Social Roles We Choose and Don't Choose: Impressions of Employed and Unemployed Parents

Abstract

The current experiment was designed to examineimpressions of persons who would be parents in the nearfuture and who would be in a breadwinning or exclusivelycaregiving role. Participants, who were students from a private college with a primarily whitestudent body, read a brief description of a targetperson expecting the arrival of a child. The targetperson anticipated either being employed or staying at home to care for the baby. Future employmentstatus was described as being either freely chosen ornot freely chosen. Impressions were consistent withEagly's (1987) social role theory of gender differences in social behavior and with researchdemonstrating the fundamental attribution error (Ross,1977). Participants rated persons who expected to stayat home with their child as being more communal and less agentic than persons who expected to beemployed, even when employment status was not freelychosen. Male participants gave higher approval ratingsto females who expected to stay at home with theirchildren, and female participants gave higher approvalratings to males who expected to stay at home with theirchildren.