Page 195 - Discrimination at Work The Psychological and Organizational Bases

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CLEVELAND, VESC1O, BARNES-FARRELL
expectation of a gendered work environment is that workforce members
will have continuous employment; those with gaps or "interruptions" in
employment tend to be less valued and less rewarded, which immediately
places many women at a disadvantage.
Finally, despite a general awareness that family structures have changed,
most work is still structured with the implicit assumption that the prevail­
ing family structure includes one earner and one stay-at-home person. To-
day's family structures are diverse, yet one fact is clear: The single-earner,
stay-at-home wife is the minority type of family structure. In traditional
married families, often both adults work, not by choice but by economic
necessity; dual earners frequently must juggle taking care of young chil­
dren. In addition, a sizable proportion of families are permanent single par­
ent families and an even larger segment are single parent families for some
period of time. The normative structures of work ignore the reality of these
family structures. Further, the division of labor within households is not
taken into consideration in typical work structures. As discussed in the next
section, women in paid employment continue to put greater numbers of
hours in both childcare and household chores than men (Crouter, Bumpus,
Head, & McHale, 2001). In dual-earner families, men may increase their
time with their children (compared to single-earner families), but their time
spent on household chores is roughly the same as single-earner families. It
is difficult to obtain an accurate picture of gender discrimination at work
until we understand the "tilted" playing field that exists within families.
Gendered Family Work: Family and Workplace Discrimination Work roles
and family roles often place competing demands on an individual's time
and attention. There is substantial evidence that when the demands of
work and family come into conflict, women are much more likely to re­
duce or adjust their work roles than men (Crouter et al., 2001). Women still
provide considerably more childcare and housework, even when they are
part of the paid labor force (Bianchi, 2000). However, one U.S. study demon­
strated that husbands' participation in family work reflected their wives'
employment level, such that husbands completed a more equal share of
housework when their wives had a career as opposed to a job (Dancer &
Gilbert, 1993). In both U.S. and European samples, it has been shown that
the addition of a child increases the total amount of work (the combination
of paid work and unpaid housework) for mothers, more so than fathers
(Sanchez & Thomson, 1997). Women also shoulder a greater proportion of
the responsibility for tasks associated with care of elderly parents (their
own and their spouse's), indicating that the disproportionately increased
workload does not appear to be limited to women of child-bearing age.
This is significant because when the total workload becomes work
"overload," it should be expected that the kinds of negative consequences