Maternal Decision-Making and Family-to-Work Spillover: Does Gender Ideology Matter?

ABSTRACT

Making parenting decisions is inherent in the responsibility of raising children. Past research suggests that employed mothers may designate themselves “in charge” of these decisions in order to reconcile employment obligations with cultural gender ideologies around mothering. Despite substantial literature suggesting that the more family responsibilities one has, the more likely that family matters are to “spill over” into one’s work, little is known about how employed mothers’ “maternal decision-making” is related to spillover or how mothers’ own personal gender ideologies may influence this link. Based on a sample of employed mothers (N = 316) derived from waves 2002 and 2012 of the General Social Survey, this paper examines how maternal decision-making (i.e., mothers acting as the primary authorities on childrearing decisions) and shared parental decision-making (i.e., mothers and fathers sharing such decisions equally) are differentially associated with negative spillover and how gender ideology plays a role in these experiences. Regression results suggest that for employed mothers, maternal decision-making is associated with greater spillover but that this link is moderated by gender ideology. Among maternal decision-makers, those holding traditional gender attitudes experience greater spillover, whereas those holding egalitarian attitudes experience less spillover, similar to the spillover rate of mothers in shared parental decision-making arrangements. By shifting empirical attention from routine childcare tasks to less visible parenting responsibilities and from societal gender ideologies to individuals’ own beliefs, this study makes important contributions to research on spillover, mental labor, and gender.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Patti Thomas for her helpful suggestions on earlier versions of this paper.

Disclosure Statement

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

Notes

¹ Prior to determining whether to pool the two waves, I assessed differences between waves for the three focal variables. There were no significant differences in gender ideology (p = .60) or spillover (p = .88). There was a slight, significant difference in shared decision-making (76.5percent in 2002 compared to 65.8percent in 2012, p = .04), but the difference was not significant in the gender-integrated sample. Thus, waves were pooled in order to have a large enough sample to include appropriate controls.

² Although including these observations in the model suggests that those in paternal decision-making arrangements experience higher spillover than those with shared parental decision-making arrangements, this effect is based on a sample of only eight individuals. Moreover, the effect sizes and significance levels for maternal decision-making are identical with or without these observations added.

³ When a dichotomous variable for the 2012 survey wave was included in models, it was not significantly related to the outcome and produced very small coefficients. Moreover, results for key independent variables are equivalent with or without survey wave included in models. Therefore, survey wave is not controlled for in main analyses.

⁴ Supplemental analyses available upon request.

⁵ The GSS did not include items about job salience, thus preventing the ability to test this explicitly. However, job satisfaction (“All things considered, how satisfied are you with your (main) job?” 1–7 Likert scale) was tested as a potential mediator in Models 2 and 3 (results available upon request.) Job satisfaction appears to mediate only 6.2percent of the effect of gender ideology. However, this does not preclude the possibility that career salience plays a role. For example, while ideologically traditional mothers may view careers as less important than ideologically egalitarian mothers, they may not necessarily derive less satisfaction from them.

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Reilly Kincaid

Reilly K. Kincaid is a sociology PhD student at Purdue University. Her research interests broadly involve gender and family across the life course, including issues such as divisions of household labor, work-family fit, and intergenerational relationships. She holds an MS in Sociology from Purdue University.