Personality and Social Psychology
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 2019, Vol. 45(5) 808 –823 © 2018 by the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Inc Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI: 10.1177/0146167218797294 pspb.sagepub.com
Article
Partner with the right person because you cannot have a full career and a full life at home with the children if you are also doing all the housework and childcare.
—Sheryl Sandberg (2013)
In understanding gender disparities in career advancement, social psychologists have focused on how stereotypes about women constrain women’s career decisions (Brown & Diekman, 2010; Ceci & Williams, 2011; Park, Smith, & Correll, 2010; Stout, Dasgupta, Hunsinger, & McManus, 2011). But as Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg suggests, the dynamics in heterosexual couples can also impact wom- en’s ability to freely pursue their career. Although there is an active literature on the gendered distribution of domestic labor in sociology and economics (England, 2010; Haddock, Zimmerman, Lyness, & Ziemba, 2006; Kroska, 2004; Offer & Schneider, 2011), social psychologists have not exam- ined how expectations about men’s roles constrain wom- en’s own aspirations to adopt counterstereotypic roles. In line with field theory (Lewin, 1939), which highlights how social forces constrain and afford individuals’ behavior, it stands to reason that women’s expectations of adopting tra- ditional roles (i.e., becoming a caregiver rather than a breadwinner) are causally predicted by their perception that men are becoming more involved in childcare. We tested
this complementarity hypothesis across five experiments and an internal meta-analysis.
The Division of Domestic Labor and Asymmetrically Changing Gender Roles
Over the past several decades, gender roles have both changed and stayed the same. In 1970, almost half of all two parent households had a mother who stayed at home, whereas today nearly 70% of families in the United States are com- prised of dual-earner parents (Pew Research Center, 2015). Although men generally outearn their partners, women are increasingly likely to be the primary economic provider in their families (Pew Research Center, 2013). Despite this evi- dence of women’s expanding roles, family responsibilities continue to fall disproportionately to them (Hochschild & Machung, 2012). In fact, after having children, women are
797294 PSPXXX10.1177/0146167218797294Personality and Social Psychology BulletinCroft et al. research-article2018
1The University of Arizona, Tucson, USA 2The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada
Corresponding Author: Alyssa Croft, The University of Arizona, 1503 E University Blvd., Tucson, AZ 85721-0001, USA. Email: alyssac@email.arizona.edu
Life in the Balance: Are Women’s Possible Selves Constrained by Men’s Domestic Involvement?
Alyssa Croft1, Toni Schmader2, and Katharina Block2
Abstract Do young women’s expectations about potential romantic partners’ likelihood of adopting caregiving roles in the future contribute to whether they imagine themselves in nontraditional future roles? Meta-analyzed effect sizes of five experiments (total N = 645) supported this complementarity hypothesis. Women who were primed with family-focused (vs. career-focused) male exemplars (Preliminary Study) or information that men are rapidly (vs. slowly) assuming greater caregiving responsibilities (Studies 1-4) were more likely to envision becoming the primary economic provider and less likely to envision becoming the primary caregiver of their future families. A meta-analysis across studies revealed that gender role complementarity has a small-to-medium effect on both women’s abstract expectations of becoming the primary economic provider (d = .27) and the primary caregiver (d = –.26). These patterns suggest that women’s stereotypes about men’s stagnant or changing gender roles might subtly constrain women’s own expected work and family roles.
Keywords gender roles, possible selves, stereotypes, romantic relationships, work–life balance
Received July 26, 2016; revision accepted August 7, 2018
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more likely than men to reduce their work commitment, earn lower salaries, and advance slowly in their career (Stone, 2007). Many women embrace this choice (Park et al., 2010). However, twice as many working mothers as fathers report that parenting responsibilities stand in the way of their career, particularly among families of highly career-focused men (Pew Research Center, 2015). Such data suggest that many women feel their career choices are constrained by men’s lower caregiving contributions (Croft, Schmader, & Block, 2015).
