What is it about?
Do women change their gender attitudes when becoming mothers, leaving or entering the labor market? Why? I find that women do change their gender attitudes only if they are experiencing substantial conflicts between their employment and family responsibilities. Simply having children or changing employment status is not associated with a change in attitudes about how paid labor work and domestic labor work should be divided between a wife and a husband.
Featured Image
Why is it important?
Earlier search only focuses on a single factor on gender attitudes - either becoming mothers or leaving the labor market - and has mixed findings. Under the current context that most childless women are full-time workers while mothers with dependent children remain constrained by childcare responsibilities and scale back their economic activities, this paper calls for more attention to the conflict between women's roles as a worker and a caregiver. Again, it highlights the significance of this conflict in women's psychological outcomes.
Perspectives
The dramatic change in women's performance in education and employment and the persistent expectation for women to care for children make it necessary to reconsider whether earlier explanations about women's gender attitudes may have changed as well. I hope this article can encourage more discussions about the conflicts between employment and childrearing and their impacts on women's identities and lives.
Muzhi Zhou
University of Oxford
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Motherhood, Employment, and the Dynamics of Women’s Gender Attitudes, Gender & Society, September 2017, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.1177/0891243217732320.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
