need a reading response. ( two pages, in 5 hours)

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The third tension is one that pervades egalitarian couples who are heavily involved in work outside the home. Husbands and wives in these couples jointly devalue family responsibilities to justify spending more time on their careers. The egalitarian philosophy leads such couples to share responsibilities such that less time is devoted to home and family—less time on housework, less time with children, less time with each other—and someone is hired to take care of most household tasks (cooking, cleaning, and child care). The ideas about what a family needs change to accommodate the couple’s egalitarian focus on careers. This issue reminds me of a dual-earner couple I know who adopted two children. After the first child was in preschool, the husband proudly remarked to me that he had never even met the preschool teacher or attended any of the preschool programs for parents because the nanny took care of all of these chores. After the second child, the couple asked the nanny to move in with them. The husband shared that he and his wife slept downstairs while the nanny slept in a room upstairs with the children, which was wonderful because the nanny could console the children at night. Hochschild (1989) calls it a hollow victory “if the work of raising a family becomes devalued because women have become equal to men on traditionally male terms” (p. 211). The homemaker role is now being devalued by both women and men. One way to increase the value of this role is for men to become more involved in household labor and child care.

Although a great many changes have been made over the past several decades in terms of work and family roles, in some ways our fundamental way of thinking about men and women has not changed. According to Valian (1998), “… the usual solutions proffered to solve ‘women’s’ problems are higher-quality, more affordable, more widely available childcare; flexible work hours; and family-leave policies. All those improvements are needed, but they fail to question the way the problem is framed. They do not ask why combining work and family is a female problem rather than a human problem, and thus do not address it as a human problem” (p. 45).

DO GENDER 12.2 Combining Roles

Interview a group of women and men who have combined the paid worker role with family roles—preferably, people who have children. Ask specific questions about the challenges that they have faced in combining roles.

Conduct Do Gender 12.2 to find out for yourself what difficulties women and men face when combining the paid worker role with family roles.

TAKE HOME POINTS

Multiple roles are good for both women’s and men’s health. There is greater support for the role expansion hypothesis than for the role scarcity hypothesis. Roles provide resources, and having more roles buffers us from the strains that arise in any one role. The fewer roles we have, the greater the effect that strain in any one role will have on health. The paid worker role and family role can both buffer one from the distress associated with the other role as well as exacerbate stressors that are associated with other roles. Employment benefits women’s health even in the presence of children, but the presence of children adds to the complexity of understanding the conditions under which paid work is beneficial to women. To understand the interactive effects among roles, we need to consider what roles mean to women and men and what the demands are in each of the roles.

QUALITY OF PAID WORKER ROLE One reason it is difficult to evaluate the effects of paid work on men’s and women’s health is that the nature of the paid worker role differs for men and women. For example, women and men are not employed in the same

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TABLE 12.1

kinds of jobs. Table 12.1 shows the percentage of women employed in a variety of jobs in 1983 and 25 years later in 2008 (U.S. Department of Labor, 2009b). Although women today are more likely to be found in professions such as accountant, architect, dentist, financial manager, lawyer, and physician, some professions remain sex segregated; for example, auto mechanic, carpenter, dental assistant, and elementary school teacher.

Women also are more likely than men to be employed in part-time positions. In 2007, 72% of employed women held full-time jobs compared to 87% of men (U.S. Department of Labor, 2009c). However, this figure really represents a comparison of White and Hispanic women to White and Hispanic men, as Black women are almost equally likely to be employed full time as Black men. Women and men also report different job conditions. Thus to compare employed women and men, we need to know more about the characteristics of their jobs to see if the two groups are really comparable. In the following section, I examine the characteristics of paid work that men and women value as well as face.

PERCENTAGE OF WOMEN WORKERS IN SELECTED OCCUPATIONS IN 1983 AND 2008 Occupation 1983 2008 Accountants/Auditors 38.7 61.1 Airplane pilots and flight engineers 2.1 2.6 Architects 12.7 24.8 Auto service technicians and technicians

0.5 1.6

Carpenters 1.4 1.5 Clergies 5.6 14.8 Computer programmers 32.5 22.4 Dental assistants 98.1 96.3 Dentists 6.7 27.2 Financial managers 38.6 54.8 Firefighters 1.0 4.8 Lawyers 15.3 34.4 Mail carriers 17.1 33 Photographers 20.7 44.1 Physicians and surgeons 15.8 30.5 Psychologists 57.1 66.9 Registered nurses 95.8 91.7 Social workers 64.3 79.4 Teachers—college and university 36.3 46.1 Teachers—elementary and middle school

83.3 81.2

Word processors and typists 95.6 92.9 Source: Adapted from U.S. Department of Labor (2009b).

Characteristics of Paid Work Do men and women value the same characteristics of work? A meta-analytic review of studies that included all age groups, ranging from children to adults, revealed that males value a high income, autonomy, challenge, recognition, and power more than females (see Figure 12.7; Konrad et al., 2000; Lips & Lawson, 2009). By contrast, females value an easy commute, the physical environment, relations with coworkers and supervisor, job benefits, and the opportunity to work with people more than males. A study of managers and executives in a variety of industries showed that both rated the agentic aspects of work (i.e., strategy, motivation, task focus) as more important than the communal aspects of work (communication, interpersonal skills), but that men valued

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the agentic aspects more than women and women valued the communal aspects more than men (Frame et al., 2010). In addition, people in higher-level positions valued agency over communion. A meta-analysis of vocational interests revealed that men prefer to work with things and women prefer to work with people (Su, Rounds, & Armstrong, 2009). In the meta-analysis shown in Figure 12.7, the largest sex difference in the direction of men is working in solitude. Although these differences in vocational interests have decreased over time, they persist and explain why men are attracted to engineering and science and women are attracted to creative arts, nursing, teaching, and social work.