Relationship satisfaction and concordance in attitudes to maternal employment in British couples with young children

Lauren Bird,Amanda Sacker,Anne Mcmunn

doi:10.1177/0265407520919987

Lauren Bird, Amanda Sacker + Show 1 more

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https://doi.org/10.1177/0265407520919987

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Abstract

Changes in paid labor in families have occurred within the wider context of societal changes in gendered attitudes to work. However, changes in behavior and attitudes are not necessarily correlated with each other, and their associations with family relationships are complex. This study uses data from over 12,000 two-parent families in the U.K.’s Millennium Cohort Study, a nationally representative cohort of children born during 2000–2002. The study investigates the potential association between relationship satisfaction and discordance between attitudes to maternal employment and mothers’ actual participation in paid labor, as well as agreement in attitudes within couples. Results show that attitudes in favor of maternal employment and actual maternal employment are generally associated with better relationship satisfaction for both mothers and fathers. In addition, discordance between an individual’s attitudes and behavior in relation to maternal employment, and discordant attitudes within couples, is both associated with significantly lower relationship satisfaction compared with concordant couples.

Highlights

The phrase gender attitudes is used to encapsulate a variety of beliefs and attitudes that form part of an individual’s gender ideology—or belief system—about behaviors which have been socially attributed to one gender or the other, such as expectations of masculine and feminine behaviors, beliefs regarding “separate spheres” for men and women, male privilege, the primacy of men in community and familial leadership, and family gender roles (Davis & Greenstein, 2009)
For both mothers and fathers, more negative attitudes toward maternal employment were associated with decreasing relationship satisfaction
Similar to their study, we found that men with traditional gender attitudes who were coupled with women who held egalitarian attitudes had the lowest relationship satisfaction; we found this to be the case for traditional women coupled with egalitarian men, perhaps because our sample was not limited to dual-earner households

Summary

Introduction

The phrase gender attitudes is used to encapsulate a variety of beliefs and attitudes that form part of an individual’s gender ideology—or belief system—about behaviors which have been socially attributed to one gender or the other, such as expectations of masculine and feminine behaviors, beliefs regarding “separate spheres” for men (public) and women (private), male privilege, the primacy of men in community and familial leadership, and family gender roles (Davis & Greenstein, 2009). One gender role expectation regularly included in social surveys is attitudes regarding maternal employment, which is often defined relative to the age of children, and only asked of mothers. The proportion who agree that a mother should stay at home when there is a child under school age decreased from nearly two third in 1989 to a third in 2012 (Park et al, 2013). The British Social Attitudes survey asked respondents what they believed to be the most and least desirable way for two parents to divide paid labor in a family with children under school age. Gender attitudes have shifted in broadly the same way in the U.S and in Britain over a similar time period, differences in worker rights and labor patterns between countries warrant investigations in a U.K. cohort (Gangl & Ziefle, 2009; Meagher & Shu, 2019)

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