Feeling Rushed: Gendered Time Quality,Work Hours,Nonstandard Work Schedules,and Spousal Crossover

The authors investigated gender differences in couple parents' subjective time pressure, using detailed Australian time use data (n=756 couples with minor children). They examined how family demand, employment hours, and nonstandard work schedules of both partners relate to each spouse's non‐employment time quality (“pure” leisure, “contaminated” leisure, multitasking housework, and child care) and subjective feelings of being rushed or pressed for time. Mothers averaged more contaminated leisure and less pure leisure and did much more unpaid work multitasking than fathers. These results suggest that these differences in time quality do partially account for mothers feeling more rushed than fathers. Weekend work was associated with mothers having less pure leisure, but not contaminated leisure. The opposite was found for fathers. Spousal work characteristics also related to time use and feeling rushed in gendered ways, with male long work hours positively associated with higher time pressure for mothers as well as the fathers who worked them.     

Long Hours and Longings: Australian Children's Views of Fathers' Work and Family Time

Using two waves of paired data from a population sample of 10‐ to 13‐year‐old Australian children (5,711 father–child observations), the authors consider how the hours, schedules, intensity, and flexibility of fathers' jobs are associated with children's views about fathers' work and family time. A third of the children studied considered that their father works too much, one eighth wished that he did not work at all, and one third wanted more time with him or did not enjoy time together. Logistic regression modeling revealed that working on weekends, being time pressured, being unable to vary start and stop times, and working long hours generated negative views in children about fathers' jobs and time together. The time dilemmas generated by fathers' work devotions and demands are salient to and subjectively shared by their children.     

Life and Work Values of Counselor Trainees: A National Survey

This national web‐based study used the Schwartz Value Survey (Schwartz, 1994) and Super's Work Values Inventory‐Revised (Zytowski, n.d.) to identify general life and work value orientations of 674 female and male entry‐level counselor trainees residing in 27 states. In general, trainees emphasized benevolence, self‐direction, and achievement and the work values lifestyle, supervision, and achievement. Significant multivariate and univariate differences for age, gender, and program of study were found on both value domains. The sample of practicing counselors scored significantly higher on several values than did trainees. Implications for how students construe values to develop toward their professional role of counselor are considered.     

United by Gender or Divided by Class? Women's Work Orientations and Labour Market Behaviour

Recent debates on the relationship between women's work orientations and their labour market behaviour have been marked by a polarization between those who emphasize personal choice and those who argue that constraint is equally, if not more, important. However, in both approaches ‘orientation’ is understood primarily as a choice between prioritizing paid work or family (understood almost exclusively in terms of childcare responsibilities) for all women regardless of socioeconomic class. Drawing on in‐depth qualitative interview data, this article outlines some of the similarities and differences in the work orientations of women in professional/managerial, intermediate and routine/manual socioeconomic classes in Oxford. It develops the concept of ‘work orientation’ to include the meaning of paid work as well as labour market behaviour for women with and without children. The data presented here suggest that there are important class‐based differences in women's attitudes and that apparently similar work orientations may have very different causes and labour market consequences.     

Long Working Hours and the Corporate Gender Divide in Japan

While the workplace custom of working long hours has been known to exacerbate gender inequality, few have investigated the organizational mechanisms by which long working hours translate into and reinforce the power and status differences between men and women in the workplace. Drawing on 64 in‐depth interviews with workers at financial and cosmetics companies in Japan, this article examines three circumstances in which a culture of long working hours is disadvantageous for women workers, and the consequences of those circumstances: (a) managers in Japanese firms, reinforcing gender stereotypes, prioritize work over personal and family lives; (b) non–career‐track women experience depressed aspirations in relation to long working hours and young women express a wish to opt out due to the incompatibility of work with family life; and (c) workers who are mothers deal with extra unpaid family work, stress such as guilt from leaving work early, salary reduction and concerns over their limited chances for promotion. The article argues that the norm of working long hours not only exacerbates the structural inequality of gender but also shapes employed women's career paths into the dichotomized patterns of either emulating workplace masculinity or opting out.     

