UTCJSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. American Sociological Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to American Sociological Review. This paper examines the process by which married men and women form and balance work and family identities. Hypotheses derived from alternative conceptualizations of the commitment process are tested with data from the 1977 Quality of Employment Survey. We find thatfor both men and women, engagement in work and family roles leads to identification with those roles. However, the process of identity formation differs for men and women in ways that correspond to gender-based differentiation in household and workplace activities. Married women employed outside the home give precedence to family in balancing work and family identities, while married men may have the discretion to build identification with work and family roles without trading one off against the other. Despite differences in the process of commitment formation, our results suggest that when men and women engaged in similar work and family roles they are almost equally committed to those roles. and labor force activities, while work in the human capital tradition attempts to understand the decision-making process that leads to an allocation of time and effort to work and family roles (e.g., Mincer and Polachek 1974;Becker 1981Becker , 1985England and Farkas 1986). Sociologists have examined the consequences of women's dual roles in terms of role strain or "overload" (e.g., Rapoport and Rapoport 1969; Scanzoni 1978; Geerken and Gove 1983). However, the personal bases upon which individuals choose to allocate time and other personal resources between work and family spheres has received far less attention (Aldous 1982;Johnson and Firebaugh 1985;Kanter 1976;Pleck 1983). As individuals allocate time and energy to work and family roles, they come to identify with those roles. Labor force and family behaviors build commitments to work and family identities. Those commitments in turn provide the personal bases for attributing meaning to dual roles, identifying conflict between them, and forming intentions regarding future role behaviors. Accordingly, in this paper, we examine the process by which married men and women form and balance work and family identities. CONCEPTUALIZING COMMITMENTCommitment has been defined as the binding of an individual to behavioral acts (Kiesler 776

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Both economists and sociologists have documented the association between gender and career outcomes. Men are more likely than women to participate in the labor force, and men average more hours of paid labor per week and more weeks per year. Women and men tend to hold different occupations and to work in different industries, firms and jobs. Furthermore, men outearn women, hold more complex jobs and are more likely to supervise workers of the other sex and to dominate the top positions in their organization.The challenge for both disciplines lies not in showing that gender is linked to employment outcomes, but in explaining the associations. Economists have sought explanations in the characteristics and preferences of individual workers or employers. Some have attributed the associations between workers' sex and their career outcomes to sex differences in training and experience, career commitment or competing demands on time and energy. Others focus on employers' preferences for workers of one sex over the other ("taste discrimination") or on employers' beliefs that workers of one sex or the other are more costly or less profitable to employ ("statistical discrimination").The sociological approach differs from that of economists in recognizing sex segregation as a causal mechanism that gives rise to other differences between women's and men's careers. This emphasis on segregation reflects sociologists' interest in the ramifications of societal-level systems of differentiation and stratification. It stems also from the discipline's concern with the impact of people's location in social structures on a variety of life outcomes. By concentrating men and women in different jobs, segregation exposes them to more or less similar employment y Barbara F. Reskin is S. Frank Miyamoto Professor of Sociology,

Recent developments in human capital theory suggest that men and women differ in how they allocate effort to work activities. This paper uses the 1973 and 1977 Quality of Employment Surveys to test the assumption that women allocate less effort to work because of their family and household responsibilities. Regression and ordered probit analyses show that, on average, women allocate more effort to work than do men. Further, the sex difference is substantial when men and women with comparable family situations and market human capital are compared. The paper discusses how experiments on sex differences in standards of "personal entitlement" and research on sex-segregated workplaces provide an alternative to the economists' perspective. Finally, the paper argues for an integration of human capital models, research on social equity, and structural theories of work organization in order to provide a more complete explanation of men's and women's orientations toward work and family. ARE MEN BETTER OFF AT WORK BECAUSE THEY WORK HARDER?Over the past several decades, discrepancies between men and women in certain "human capital" investments have decreased. Women, for example, increasingly train for and compete in male-dominated professions,