Gender and the Long Arm of the Job: A Beeper Study of Work-to-Home Spillover and Crossover

• In Event: 220 - Section on the Sociology of the Family Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 09. Family, Work, and Leisure

Abstract

In their classic sociological work Middletown, Robert and Helen Lynd wrote of “the long arm of the job” in describing how employment influences workers’ family and community lives outside of the workplace. In this paper, we investigate whether this influence is gendered. We focus on people’s emotions at both work and home and test whether spillover (an individual’s own work emotions being felt at home) and crossover (one spouse’s work emotions being felt by the other spouse at home) are experienced differently by wives and husbands. In doing so, we improve upon previous spillover and crossover papers by using fixed effects to more carefully isolate the causal effect implied by these terms and by drawing on not just one emotion but on the information from a wide array of positive and negative emotions. We find that wives experience spillover of negative emotions but not positive ones while husbands experience both (with borderline significance for positive ones). Our most important finding, however, is that wives absorb their husbands’ work emotions through crossover but husbands do not absorb their wives’ work emotions. The long arm of the job thus has a double effect on wives and is really the long arm of two jobs, both wives’ own jobs and their husbands’. This situation represents an under-studied aspect of the extra domestic labor, in this case emotional labor, women experience in family life.

Authors

• Judith A. Levine, Temple University

• Valerie Kim Bonner, Temple University

• Joshua Klugman, Temple University