maddeningly illogical to leave a cereal bowl on your desk when you're going to the sink anyway, but I started trying to see it from the reverse - for instance, of an evening I tend to have a cup of tea right before bed, and if he's already switched off the lights etc. downstairs, I won't make the journey especially to put the mug away, so I leave it until the morning. I'd be pretty pissed if I lived with someone who couldn't possibly leave a mug out overnight, and started nagging me about it.
The thing is that women have been terribly mistreated by these assumptions about housework over the years, and the equity still certainly isn't there on the whole, so it's easy to be very touchy on the subject and actually end up adopting a very unreasonable position without meaning to. I am very tidy and get stressed around mess, but if I lived with someone whose standards were as high as I sometimes see on MN - hoovering twice a day, ironing sheets etc.- and they pestered me to maintain what I thought were mad standards, I'd feel very harassed and would think they were very unfair.
Caveat: obviously all of the above relates to non-urgent jobs. If essential things are not getting done and one party is claiming to be biologically incapable of providing food and clean clothes or whatever, then it's a different ball game entirely.