Not up to the task: perceptions of women and men with work-family conflicts

Conversations about work-family conflict are commonplace. However, most of the conversation is based on how individuals can best manage work and family demands. Little is known about how others perceive and react towards individuals who go through this experience. Building on theories of social evaluation and stereotype maintenance, we hypothesized that due to gender stereotypes, which prescribe the ideal woman as highly invested in family and the ideal man as highly invested in work, women who experience work interference with family (WIF) and men who experience family interference with work (FIW) would elicit negative reactions. Results of three experimental studies (N-Study1 = 569; N-Study2 = 299; N-Study3 = 275) and a field study (N = 219) provided only limited evidence for this assumption. However, they consistently showed across all four studies that both men and women who experience FIW were systematically judged and treated less favourably compared to employees with WIF, by observers and their supervisors, on several work-related dimensions (agency, dominance, respect, promotability, work performance, reward allocations). However, they were judged to be the better parents. We discuss the implications of our findings for work-family conflict research.