Can We Finish the Revolution? Gender, Work-Family Ideals, and Institutional Constraint

Abstract

Why has progress toward gender equality in the workplace and at home stalled in recent decades? A growing body of scholarship suggests that persistently gendered workplace norms and policies limit men's and women's ability to create gender egalitarian relationships at home. In this article, we build on and extend prior research by examining the extent to which institutional constraints, including workplace policies, affect young, unmarried men's and women's preferences for their future work-family arrangements. We also examine how these effects vary across levels of education. Drawing on original survey-experimental data, we ask respondents how they would like to structure their future relationships while experimentally manipulating the degree of institutional constraint under which they state their preferences. Two clear patterns emerge. First, as constraints are removed and men and women can opt for an egalitarian relationship, the majority of them choose this option, regardless of gender or education level. Second, women's relationship structure preferences are more malleable to the removal of institutional constraints via supportive work-family policy interventions than are men's. These findings shed light on important questions about the role of institutions in shaping work-family preferences, underscoring the notion that seemingly gender-traditional work-family decisions are largely contingent on the constraints of current workplaces.

Segregation, Stereotypes, and STEM

“…Social arrangements-for example, relating to hours, working conditions, family leaves, childcare, worker protection, and taxation-regulate individual behavior and reproduce normative models of work and family (Buchmann and Charles 1995;Gornick and Meyers 2003;Thébaud 2015;Ecklund and Lincoln 2016). Social democratic policy regimes, which offer greater support to working parents, tend to promote more egalitarian family structures and higher rates of women's full-time employment (Charles and Cech 2010;Pedulla and Thébaud 2015;Hegewisch and Gornick 2011), but they are at best weakly related to gender segregation in STEM-as evidenced in the highly segregated scientific and technical labor forces found in policy-progressive Scandinavian countries (Charles and Bradley 2006;Charles 2011a).…”

The Division of Child Care, Sexual Intimacy, and Relationship Quality in Couples

“…These cultural forces shape, and are shaped by, family and workplace policies that assume male breadwinning and female homemaking. Indeed, the absence or presence of supportive work-family policies shapes individuals' preferences for egalitarian arrangements (Pedulla and Thébaud 2015). Even if couples embrace egalitarian ideals and resist cultural pressures to embrace gendered roles at home, they often face inflexible work schedules, a lack of paid family leave, patchwork childcare arrangements, wage and hiring discrimination for female partners, and a masculine workplace culture that assumes 24-7 availability (Gault et al 2014;Capizzano, Adams, and Sonenstein 2000).…”

Research on Students' Performance in Higher Education through Sequence Analysis

“…For example, the ratio of the Civilian labour force participation rates in the US labour force for those over 16 was 0.39 in 1950, 0.54 in 1970, 0.75 in 1990and 0.82 in 2010(US Department of Labour 2015. At the same time an inquiry about the failure to achieve a complete convergence is also possible (Williams 1999;Stone 2007;Gerson 2009Gerson , 2010Cha 2010Cha , 2013Goldin 2014;Pedulla & Thébaud 2015). The pay gap -the other star indicator of women's progress in paid work -is experiencing exactly the same dynamics.…”