Finding middle ground: the relationship between cultural schemas and working mothers’ work-family strategies

ABSTRACT

All-consuming expectations and a limited policy framework require working parents in the United States to develop creative and resourceful approaches when managing work and family responsibilities. Previous research on work-family strategies demonstrates how the ‘trade-offs’ working parents make at home and at work are stratified by structural factors such as gender, life stage and access to resources. In this article, I argue that strategies are better conceptualized as a ‘buffet’ of options and that strategy selections are, in part, cultural decisions, embedded within symbolic landscapes that render certain options more accessible, appropriate or desirable than others. I use data from the 500 Family Study to test the association between working mothers’ socially structured moral and emotional commitments and the work-family strategies they employ. My findings demonstrate that cultural beliefs matter simultaneously with and sometimes over and beyond institutional and material resources and constraints. This article also highlights, through a process I term stigma coding, women’s ‘bounded agency’ in interpreting and aligning schemas and strategies. I conclude that these contributions offer a more complete picture of working mothers’ complex negotiations of work and family life.

RÉSUMÉ

Dans le contexte d’attentes élevées, les parents qui travaillent aux Etats-Unis doivent développer des approches créatives pour gérer à la fois les responsabilités professionnelles et familiales. La littérature sur les stratégies travail-famille montre comment les decisions au travail et à la maison sont stratifiés en fonction de facteurs structurels tels que le genre, l’étape de vie et l’accès aux ressources. Cet article montreque les décisions travail-famille sont aussi partiellement d’ordre culturelle, encastrées dans un paysage symbolique qui rend certaines options plus accessibles, pertinentes ou désirables que d’autres. En utilisant des données du 500 Family Study, je teste l’association entre les engagements structurels et moraux des mères occupées et les stratégies travail-famille qu’elles adoptent. Mes résultats démontrent que les croyances culturelles importent simultanément et parfois plus que les ressources et contraintes institutionnelles et matérielles. Cet article également démontrer le pouvoir limité des femmes dans l'interprétation des schémas et des stratégies en mobilisant un concept que j'appelle "le codage de la stigmatisation". Je conclus que ces contributions offrent une vision plus complète de la complexité des négociations des mères qui travaillent.

KEYWORDS:

• Work-family
• gender
• working mothers
• cultural schemas
• strategies

MOTS-CLÉS:

• travail-famille
• le genre
• les mères actifs occupés
• le schémas culturelles
• stratégies

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Yuxin Wu for research assistance and Elizabeth Gorman, Allison Pugh, Adam Slez, Denise Deutschlander, Michele Darling and the anonymous reviewers for their insightful feedback on earlier drafts of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Gendered family structures represent just one example of this, as research on heterosexual couples shows that men’s work hours influence their wives’ work patterns (i.e. Cha, 2010).

2 This conceptualization takes theoretical inspiration from Swidler’s (1986) ‘toolkit’ model of culture. A parallel, empirically driven approach, which focuses on gender socialization strategies, can be found in Averett’s (2016) study of LGBTQ parents.

3 These ideals, never universally attainable, hold women accountable for selfless care of children and assign earning to men. Nevertheless, they are institutionalized in interactions, organizations and policies (Acker, 1990; Williams, 2000).

4 Cultural schemas incorporate, but extend beyond, gender ideologies to capture beliefs about work ethic, children’s ‘sacredness’ and public/private life. Thus, an analysis using cultural schemas may identify associations not found between traditional gender ideologies and middle-ground work-family strategies (Ammons & Edgell, 2007; Mennino & Brayfield, 2002).

5 The adjectives ‘high’ and ‘low’ represent a simplification of the continuum of stigmatized experiences. In reality, stigma is not experienced in absolute terms and is not only relative to particular strategies but also to one’s social position and context.

6 Even those who do not adopt this strategy are aware of its eschewed status (Munsch et al., 2014).

7 To date, the scholarship on ‘flexibility stigma’ has tended to conflate different levels and forms of stigma associated with violations of the work devotion schema (see for example, the articles in the 2013 special issue of the Journal of Social Issues focused on the flexibility stigma). Here, I aim to provide a more nuanced articulation of this stigma. This more nuanced approach to flexibility stigma is aligned with recent publications, such as those from Christin Munsch ((2016)), although I draw on different points of distinction.

8 In this case, high-quality, paid childcare may be seen as a means of ‘concerted cultivation’ in that it helps expose young children to diverse social situations (Lareau, 2003).

9 As items probing on childcare and flexible work arrangements were only administered to mothers, this analysis does not draw on survey responses from fathers.

10 This measure specifies only the availability of flexibility in one’s organization, as opposed to individual access, and it does not specify the degree of flexibility. As a liberal measure of flexibility access, this statistic is aligned with other findings (i.e. Matos & Galinksy, 2011; US Council of Economic Advisors, 2014).

11 Approximately 88% of respondents using childcare paid for it.

12 Fit statistics are as follows: (χ²(12) = 16.27, CFI = .995, RMSEA = .030).

13 The fit statistics are as follows: (χ²(19) = 18.14, CFI = 1.000, RMSEA = .000).

14 In their quantitative measure of the work devotion schema, Blair-Loy and Cech (2017) more fully capture the allegiance and emotion entailed in schema adherence. Yet, the interpretation of their findings on the relationship between work devotion schema adherence and overload suggests that the extent to which one views work as ‘worthwhile’ is key. Thus, I view the measures in this study as complementary to that approach, supplementing it with a measure of family devotion, as well as indicators for beliefs about children’s well-being. The belief measures, in particular, are valuable in this case as women – even work devoted women – must always socially account for the impact of their work and family decisions on children’ well-being.

15 The data only offered an ordinal work-hour measure. As long work hours – defined here as more than five hours over full-time – offer the greatest conceptual value, this measure was recoded as a binary variable.

16 This was the best available measure of spousal hours within the dataset, but as researchers have previously shown, spousal overwork can lead women to pull back from the workplace (Cha, 2010; Misra, Budig, & Boeckmann, 2011). Thus, future research should seek to include such a measure.

17 Originally an ordinal-level measure, this variable was recoded to the midpoint and divided by 1,000.

18 The Pew Research Center defines middle-class as household incomes ranging from two-thirds to twice the national median (Fry & Kochhar, 2016).

19 While only 25% of lower-income women use housecleaning and 33% use paid childcare, 56% and 45% of affluent women use these respective family-targeted strategies. Approximately 54% of White women and 30% of women of color used housecleaning services, and 43% of White women and 25% of women of color use part-time scheduling. These racial differences in strategy use were driven primarily by differences between Black and White mothers.

20 For AMEs (reported in tables), other variables are not held at their means.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by University of Virginia Office of Undergraduate research [Double Hoo Award].

Notes on contributors

Sarah E. Mosseri

Sarah Mosseri is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Sydney Business School. Her research investigates what it means to be a good worker and how moral understandings of work shape employer-employee relationships, create hierarchies of visibility and guide, sometimes narrow, pathways of empowerment.