In examining factors relating to how married couples make work and family decisions, we discovered that gender and marriages are constructed and, in turn, reconstructed through the decisions couples make about work and family. We qualitatively analyzed longitudinal data gathered from 61 couples who made a work and family decision. Husbands and wives provided information concerning their marriages in general and their work and family decision-making process in particular. We took a feminist critical stance on what couples considered as they faced the decision, and how their considerations were related to aspects of their relationship. The focus of this article is to illuminate how married couples construct gender and their marriages through their decisions concerning work and family. Building on decision-making research and feminist critiques of marital roles, we scrutinize work and family decisions. We show how interpersonal processes--those underlying and emergent patterns of interaction in intimate relationships--are experienced in ways that reflect the couples' construction of gender in their interpersonal lives and how that construction impacts the process of decision making. Through qualitative analysis, we illuminate how important the couples' own construction of gender and their marriages is in explaining the decisions they make and the ways those decisions change or cement their ideas about gender and about marriage. Thus, this research is aimed at providing a more complete understanding of why couples make the decisions they do regarding work and family. How is it that couples continue to make decisions that, from an economic standpoint, simultaneously disadvantage women and overburden men? The answer to this question points to how decisions that couples make about work and family perpetuate patriarchy. REVIEW OF LITERATURE The Gender Perspective and Construction of Marriage The gender perspective sees gender as produced in everyday activities (Ferree, 1990; West & Zimmerman, 1987). Rather than describing gender as an individual property based on biology, the gender perspective focuses on how people in their interactions with others come to perceive each other and each other's behaviors as gender appropriate or inappropriate. Stemming from symbolic interaction theory, the gender perspective views interactants as striving to create meaning out of their behaviors and the behaviors of others. Through this process of deriving meaning from interaction, the behaviors of men and women are seen as diametrically different (West & Zimmerman, 1987). Particularly important for the study of married couples making decisions, gender is socially constructed and embedded in social contexts and processes through a system of boundaries that help to define what is appropriate for each gender, and through self-concepts, beliefs, and expectations for behavior (Potuchek, 1992; Risman & Schwartz, 1989; Thompson, 1993). Seen in this light, the ways that couples make work and family decisions and the outcomes of those decisions have implications for how gender and marriages are constructed for individual couples and for the larger society. Rather than surmising that married women are forced into unrewarding jobs and are constrained by their family obligations, the gender perspective suggests a deeper look into the processes through which couples make the decisions that result in women's economic marginalization and women's second shift in the household (Hochschild, 1989). What sorts of marital behaviors are gendered? In terms of responsibility, we know that men typically have responsibility for bread winning; women typically bear responsibility for home care, including housework, dependent care, and attentive care and emotional labor (Hood, 1983; Thompson, 1993). From a gender perspective, Potuchek (1992) suggests that these responsibilities are not passively stepped into by spouses; rather, role taking and role making are negotiated and renegotiated throughout marital interaction as an active and contentious process of constructing gender boundaries (p. …