Making Milk and Money: Contemporary Mothers' Orientations to Breastfeeding and Work

In most Western industrial nations, gains have been made in women's educational and occupational opportunities as part of a larger gender revolution. At the same time, contemporary mothering expectations have expanded and intensified, especially the renewed focus on breastfeeding as the “optimal” choice for infant feeding. How do women perceive the simultaneous pursuit of these activities? Prior scholarship has identified tensions in cultural models of breastfeeding as well as in women's subjective experiences, emphasizing how breastfeeding is shaped and encountered through sociocultural context, especially ideologies that position work and mothering as incompatible. Building on this, I examine how the current generation of working mothers view working and breastfeeding. Through in‐depth interviews with 32 U.S. women, I show how women espouse distinctly different orientations to breastfeeding: instrumentalist, quasi‐maternalist, and pragmatist. I argue that these different orientations both reflect and reframe existing cultural models and discourses about contemporary women's relationships to work, mothering, and breastfeeding.     

Parents' Family Time and Work Schedules: The Split‐Shift Schedule in Spain

This study used data on couples from the 2003 Spanish Time Use Survey (N = 1,416) to analyze how work schedules are associated with family, couple, parent–child, and non‐family leisure activities. Spain is clearly an interesting case for the institutionalized split‐shift schedule, a long lunch break rooted in the traditional siesta that splits the workday between morning and evening. Results showed strong negative associations between the split shift and both family and parent–child activities. The evening shift was negatively associated with couple and family time, but not with parent–child time. Women spent much more time than men in parent–child activities for all work categories, and they were more responsive to the spouse's work hours. Men were substantially more active than women in non‐family leisure, considering both individuals' and their spouses' work schedules. Altogether, this study has important implications for scientific and public policy debates.     

Step In or Stay Out? Parents' Roles in Adolescent Siblings' Relationships

We studied parents' direct involvement in adolescent sibling relationships, including parents' reactions to sibling conflict and their time spent in the company of the sibling dyad. Participants were 185 White, working‐ and middle‐class families; firstborns averaged 15 and secondborns averaged 13.5 years of age. In separate home interviews mothers, fathers and both adolescents described their personal and family relationship qualities and experiences. In a series of 7 evening phone calls, family members reported on each day's activities including the time they spent and their companions in 63 daily activities (e.g., do dishes, play sports, talk on phone). Analyses revealed 3 general conflict reactions by parents: (a) noninvolvement (e.g., tell siblings to work out problem themselves); (b) intervene (e.g., step in and solve problem); and (c) coach (e.g., give advice about how to solve problem). We found mother‐father differences in conflict reactions and time spent with siblings; differences in parents' direct involvement as a function of the gender constellation of the sibling dyad also were evident. Direct involvement was linked to sibling relationship qualities and explained variance beyond that accounted for by an index of indirect involvement, that is, parental warmth. Further, parents' orientations toward autonomy were linked to the indices of involvement such that parents with stronger autonomy orientations were less involved, and parents' orientations explained variance in their involvement beyond that explained by adolescent characteristics.     

Teachers as good mothers,mothers as good teachers: Functional and ideological work–family alignment in the South Korean teaching profession

As one of the largest women‐dominated employment niches in many national contexts, the teaching profession has been widely studied, yet the gender, work and family negotiations within this profession deserve fuller attention. The case study of South Korean teachers, one of the most highly qualified teaching workforces in the world, illuminates how particular professions create specific challenges as well as supports for work and family that can counter national patterns of women's low labour force participation. This study engages with theoretical debates regarding ‘work–family conflict' and ‘work–life balance' to develop the alternative framework of ‘work–family alignment' giving greater attention to cultural, ideological and functional dimensions within specific occupations and national contexts. However, rather than expanding opportunities for women, work–family alignment often depends on conformity to normative gender roles — both at work and within families. Nonetheless, the framework of work–family alignment can inform policy implementation by demonstrating that both functional and ideological supports are needed for workplace and state policies to be effective.     

Gender Differences in Attitudes Towards Work Group in the United States and Japan*

Abstract This study examines gender differences in employees' group orientations on the basis of the United States-Japan gender comparisons of individual work attitudes. It is hypothesized that the gender differences in work group orientations disappear when workplace structures and styles of supervision are held constant across individual employees in the U.S. and Japan. The results show that the impact of being a woman on work group orientations is relatively small in both countries. At least, the impact of gender on Japanese and American group attitudes does not appear to be powerful enough to reinforce the assertion that gender is an absolute determinant of work attitudes. Although gender-based arguments can not be fully rejected by the present results, the fact that one is a woman produced only a minimal increment in employees' work group orientations, when men and women worked in similarly structured organizations. The findings, however, indicate that gender differences in work group orientations are not thoroughly reducible to the fact that workplaces are differently structured for the two genders in Japan and the U.S. The possibility of cultural embeddedness of individual affective work orientations is discussed.     

