The Job Costs of Family Demands: Gender Differences in Negative Family-To-Work Spillover

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

4-2005

Publication Title

Journal of Family Issues

Volume

26

Issue

3

First page number:

275

Last page number:

299

Abstract

This article uses the 1992 National Study of the Changing Workforce to examine family and workplace factors contributing to gender differences in negative family-to-work spillover. We focus on spillover as manifested when family demands negatively affect job performance. Among married workers, women were twice as likely as men to report that family demands negatively affect their job performance. This finding is due, in part, to the fact that women made more adjustments to their workloads—such as refusing overtime or turning down assignments—for the sake of family. Ordered probit analysis suggests that job characteristics are more salient than family factors for predicting the likelihood that family demands will detract from job performance and for explaining the gender gap in negative family-to-work spillover. Working in a demanding job or having little job autonomy was associated with more negative family-to-work spillover regardless of gender, while greater scheduling flexibility mitigated the gender gap.

Keywords

Dual-career families; Dual-earner couples; Family-to-work spillover; Gender; Job characteristics; Job performance; Quality of work life; Sex differences; Work and family; Work-life balance

Disciplines

Family, Life Course, and Society | Sociology | Work, Economy and Organizations

Language

English

Permissions

Use Find in Your Library, contact the author, or use interlibrary loan to garner a copy of the article. Publisher copyright policy allows author to archive post-print (author’s final manuscript). When post-print is available or publisher policy changes, the article will be deposited

Publisher Citation

Keene, J. R., & Reynolds, J. R. (2005). The job costs of family demands. Journal of Family Issues, 26(3), 275-299. doi:10.1177/0192513X04270219

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