A temporary solution to the two-body problem: How gender norms disadvantage women in commuting couples.

Abstract

Based on interviews with 31 academics and 5 nonacademic partners, this article explores the experiences of academics in commuting couples, or those who live apart for work-related reasons. Using identity theory as a guide, this article explores how participants navigate their competing identities of academic and partner (and, for some, parent) to determine how to best accommodate their personal and professional obligations. Although commuting offered participants an opportunity to prioritize their professional identity, women in opposite-gender couples particularly struggled with the arrangement as they felt it came into conflict with their responsibilities and roles as mothers.

The Impact of COVID-19 on Women and Work: Career Advancement Challenges

“…A related challenge that women face in advancing their careers is the difficulty of balancing the expectations of their professional lives with family responsibilities, particularly with the continued lack of family-friendly policies and practices in organizations today. Some of the literature has discussed the incompatibility of work expectations with family life [37][38][39][40]. Further, Deming [37] found that women often face a penalty for having families because they feel a need to cut back on hours to meet family obligations, which prevents them from career progression.…”

“…Identity theory, especially as Stryker conceptualizes it, addresses the question regarding systemic inequalities for women in the workplace [38,45,46]. Identity theory suggests that people have complex identities and that a single person can often identify with multiple roles.…”

“…For example, a person may maintain the roles of a friend, a parent, a spouse, and a worker. Stryker's identity theory suggests that the social expectations and social networks surrounding individuals may make some identity roles more salient [38,45,46]. In considering systemic gender inequality in the workplace, one could infer that many working mothers might be drawn to identify more closely with the parent role over the worker role, both because of how they have been socialized and because of the present expectations of their social networks.…”

“…Thus, without large-scale changes to these social expectations and reinforcement of those changes, men may tend to focus singularly on work roles more than women do, which can translate into greater advancement and compensation opportunities for men in the longer term. In contrast, women who have children may feel less inclined to focus on the worker role because of the social expectations and networks that reinforce their connection to parenting roles [38].…”

Hierarchies and paradoxes: How women in non-tenure-track faculty positions experience a gendered organization.

“…Fourth, the preceding processes contribute to individuals' gender performance. Men and women in organizations internalize gendered messages in their identities and presentation of themselves (Acker, 1990;Sallee, 2021), often enacting ideal worker norms where workers are expected to be or behave as cisgender men available to work untethered from domestic tasks (Williams, 2001). When women act in traditionally feminine ways, such as expressing empathy or being accommodating, these behaviors are viewed as undercutting the business of the organization (Acker, 1990;Lester, 2008).…”