The lives of women and men, the relationships that they establish, and their work have changed dramatically in the past 50 years, but the dominant theories driving research in these areas have not. In this article, the authors argue that the facts underlying the assumptions of the classical theories of gender and multiple roles have changed so radically as to make the theories obsolete. Moreover, a large body of empirical data fails to support the predictions flowing from these theories. Yet the development of new theory for guiding research and clinical practice has not kept pace. The authors attempt to fill this theoretical gap by reviewing the research literature and articulating an expansionist theory of gender, work, and family that includes four empirically derived and empirically testable principles better matched to today's realities.

This article illustrates new statistical methods for the study of psychological change in married couples. The design involves time-series data on each partner. The analysis combines longitudinal methods for studies of individual change with cross-sectional methods for the study of matched pairs. Each person is viewed as changing over time as a function of an individual growth curve or change function. As in previous studies of individual change, a person's trajectory depends on time-invariant personal background characteristics and time-varying changes in the environment. However, unlike typical studies of individual change, a person's changing psychological profile depends, in part, on the influence of that person's partner. These methods apply directly to other types of longitudinal studies on families (e.g., studies that use teacher and parent reports of a child's social behavior). The methodology is flexible in allowing randomly missing data, varying spacing of time points, unbalanced designs, and time-varying and time-invariant covariates.

Women's involvement in multiple roles was examined in relation to three stress indices: role overload, role conflict, and anxiety. Using hierarchical multiple regression analyses, effects of number of roles occupied; occupancy of the particular roles of paid worker, wife, and mother; and the quality of a woman's experience in her roles were analyzed. Data were from a disproportionate stratified random sample (N = 238) of Caucasian women between 35 and 55 years of age. For the total sample and for employed women, occupancy of the role of mother was related to two stress indices; occupancy of the role of paid worker was related to none. The quality of experience in the work and parental roles was a significant predictor of role overload; quality of parental role experience was a significant predictor of role conflict and of anxiety.

Compared with female faculty without children and compared with men, female faculty with children face major obstacles in academic careers. Some of these obstacles can be easily modified (for example, by eliminating after-hours meetings and creating part-time career tracks). Medical schools should address these obstacles and provide support for faculty with children.

Women's occupancy of the social roles of paid worker, wife, and mother, and the quality of their experience in these three roles, were examined in relation to psychological well-being. Data were from a disproportionate random sample (N -238) of Caucasian women ages 35 to 55. Well-being was measured by indices of self-esteem, depression, and pleasure; pleasure was assessed by a scale consisting of single-item measures of happiness, satisfaction, and optimism. Role quality was measured by scales developed for this study that assessed the balance between the positive and negative attributes women perceived in their roles. Hierarchical regression analyses controlling for age, education, and income indicated that role occupancy per se was unrelated to well-being with one exception: occupying the role of paid worker significantly predicted self-esteem. In contrast, the three role quality variables were significant predictors of the well-being indices, with one exception: quality of experience in the role of mother did not predict pleasure. Overall, the findings suggest the importance of qualitative rather than quantitative aspects of role involvement and the need to examine different dimensions of well-being in relation to social roles.In a review of the literature on women's social roles, Long and Porter (1984) point to the existence of a kind of sex segregation in research and theory on multiple roles. For men, multiple roles have been seen as beneficial; Gove and Tudor (1973), for example, attributed the better mental health of men compared to women to their participation in both family and paid work roles. The topic of "dual roles," in contrast, has been seen as a woman's issue; for women, the role of paid worker is assumed to be added on to the normative condition of being a wife, mother, and homemaker. Role overload, role conflict, guilt, anxiety, and other hazards are expected to follow, resulting in impaired well-being. Two major hypotheses have been put forward concerning the relation of role involvement to well-being. The "scarcity" hypothesis (Marks, 1977), put forth by Goode (1960) and others, assumes that the social structure normally creates overly demanding role obligations, the more so the more roles one occupies. Because human energy is limited, well-being is impaired by the overload and conflict inherent in numerous, often incompatible roles. In contrast to this view, the "enhancement" hypothesis (Marks, 1977;Sieber, 1974) emphasizes the benefits rather than the costs of multiple role involvement: status, privileges, increased self-esteem, the ability to trade off undesirable components of roles. Like placing one's eggs in many baskets,

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Despite substantial increases in the number of female faculty, reports of gender-based discrimination and sexual harassment remain common.

This article examines the association between job role quality and psychological distress in a sample of 300 full-time employed dual-earner couples, controlling for such individual level variables as age, education, occupational prestige, and marital quality and for such couple level variables as length of marriage, parental status, and household income. The magnitude of this effect is compared for men and for women. Results indicate that job role quality is significantly negatively associated with psychological distress for women as well as for men and that the magnitude of the effect depends little, if at all, on gender, casting doubt on the widely held view that job experiences more significantly influence men's mental health states than women's. The results are discussed in the context of differentiating between sex differences and gender differences.