Understanding contemporary beliefs and ideals pertaining to work, family, and gender.
Ideas about the meaning of work, about families and caregiving, and about men and women are deeply rooted in our culture. These ideas don’t just characterize individuals. They also are aspects of families, organizations, and communities. But as our economy and society changes, so do cultural beliefs, and their potential effects on workers and families. Therefore, our lab conducts work that is motivated by questions like:
- What are Americans’ cultural beliefs, expectations, and personal ideals when it comes to work, family, and gender? Are they changing over time and if so, how?
- How do cultural beliefs shape work-family aspirations and the structures, practices and use of technology in organizations and families?
How Technology Intensifies Cultural Demands for Workers and Parents
Christine Beckman's book, Dreams of the Overworked, is a close look at nine families operating in a technology-enabled world where boundaries between the personal and the professional are frequently blurred. She and her co-author, Melissa Mazmanian, describe how technology and cultural beliefs shape aspirations to be Ideal Workers, Perfect Parents and Ultimate Bodies, as well as document the scaffolds of support developed by families in their efforts to manage these intense expectations.
Read more about Christine Beckman and Melissa Mazmanian's Dreams of the Overworked in recent coverage in The Atlantic.
Women are Judged More Harshly for Messy Homes
This study shows that women are still judged more harshly for a messy home compared to men. Using an experimental survey, Sarah Thébaud and her co-authors find that men and women respondents do not objectively perceive degrees of mess any differently, nor do they differ in their interpretation of how urgent it is to clean it up. Importantly however, all respondents held women to higher standards of cleanliness and expressed more negative perceptions of them based on the tidiness of their homes. This research reveals that widely shared cultural expectations - which hold women to higher standards of cleanliness than men - are a key factor that contributes to ongoing gender disparities in the time that individuals spend doing unpaid domestic labor.
Read more about this research in coverage by The New York Times and The Conversation.