Family and Work Time: How Attorneys Arrange Time Between Work and Motherhood

• In Event: 50220 - Section on Organizations, Occupations, and Work Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 17: Careers, Work, and Family

Abstract

As households with working mothers move beyond traditional arrangements for work and care, they combine work and care in new gendered approaches. This study explores how and why working mothers arrange their responsibilities for work and caregiving by exploring how lawyer mothers work under the demanding time constraints of practicing law and care for minor children, with a particular focus on their strategies for the mental load of cognitive and emotional labor. The sample comes from forty in-depth interviews conducted with women attorneys who have been in practice for at least ten years and have at least one child in high school or younger. Patterns emerging from analysis of an initial sample of interviews suggest that the lawyer mothers’ work-care arrangements fall into four categories: reverse-traditional, egalitarian, unequal dual earner, and primary caregivers. These work-care arrangements reflect both how the attorneys allot their focus between work and care responsibilities, as well as their tolerance for conducting family-oriented cognitive labor while at work. Attorneys in egalitarian arrangements allow cognitive labor tasks throughout their work day, while the lawyers with reverse-traditional arrangements and those who are the primary caregivers tend to focus on work at work time and restrict cognitive labor for their families outside of those times. Moreover, the tolerance for cognitive labor appears sticky, so that even if a family changes work-care arrangements, the mothers maintain the cognitive labor practices they engaged in their original arrangement. Future analysis will incorporate the remaining interviews in iterative, flexible coding and explore the attorneys’ attachment to emotional labor, especially in conjunction with cognitive household tasks, and the relationship to time constraints and work-care arrangements.

Author

• Carolyn E. Waldrep, University of Texas-Austin