Blurring Motherhood, Preserving Work: The Asymmetric Reconstruction of Moral Ideals

• In Event: Identities, Repertoires, and Interpretive Resources

Abstract

When dominant moral ideals collide, actors do not simply absorb the tension—they actively reshape it. Drawing on 40 in-depth interviews with senior software engineers who are mothers, this article examines how women engage and transform the tension between two powerful cultural schemas: the ideal worker and the ideal mother. I show a patterned asymmetry. Women frequently blur the boundary of motherhood, redefining devotion to children as achievable through paid work. In contrast, efforts to revise the ideal worker tend to broaden acceptable practices—such as flexible schedules—without redefining devotion itself, which remains anchored in productivity and prioritization of work. To explain this variation, I develop a framework of prospective boundary work that distinguishes between enabling relational schemas and derivative narratives and specifies how the location of interpretive authority and the structure of discursive fields shape the depth of transformation. The findings refine sociological accounts of cultural change and illuminate the moral mechanisms sustaining gender inequality at work.

Author

• Talia Shiff, Tel-Aviv University