In recent decades, women's participation in the labor force has risen significantly and occupational sex segregation has declined modestly. Although most women are still employed in traditionally feminine fields (e.g., nursing, teaching, social work), approximately one in three seek occupations traditionally assigned to males, such as engineer, physician, or lawyer. As a result of the influx of women into all areas of the workforce, the ways in which men and women balance career and family responsibilities has been an ongoing topic of scholarly inquiry. Dual career marriages offer a revealing glimpse into the evolution of gender roles in our relationships and in larger society. Much of the research in this area has focused on the relationships among gender, employment and the allocation of household tasks.
Because most researchers have conceptualized household labor solely in terms of physical tasks, the emotional work that takes place in the home has been largely neglected. Historically, emotion work has been defined both as the management of one's own feelings and the feelings of others in social interactions. But more recently, emotion work has been defined as "work done in a conscious effort to maintain the well being of a relationship" and is exemplified by engaging in behaviors such as praising one's partner, confiding innermost thoughts and feelings to one's partner, and raising problems on which the couple needs to work.
Harvey, Cook, Starrels, and Berger conducted a study that investigated the ability of gender, marital satisfaction, and occupational sex composition to predict performance levels of emotion work and household labor. Occupational sex composition refers to the proportion of persons in an occupation who are female or male. Emotion work is the effort that is invested in providing emotional support and reassurance in a relationship.The data were collected from questionnaires mailed to members of dual-earner marriages. Multiple regression analyses were conducted, and results indicate that:
In this study, marital satisfaction, occupational sex composition, and number of children combined to account for 42% of the variance in respondent's emotion work scores. Gender, occupational sex composition, number of children, and hours per week employed combined to account for 26% of the variance in household labor. Although gender has been correlated with emotion work levels in previous studies, it was not a significant predictor of emotion work levels with this sample.
The findings indicated that irrespective of gender, persons in predominately female occupations perform more domestic labor than those in predominantly male occupations. Also marital satisfaction is strongly related to emotion work only. In contrast to previous research, this study did not find marital satisfaction to predict household labor. Finally, greater numbers of children are associated with more household labor, and longer employment hours are linked to lower levels of household labor for both husbands and wives.
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