It is not surprising that women, once parents, might make a rational decision to prioritize family over career. Our ques- tion is whether women anticipate this trade-off in advance of negotiating work and family responsibilities with a partner. Young heterosexual women expect a traditional, gender- based division of labor in their future relationship (Askari, Liss, Erchull, Staebell, & Axelson, 2010; Hodges & Park, 2013; Park, Smith, & Correll, 2008). But what if they believed that men’s interest in childcare was increasing? For example, although the percentage of stay-at-home fathers is still low, it has been increasing over the last two decades (Pew Research Center, 2014), and working couples are increasingly sharing family responsibilities equally (Pew Research Center, 2015). Are these, albeit modest, changes in men’s caregiving roles incorporated into how young women view their own future?
Schemas of the Self, Others, and Relationships
When women envision their future, they imagine the person they might become (Oyserman & James, 2011). Self-schemas are people’s cognitive representations of the self, informed by their past experiences, current context, and future expec- tations. The self-schemas people have for the person they could become are called possible selves (Markus & Nurius, 1986; Smith & Oyserman, 2015). Unlike current self-sche- mas, possible selves are uniquely based on anticipated social roles and environments people might inhabit. Some past research has shown that possible selves about being a parent or provider can be influenced by pragmatic concerns (e.g, Bloom, Delmore-Ko, Masataka, & Carli, 1999; Lee & Oyserman, 2007, 2009; Smith, James, Varnum, & Oyserman, 2014). Of greater relevance to the current research is the way in which possible selves are shaped by gender stereotypes.
Consistent with social role theory (Eagly & Steffen, 1984; Eagly & Wood, 2013), because young girls see women as caregivers and men as breadwinners, gender-stereotypic role expectations are internalized into possible selves. Such ste- reotypes are especially likely to influence people’s possible selves when imagining themselves in a distant future that is necessarily more abstract. For example, a recent study showed that grade school–aged girls aspire to more gender- neutral (than female-stereotypic) occupations to the extent that their fathers exhibit less male-stereotypic behavior by
engaging in domestic tasks (Croft, Schmader, Block, & Baron, 2014). In addition, there is a notable gender differ- ence in the family-related possible selves of college students who imagine their lives in 10 to 15 years, but no such differ- ence when imagining themselves only 1 year in the future (Brown & Diekman, 2010). This pattern suggests distant possible selves are shaped, at least to some degree, by stereo- typic expectations.
Women’s (and men’s) possible selves are not only a function of the schemas they have about themselves, but also the schemas about future romantic partners. Aron and Aron (1986) theorized that the perception of oneself includes the resources, perspectives, and characteristics of one’s relationship partner. Importantly, relationship sche- mas are defined not merely by expectations of the self and the partner as individuals, but also by expectations about relationship dynamics (e.g., forecasted division-of-labor). Heterosexual women’s stereotypical expectations about their future partner should therefore inform their own pos- sible selves, but the abstract nature of these future forecasts makes them susceptible to stereotypes and norms. Thus, women’s own future selves might be shaped by their beliefs that men (and therefore future partners) will continue to be less communal than women (Diekman & Eagly, 2000).
There is some initial support for gender role complemen- tarity in future selves. In a clever study, men and women who were randomly assigned to imagine becoming the primary breadwinner or primary caregiver of their future families reported preferring a partner with a role complementary to their own (Eagly, Eastwick, & Johannesen-Schmidt, 2009). Our research examines the reverse relationship: When women expect that men’s roles are unchanging (i.e., men remain more career- than family-focused), are women less likely to imagine themselves becoming the economic pro- vider of their family? And if instead women encounter evi- dence that men are becoming more family-focused, are they more likely to imagine themselves as a future economic provider?
In addition to women’s anticipated adoption of provider roles, we also considered their anticipation of becoming the primary caregiver to their children. On one hand, expecta- tions that men are becoming more involved in caregiving might lead women to feel less pressure to take on caregiving responsibilities themselves. However, we also recognize that social pressures and individual expectations surrounding motherhood are quite strong. For example, even when fathers are involved in childcare, women often find it difficult to give up the primary caregiver role and still manage how…