Gender Similarity or Gender Difference? Contemporary Women's and Men's Career Patterns

Career development research has often explored gender differences in and development of career patterns ( Gottfredson, 2006 ). Hyde's (2005) meta‐analysis indicated that men and women shared more similarities than differences. Applying Hyde's gender similarities hypothesis to careers, the authors conducted a 2‐stage study. Stage 1 was an analysis of career choices of couples (a socioeconomically and educationally advantaged group) announcing their wedding in the New York Times. Stage 2 was a comparison of a New York Times wedding cohort with a cohort from 11 other U.S. newspapers, examining national trends and exploring generalizability of the findings from Stage 1 of the study. Results revealed that there are shifting trends in career choices, most notably in the legal profession.     

Gender Orientations and Family Strategies*

Des interviews qualitatives de 95 femmes mariées ayant entre 18 et 45 ans ont été menées afin d'étudier les points de vue de ces dernières sur le mariage, les enfants, le travail et les politiques familiales. Nous avons comparé les opinions des femmes plus traditionnelles avec celles des femmes favorisant l'égalité des sexes, et nous avons pu constater que plusieurs idées étaient partagées, notamment sur le mariage et les enfants. Étaient à l'origine de divergences les stratégies familiales régissant l'opportunité du mariage et des naissances ainsi que la priorité accordée aux questions familiales par rapport aux autres aspects de la vie. Ceci nous porte à croire qu'il faut considérer deux éléments lorsqu'il s'agit de mieux comprendre le mariage et la procreation, soit la hiérarchie sexuelle et les points de vue des particuliers sur le roLle des hommes et des femmes dans notre société. Based on open-ended interviews with 95 married women aged 18 to 45, the authors explore basic orientations toward marriage, children, work and family policy. While women with more traditional gender role orientations are contrasted with those who hold more egalitarian views, there are striking similarities among the women in the sample. In particular, marriage and children are clearly preferred. The differences relate to the family strategies associated with the timing of marriage and births and the priority given to family questions in comparison to other aspects of life. This leads the authors to conclude that both gender structures in society and gender role orientations of individuals are important in understanding marriage and childbearing.     

Variations of the same? A sectoral analysis of the gender pay gap in Germany and Austria

Germany and Austria are two countries with a comparably and persistently high gender pay gap. Further, both countries are classified as conservative welfare states where the male breadwinner model has been only partly modernized and strong corporatist structures shape working conditions. At the same time, welfare policy and provision are not only based on but also shape gender‐related norms, beliefs and assumptions that are virulent for job valuation and collective bargaining. Against this background the article analyses similarities and differences regarding the gender pay gap in Germany and Austria. While both countries show significant similarities regarding the causes for the gender pay gap, there are some differences regarding legislation and further policies with which the gender pay gap could be reduced. Arguing that the institutional framework strongly influences income opportunities for women and men, the article provides a sectoral analysis of the financial and insurance sector and the human health sector in both countries. Using qualitative data from a recent research project, it is argued that in the classification of a sector as ‘female’, the sectoral income level combined with different wage‐setting mechanisms have a crucial impact on wage inequalities between women and men.     

Factors Attracting Individuals to Nonprofit Management over Public and Private Sector Management

Little research has sought to identify the distinct advantages that nonprofits offer employees, particularly managers. Drawing upon Weisbrod's theory of managerial sorting (1988), we test a series of hypotheses about the differences among nonprofit, public, and for‐profit organizations that may explain the preference of managers to work in one sector over the other. We use pooled cross‐sectional data from the General Social Survey to test managerial sorting. We find many similarities in the perceptions of managers in the nonprofit and public sectors as compared to the for‐profit sector. However, when we examine the sorting of managers into nonprofit versus public sector jobs, we find differences in work environment. Compared to those working in the public sector, managers in nonprofits report greater freedom in deciding how to carry out their job functions, more control over their work schedules, and greater opportunities for pay increases. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of these findings for the practice of nonprofit management.     

Outre‐Manche/Across the Channel: Ongoing Training and Gender in France and Britain

The French state‐levy system of ongoing training at work has not provided greater access for women than the laissez‐faire British system. While headlines figures suggest that women receive more training than men in Britain and that the gap has also closed for well‐qualified women in France, qualitative analysis shows that this does not indicate greater gender equity. The societal effect approach is useful for cross‐national comparison within the sphere of economic organization but must be combined with analysis of the gender order to account for differences and similarities in social reproduction. The case of the insurance industry provides detailed empirical evidence of the issues underlying this, particularly women's availability for ongoing training at work. The situation of women in each country is inextricably linked to a complex interdependence of a multitude of variables, some of which are similar, such as the workings of patriarchy, and some of which are different, such as state configurations of childcare infrastructure.     

