When Mom Is CEO at Home, Workplace Ambitions Take a Back
Seat
When mom is the boss at home, she may have a harder time
being the boss at work. New research suggests that women, but not men, become
less interested in pursuing workplace power when they view that they are in
control of decision-making in the home. This shift in thinking affects career
choices without women even being aware.
"Women don't know that they are backing off from
workplace power because of how they are thinking about their role at
home," says Melissa Williams of Emory University. "As a result, women
may make decisions such as not going after a high-status promotion at work, or
not seeking to work full time, without realizing why," explains Williams
who will be presenting her findings on January 18 at the Society of Personality
and Social Psychology (SPSP) annual meeting in New Orleans.
Her new study is one of several at the SPSP meeting that
will explore a continued gender gap in workplace power -- from how women versus
men view their roles in the home to how gender stereotypes form at a young age
to how these attitudes affect women's likelihood of pursuing careers in science
and math. "Even as we see great gains made by women in the workforce, we
continue to also see disproportionately larger numbers of women leaving
successful careers, or diverting their career paths to ones with fewer hours
and greater flexibility, but that also hold less status," says Bernadette
Park of the University of Colorado Boulder.
When
women rule at home
We often speak about women as being decision-making
experts or powerholders in the home setting -- for example, expecting that men
will defer to their wives' decisions regarding clothing. But while people
intend these references to be complimentary to women, Williams says, "such
language may have a negative effect on the decisions they make about their
lives outside the home, without them being aware of it."
To test this effect, Williams and colleagues first
surveyed people to gauge their views of power in household decisions-making.
Both men and women perceived power over household decisions as being desirable
and making a person feel powerful.
They then asked men and women aged 18 to 30 years old to
imagine that they were married and had a child in one of three conditions:
either they make many of the decisions; they make decisions together with their
spouse; or they perform most of the household tasks with no mention of
household decision-making power. Women were less interested in pursuing work
goals when they had household power, compared to sharing equal power with a
spouse. Men's interest in work goals, however, was unaffected by their household
power.
Also, women's interest in workplace power did not change
simply by imagining that they were performing household tasks. "It is only
when such tasks are described as involving power that they negatively affect
women's motivation to pursue workplace power," Williams says. "We
think this is because referring to women's household role as one involving
power puts a positive spin on women's traditional role on the home, and makes
it seem more appealing."
"It is one thing for a woman to choose to stay at
home if she wishes her primary role be that of wife and mother," Williams
says. "But when the language we use to talk about household chores makes
such a role unconsciously more appealing to women, without the same effect on
men, this is not what most people think of as making a free choice."
When
mom and worker collide
Women have some even more basic obstacles to overcome
when working at both home and in the workplace. According to new study, women
experience conflict in managing their identities as a parent and a worker at
the same time, much more so than men.
"The basic premise of this research is that cultural
stereotypes of the 'ideal mom' conflict with stereotypes of the 'ideal worker'
and in particular the 'ideal professional,' says Park of the University of
Colorado Boulder. "In contrast, for men, successfully fulfilling the role
of professional in part also fulfills obligations associated with the 'ideal
dad,'" such as being a provider and being decisive. "For women, the
identities of mom and professional are experienced in opposition or conflict
with one another in a way that dad and professional are not for men."
Park and colleagues measured how easily women and men
associate themselves with career versus family goals through a series of
"implicit" association tests that measure how quickly people
categorize words within the two goal domains. They found that women often had
to "switch hats" in thinking about parenting versus work, while men
primarily associated themselves with just work.
They also found that women performed more poorly on
cognitive tasks after experiencing shifts in how they associate with these two
identities, but not before. Men showed no such depletion of cognitive
capacities. The researchers further found that when women received negative
feedback related to a career-related task, they would more strongly
"activate" their identity as a parent, "as if easing the sting
of the failure," Park says.
The data together suggest that "one of the greatest
challenges faced by women in trying to 'have it all' is that they experience a
psychological conflict in their most basic identities not true of men,"
Park says. "Mentally, they have to shift back and forth between
self-conceptions of self-as-mom versus self-as-professional and these two
selves do not reside easily next to each other."
When
children follow what you do not what you say
Even when women work full-time, they often still shoulder
a disproportionate amount of domestic responsibilities at home. This division
of labor can fundamentally change how children view their gender roles, even if
parents teach their children to be egalitarian, according to new research.
"When it comes to learning gender roles, actions and
implicit attitudes might speak louder than words," says Toni Schmader of
the University of British Columbia. "Parents pride themselves on teaching
their kids that they can be anything they want to be. However, parents' own
behavior and entrenched cultural associations continue to reinforce more
traditional gender roles."
Looking at male and female children between the ages of 7
and 13 and dads and moms, all in heterosexual cohabiting relationships, the
researchers, led by Schmader and graduate student Alyssa Croft, tested implicit
attitudes toward men and women in the workplace versus home. They also asked
their parents about their paid work hours and relative contribution to domestic
tasks at home and asked children about preferences for gender-stereotypical
toys, shows, and future roles or occupations.
The researchers found that regardless of whether parents
explicitly endorsed gender-egalitarian roles, if their actual behaviors modeled
a more traditional division of household labor, their children -- especially
their daughters -- preferred more gender-typical toys, TV shows, and future
occupations.
They also found that women performed more of the domestic
tasks at home, even after controlling for fewer hours spent at work compared to
men. "Looking specifically at parents who work full-time, we saw that
women still reported doing nearly twice as much of the domestic work as men
do," Schmader says. "In line with these trends, both parents and kids
tended to associate women more than men with childcare and domestic work."
And they found that fathers' stereotypical beliefs and
behavior are particularly important for their daughters' identities.
"Girls might develop ideas of what is possible for them by the kind of
roles their fathers seem to expect from women in general and their moms more
specifically," Schmader says.
When
girls see a new image of science
Where we often see the largest under-representation of
women is in the area of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM). In a
new study, making girls feel welcome in computer science and changing their
stereotypes about the subject dramatically increased their interest in the
field.
"Adolescence is a critical stage at which to recruit
more females into these fields as they begin to make career-relevant decisions,
yet gender differences in attitudes toward computing are already evident during
this period," says Sapna Cheryan of the University of Washington. Therefore,
Cheryan and colleagues sought to change prevailing cultural stereotypes of
computer scientists to see how it affected young women.
They showed high-school students photos of two
introductory computer science classrooms, one that contained highly
stereotypical objects (e.g., Star Trek posters) and one that did not (e.g.,
nature posters). They told students that both courses covered the same
material, had the same amount of homework, a male teacher, and a 50:50 gender
proportion. Students rated their interest and their "sense of
belonging" in both courses. With a stereotypical classroom, the girls'
interest in the course was lower than the boys' interest, but with the
non-stereotypical class, it increased to the same level. Boys' interest did not
change as a result of the stereotypes.
Such a low-cost approach for countering stereotypes of
science as geeky and male-oriented can increase girls' sense of belonging and
get them more interested in this field without harming boys in the process,
Cheryan says. "Inspiring girls to enter technological fields is critical
for ensuring women's participation in, and contributions to, cutting-edge
technological innovation."
Source: sciencedaily
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