TY - JOUR
T1 - How individual gender role beliefs, organizational gender norms, and national gender norms predict parents’ work-family guilt in Europe
AU - Aarntzen, Lianne
AU - van der Lippe, Tanja
AU - van Steenbergen, Elianne
AU - Derks, Belle
N1 - Funding Information:
The research was supported by the European Research Council under the European Union?s Seventh Framework Programme (FP/2007-2013)/ERC Grant Agreement No. 340045, awarded to T. van der Lippe. This work was also supported by an NWO VIDI grant (016.155.391) awarded to B. Derks. We thank Bedriy? Kuyumcu for making Appendix A and B.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
PY - 2021/3/15
Y1 - 2021/3/15
N2 - The guilt that mothers feel about the time and energy that they invest in work instead of their family is often proposed to be an important reason for why mothers ‘opt-out’ the career track. We sought to understand if mothers indeed experience more workfamily guilt than fathers and how this relates to both their own gender role beliefs and organizational gender norms across nine European countries. Analyses draw on the European Social Workforce Survey, with data from 2619 working parents nested in 110 organizations in 9 European countries. Results showed that when fathers and mothers work more than a full-time week (a) fathers with traditional gender role beliefs felt less guilty, and (b) especially mothers working in an organization with low support for the parent role of working fathers felt guilty. Explorative analyses showed no effect of national gender norms on gender differences in guilt. Our results are beneficial for organizations and policy makers by showing that guilt in working mothers can be reduced by developing egalitarian organizational norms, in which there is support for the parent role of mothers and fathers, potentially helping mothers to focus on their careers alongside their families.
AB - The guilt that mothers feel about the time and energy that they invest in work instead of their family is often proposed to be an important reason for why mothers ‘opt-out’ the career track. We sought to understand if mothers indeed experience more workfamily guilt than fathers and how this relates to both their own gender role beliefs and organizational gender norms across nine European countries. Analyses draw on the European Social Workforce Survey, with data from 2619 working parents nested in 110 organizations in 9 European countries. Results showed that when fathers and mothers work more than a full-time week (a) fathers with traditional gender role beliefs felt less guilty, and (b) especially mothers working in an organization with low support for the parent role of working fathers felt guilty. Explorative analyses showed no effect of national gender norms on gender differences in guilt. Our results are beneficial for organizations and policy makers by showing that guilt in working mothers can be reduced by developing egalitarian organizational norms, in which there is support for the parent role of mothers and fathers, potentially helping mothers to focus on their careers alongside their families.
U2 - 10.1080/13668803.2020.1816901
DO - 10.1080/13668803.2020.1816901
M3 - Article
SN - 1366-8803
VL - 24
SP - 120
EP - 142
JO - Community, Work and Family
JF - Community, Work and Family
IS - 2
ER -