Partners’ Overwork and Women’s Well-being

• In Event: 380 - Regular Session. Gendered Dimensions of Family and Work

Abstract

The negative impact of very long work hours, or overwork, on individuals’ physical and psychological wellbeing is well documented. Less is known about the impact of overwork on individuals’ families. Recent work has linked parents’ overwork to negative health outcomes for children, but to our knowledge, there is no literature on the impact of very long hours on partners’ health. In this paper, we address this gap in the literature using high quality measured health data from the Work, Family, and Health Network in a sample of female IT workers. Specifically we examine whether partners’ very long work hours have an impact on women’s emotional/relational wellbeing outcomes, such as: perceived stress, relationship quality, and time adequacy as well as cardiometabolic disease risk outcomes, including: body mass index (BMI), glycosylated hemoglobin (HbA1c), and blood pressure. We find that women who are partnered to men who work very long hours have significantly higher BMIs and perceived stress and significantly lower relationship quality and time adequacy with their partner. In addition, we test whether the correlation between women’s higher BMI and partners’ work hours is the result of health behaviors such as sleep duration, exercise, and fast food consumption. We find that health behaviors reduce the correlation marginally, implying that men’s overwork may impact women’s BMI through other mechanisms.

Authors

• Emily Fitzgibbons Shafer, RAND Corporation

• Erin Kelly, University of Minnesota

• Orfeu Buxton, Harvard University

• Lisa Berkman, Harvard University