Work and Family

The readings of this week address different issues within what is known as work and family balance, discrimination in the labor market against women, especially motherhood, and the importation of care.

Becker and Moen (1999) focus on the different strategies that dual-earner couples engage to scale back and balance work and family: placing limits, having a one-job, one-career marriage and trading off. They interviewed middle-class people employed as salaried workers in seven different institutions in upstate New York. Their findings differ from what Arlie Hochschild finds in Amerco (2003) and discuses in chapter 15 “Emotional geography and the flight plan of capitalism”. In this chapter, she also addresses the question of family-friendly policies and environments in the workplace like flextime, flexplace, part-time jobs, job sharing, paid parental leave and others. Quebec and the rest of Canada have different family policies than the United States. How do you think the work and family balance differ in these contexts? If you are interested (and read French because I could not find the link on English), then you may read more about Quebec family policies in http://www.mfa.gouv.qc.ca/fr/Famille/Pages/index.aspx.

The notion of work and family balance is usually conceived as a woman’s problem. Regardless of assumptions of gender roles, it is true that women have different biological demands and needs when having a child, for example. Correll, Benard and Paik (2007) show that a wage penalty is actually put on motherhood. Doing a laboratory experiment and an audit study, they find that while mothers are penalized in perceived competence, salary and recommendation for hiring, men sometimes benefit from being a parent. The authors provide us with a set of explanations of how and why discrimination against mothers could be taking place. Their main possible explanations are the beliefs of tension between motherhood and the ideal worker and thus, say that the “glass ceiling” that women could face may be actually partially explained by this.

How come some women reach high positions of power? Watch some “advice” from two women that have done so: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jiWGfMTIorM&feature=related. It is very likely that Inara Nooyi & Condoleezza Rice have people to help her. In order to work and keep a household, many (middle-class dual earners, not only the top elite) engage in hiring people to take care of the kids or to do domestic work. As Hochschild (2003) discusses in “Love and gold”, current arrangements of balancing work and family duties have implied an increased dependency of imported care, i.e. female immigrants that may as well leave children behind with kin or paid work to take care of them. Becker and Moen (1999) write “Their strategy of hiring a “wife” underscores the difficulty of managing two absorbing careers while simultaneously raising young children” (p. 998). Are domestic workers wifes? What are the assumptions behind the notion of what a wife should be and do?

In this same line of thought, what are the assumptions of what a woman is, for example, in the title of the book “Full-time woman, part-time career”, a new advice book like those that Hochschild analyses, by Karen Steede-Terry (to see the news of its release: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMt2Cyv3wnY; and to find information about the book: http://www.fulltimewoman.com/html/index.html). A notion that may be useful is that of ‘gatekeepers’. Becker and Moen (1999) talk about how managers, professionals and business persons control resources and perpetuate values using the media. Watch the following video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nh0EQte4bFU. Is gender equality in the labor market possible if paid domestic work disappears? Are women careers that Karen Steede-Terry and Coral Arvon depict in the videos compatible to the idea of having more women in higher positions and in intensive decision-making?

I am looking forward to reading your responses and questions for discussion! See you on Monday.