It Was Not the Best Option: Family-Role Overload and Regret about Sacrificing Work for the Family

Abstract

We aimed to analyze whether women with higher family-role overload regret sacrificing their professional work to fulfill family responsibilities better after analyzing the costs of making the work sacrifice. In Study 1, participants (n = 218 women and men) self-reported their family-role overload, rated the costs of sacrificing their work for their family, and rated the extent to which they experienced regret about this sacrifice. In Study 2, participants (n = 285 women) reported their gender role ideology and responded to the same measures as in Study 1. In Study 3, participants (n = 180 women) reported their ideology and their partner’s perceived gender role ideology and completed the same procedure as in Study 1. The main findings showed that women (but not men) with higher family-role overload perceived more costs of sacrificing their work for the family, which were associated with greater regret about making the sacrifice. Additionally, women who perceived a traditional ideology in their partner reported more family-role overload, which was associated with greater costs of making the work sacrifice, which in turn was related to greater experienced regret. These findings indicate that although women make these sacrifices based on societal expectations in accordance with their gender role, they could not have obtained the results they could have expected and consequently could regret risking their professional progress for the family. In addition, they suggest that partner involvement is also necessary to overcome this invisible gender inequality.

Keywords:

• Work–family
• sacrifices
• overload
• regret
• gender role ideology

Ethical approval

The study is part of a broad project approved by the Ethics Committee of the University of Granada. All participants provided informed consent to participate in this study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

Data are available at Open Science Framework (https://osf.io/mbfe2/?view_only=dc9d757530934408b396b0b8a07f4682).

Notes

1 Having children was an inclusion criterion because the literature has shown that it is an important factor in work sacrifices (Herrarte et al., 2012; Rapoport et al., 2011). In addition, we recruited people in heterosexual couples, given the unbalanced distribution of tasks in these couples (Bauer, 2016).

2 Work sacrifices: mothers (e.g., “I reduced my workday by half forever”) and fathers (“Not to go to work to accompany my daughter to the doctor”).

3 They were asked to consider their family life when answering the items (Lu et al., 2019; Matthews et al., 2014). A preliminary study enabled us to prove that asking parents to consider family/work when they answered overload items was effective, showing gender differences in family-role overload (see OSM).

Additional information

Funding

Grant PID2021-123125OB-100 funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and, as appropriate, by “ERDF A way of making Europe”, by the “European Union” or by the “European Union NextGenerationEU/PRTR.”

Notes on contributors

Laura Villanueva-Moya

Laura Villanueva-Moya is PhD in Social Psychology at the University of Granada. Her research interests include gender inequality and romantic relationships.

Francisca Expósito

Francisca Expósito is professor in Social Psychology at the University of Granada. Her research interests include gender inequality, sexism, intimate partner violence, and romantic relationships.