I’m currently surrounded by conversations regarding work-family conflict. Over the past few days (March 2019), I’ve been attending a women’s leadership conference.
Although the conference focuses on a variety of leadership topics, conversations often switch to balancing work and family needs. These conversations occur as part of the formal program and panels and also spill over into the hallways, over dinner and with a few drinks in the bar.
With fast-paced expectations at work, balancing work and family needs continues to be a critical issue for professional women. Women seem to naturally spend time and energy thinking about this topic.
But women only experience one side of work-family conflict. What is the rest of the story?
Is work-family conflict just a women’s issue?
Although it is often framed as a women’s issue, work-family conflict should be on everyone’s radar as a key issue.
With complicated work schedules and life demands, women, men and kids are all impacted by work and family issues.
One research project supported the shared impact by showing that women and men are more similar than different regarding work-family conflict.
The research project, published as a monograph in the Journal of Applied Psychology in 2017, was titled “Disentangling the Relationship Between Gender and Work-Family Conflict: An Integration of Theoretical Perspectives Using Meta-Analytic Methods” by Kristen Shockley, Winny Shen, Michael DeNunzio, Maryana Arvan, and Eric Knudsen.
The Meta-Analysis Research
This monograph provides a unique perspective, because it used a series of meta-analysis methods to reach conclusions.
A Meta-analysis is a research approach that takes a collection of primary research projects and combines their data in order to analyze the results across the combined data set.
Meta-analysis provides a broad and inclusive view of a topic by incorporating various studies and data. The challenge of meta-analysis is finding the right studies and combining the variables and data in a statistically acceptable way.
In this monograph, the researchers combined the data from 350 studies that covered more than 250,000 workers. They used a variety of statistical approaches to examine a series of hypotheses related to both work-interference-with-family (WIF) and family-interference-with-work (FIW).
The research looked at gender and its impact on work-family conflict. In addition, it considered how sub-groups – like working mothers – tended to fare.
Key Finding: Few Gender Differences in work-family conflict
The results are more striking for what they did not find versus what they did find.
Specifically, the research did not show many differences based on gender – men and women did not show many statistical differences in how they experience work-family conflict.
This indicates that work-family conflict should not be limited to discussions in the hallways at a women’s conference. It needs to be discussed as a serious work issue that impacts women and men and the families that depend on them.
“Everyone, regardless of gender, should be part of the conversation and part of the solutions.”
Other Findings
The researchers took a deeper look at some sub-groups and at variables that might affect the relationships. They found some significant results such as:
- Men in the study work more hours per week than the women. Higher number of hours worked was shown to lead to more work-interfere-with-family (WIF) conflict. Time focused on work restricts time with family – leading to WIF conflict. For men, the primary conflict was work have a negative impact on family life due to longer hours.
- In dual career couples (in which both spouses work outside the home), women experience more issues with family-interfering-with-work (FIW) than men do. This likely reflects the tendency for women to take on more chores at home which in turn can have a negative impact on work. Women in dual career couples sacrifice work for family more than men do.
- Once kids enter the picture, the trend continues to cause more conflict for women than men. Similar to the dual career finding, mothers have more conflict than fathers due to family interfering with work. Working mothers face a penalty that does not seem to apply to working fathers.
Conclusion
All professionals have a vested interest in balancing work demands and family life.
Work family conflict is a serious issue for both women and men.
As companies plan related benefits, they should consider the impact on all associates – regardless of gender.
However, some groups – women in dual career couples and mothers – do experience more work family conflict than others. There still seems to be a tendency to fall into traditional gender roles in marriages and when children are involved.
These findings indicate that it is too early to declare that work-family conflict functions the same way across genders – even if it is important to both.
For the sake of working mothers and dual career women, these discrepancies should be further studied n search of additional solutions.
Future Research
This monograph highlights our need for more research.
The researchers suggested that some other variables should be studied – such as the impact of guilt on work-life conflict. Tendency to feel guilty for choices could help explain the differences that still exist with some groups like working mothers and dual career women.
I would also challenge future researchers to be more inclusive and look beyond traditional designations to consider non-binary people and people in non-traditional committed relationships.
All professionals will benefit from an improved understanding of work-family conflict issues and balance-friendly policies at work.
Citation:
Shockley, K.M., Shen, W., DeNunzio, M.M., Arvan, M.L., & Knudsen, E.A. (2017). Disentangling the Relationship Between Gender and Work-Family Conflict: An Integration of Theoretical Perspectives Using Meta-Analytic Methods. Journal of Applied Psychology, 102(12), pp.1601-1635.