Work Orientations of Males and Females: Exploring the Gender Socialization Approach*

Earlier surveys show differences in work orientations of males and females, but these were based on mostly sex-segregated workers. Two broad explanations are used to examine differences in work orientations of males and females: namely the socialstructural and the gender-socialization approaches. A secondary analysis of 22 separate sudies of specific occupations are combined and used to determine if the sexes display different patterns on ten work dimensions when occupation is held constant. Patterned differences in work orientations between the sexes persist supporting the gender socialization approach. Implications for workplace discrimination are discussed.     

Dual‐earner parent couples’ work and care during COVID‐19

COVID‐19 and the associated lockdowns meant many working parents were faced with doing paid work and family care at home simultaneously. To investigate how they managed, this article draws a subsample of parents in dual‐earner couples (n = 1536) from a national survey of 2722 Australian men and women conducted during lockdown in May 2020. It asked how much time respondents spent in paid and unpaid labour, including both active and supervisory care, and about their satisfaction with work–family balance and how their partner shared the load. Overall, paid work time was slightly lower and unpaid work time was very much higher during lockdown than before it. These time changes were most for mothers, but gender gaps somewhat narrowed because the relative increase in childcare was higher for fathers. More mothers than fathers were dissatisfied with their work–family balance and partner’s share before COVID‐19. For some the pandemic improved satisfaction levels, but for most they became worse. Again, some gender differences narrowed, mainly because more fathers also felt negatively during lockdown than they had before.     

Work–family Management among Low‐wage Service Workers and Assistant Professors in the USA: A Comparative Intersectional Analysis

Noting an inattention to the specific ways in which class, race, and gender combine to affect work–family management, we conducted a qualitative exploration of the processes of intersectionality. Our analysis relies on two points on a continuum of class experiences provided by two groups of predominately white female workers: low‐wage service workers and assistant professors. Drawing on in‐depth interviews with each group, we examine the similarities and differences in their experiences of negotiating their work worlds as they tried to meet family demands. We focus on the ways in which class and gender interacted to shape these women's everyday lives in different ways. While we found that women privileged by class were privileged in their abilities to manage work and family demands, we also found that class shaped the gendered experiences of these women differently. Our data suggest that, in the realm of work–family management, class mutes gendered experiences for assistant professors while it exacerbates gendered experiences for women working in the low‐wage service sector. Our analysis not only highlights the importance of considering intersecting hierarchies when examining women's lived experiences in families and workplaces, but provides an empirical example of the workings of intersectionality.     

Gender Equality and Restless Sleep Among Partnered Europeans

Sleep is situated in the work–family nexus and can be shaped by national norms promoting gender equality. The authors tested this proposition using individual data from the European Social Survey matched to a country‐level measure of gender equality. In individual‐level models, women's sleep was more troubled by the presence of children in the home and partners' unemployment, whereas men's restless sleep was associated with their own unemployment and worries about household finances. In country‐level models, the authors find that in nations that empower women and elevate their status, men and women alike report sounder sleep, and the gender gap in restless sleep is significantly reduced among those living in gender‐equal countries. This study adds to the understanding of gender differences in sleep quality and provides new evidence on the importance of the national context in shaping the pattern of gender inequality in the domestic sphere.     

Are women less career centric than men? Structure,culture, and identity investments

Some work/family scholars assume that gender differences in career centrality (i.e. the importance of career to one's identity) are a result of differential job characteristics and family demands; others trace these differences to pre-existing cultural orientations. Using the 2010 Generations of Talent data from 9210 employees working in 11 countries for 7 multinational companies, this study verifies the existence of gender differences in career centrality and explores structural and cultural explanations. Gender disparities in career centrality are modest, indicating that women's and men's identification with careers is more similar than is commonly asserted; the most pronounced (but still relatively small) disparities are observed in Japan and China. A large portion of the gender gap is explained by job characteristics, supporting structural explanations. Family demands contribute to explaining the gap as well, but the findings are unexpected: having minor children is associated with higher career centrality for both women and men. In support of cultural explanations, however, traditional gender beliefs are associated with lower career centrality, especially for women, while two job characteristics (job variety and peer relations) have distinct links to career centrality for women and men. Findings challenge the common assumption that family identities compete against work identities.