Parental Decision-Making, Gender, and Work-Family Conflict

• In Event: 2351 - Section on the Sociology of Sex and Gender Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable 100min: 12. Work/Family Considerations

Abstract

Objectives

Few quantitative studies have sought to extend the link between work-family conflict and childcare responsibilities to parental decision-making, a form of mental labor. As paid work and unpaid family work become increasingly gender-integrated and couples idealize egalitarian arrangements, questions arise regarding whether this spirit of equality extends to the mental labor of parenting and what work-family consequences might arise from lingering inequities. This paper explores how different divisions of responsibility for deciding children’s upbringing are associated with family-interference-with-work (FIW) (RQ1) and how gender ideology plays a role in this relationship (RQ2).

Methods

The analytic sample (N=389) comes from the 2012 wave of the General Social Survey. OLS regression is used to test whether disproportionate responsibility for deciding how children are raised is associated with greater FIW. Interactions are used to test whether gender ideology moderates this relationship.

Results

Compared to shared decision-making, having primary responsibility for childrearing decisions is marginally associated with more FIW for women (β = .123, p<.10). For men, having one’s spouse make the majority of childrearing decisions predicts greater FIW (β = .210, p<.01). When decision-making distributions and gender ideology are interacted, the effect of disproportionate decision-making responsibility on women’s FIW seems to depend on gender ideology, with traditional women experiencing more FIW (β = .465, p≤ .001) and egalitarian women experiencing less FIW (β = -.486, p≤ .001).

Discussion

When childrearing decisions fall primarily on mothers, having traditional gender attitudes may exacerbate concentration difficulties at work, while having egalitarian gender attitudes may lessen such difficulties by comparison. Challenging rigid beliefs about gender and sharing parental decisions can facilitate positive work-family outcomes for both men and women.

Author

• Reilly Kincaid, Purdue University