Combining Gender, Work, and Family Identities: The Cross-Over and Spill-Over of Gender Norms into Young Adults’ Work and Family Aspirations

Abstract

The current study investigates how descriptive and prescriptive gender norms that communicate work and family identities to be (in)compatible with gender identities limit or enhance young men and women’s family and career aspirations. Results show that young adults (N = 445) perceived gender norms to assign greater compatibility between female and family identities and male and work identities than vice versa, and that young men and women mirror their aspirations to this traditional division of tasks. Spill-over effects of norms across life domains and cross-over effects of norms across gender-groups indicated that young women, more than young men, aimed to ‘have it all’: mirroring their career ambitions to a male career model, while keeping their family aspirations high. Moreover, young women opposed traditional role divisions in the family domain by decreasing their family aspirations in face of norms of lower family involvement or higher career involvement of men. Conversely, in line with traditional gender roles, young men showed lower family aspirations in the face of strong male career norms; and showed increases in their career aspirations when perceiving women to take up more family roles. Young men’s family aspirations were, however, more influenced by new norms prescribing men to invest more in their family, suggesting opportunities for change. Together, these findings show that through social norms, young adults’ gender identity affects aspirations for how to manage the co-presence of their work and family identities. Altering these norms may provide leverage for change to allow both men and women to combine their multiple identities in an enriching way.

Master Narratives, Gender Identity, Socialization Processes

“…In terms of the expectations for life course events, we saw gender differences for three events: choosing a career, and devoting energy to career advancement, and to childrearing ( Table 2). This is consistent with a traditional master narrative, as well as the normative division of labor in American households (Lindsey, 2015;Meeussen, Veldman, & Van Laar, 2016). In terms of personal experiences, men were more likely to align with a traditional master narrative, and women were more likely to align with an equality narrative.…”

Self-consistency in Bicultural Persons: Dialectical Self-beliefs Mediate the Relation between Identity Integration and Self-consistency

“…In the case of Asian Canadians, for instance, whether it is their higher levels of social anxiety (Hsu et al, 2012), experience of lower relational mobility (Zhang and Li, 2014), or compensatory conformity to the European Canadian norm (Tafarodi et al, 2002), there are likely more than one socio-cultural factor that account for those psychological characteristics. To be sure, depending on the form of culture, being bicultural could entail juggling any two or multiple important social identities, such as being a mother and being a career woman with contrastive prescriptions for what it means to succeed (Hodges and Park, 2013; Meeussen et al, 2016). Future research could examine if a similar process to what was found here operates at the intersection of social identities that are receiving increasing attention as social change progresses.…”

A multilevel perspective of the identity transition to motherhood

“…Meeussen, Veldman, and Van Laar (, p. 1781) revealed in their study on young adults’ work and family aspirations that ‘while young women's family aspirations were positively related to female career norms, their career aspirations were not related to female family norms’. This difference may be a result of high expectations for mothers (Johnston & Swanson, ).…”