Work-family conflict & how we got here.

Have you ever really thought about why we have work-family conflict, and where this invisible force causing friction between work and family, actually originated?  Isn’t it just life, after all, and how did we get here?

According to sociologist Caitlyn Collins, work family conflict in the US is bound up in the powerful moral and cultural understandings of what it means to be a good worker and a good mother.

Ideologies in society develop over time and draw upon cultural constructions that happen over generations. These constructions, also called schemas, are the shared cultural models through which we view, understand, and go about our day-to-day living. These social and cultural models are what mold our thoughts, opinions, and behaviors even on a subconscious level.

In the US, mothers face an overwhelming pressure to perform what is termed “intensive mothering”. The historical cultural model here says that motherhood and marriage should be a woman’s primary and all absorbing commitment. Whether or not we consider ourselves to be modern thinking adults, and even if perhaps we shun this idea on paper, the reality is that this kind of thinking is deeply embedded into our subconscious psyche as part of gender and historical norms. In sociology, the intensive mothering ideal is part of what is called the “family-devotion construct” which is historically the bucket where mothers have been placed.

On the flip side is the “work-devotion construct”, which says that a good worker is fully devoted to his or her job.  It has also been coined the Ideal Worker Model which is still very much alive in the subconscious mind of hiring managers. The more we show that we are “devoted” to our work, the more we are given raises,  promotions, and a little extra runway to make mistakes. There is still a widespread reverence for the “ideal worker” who we commonly define as someone who starts working in early adulthood and continues full-time and full force, for 40 years straight. Research has also shown that the ideal worker is almost always seen, or pictured in the subconscious mind, as a white adult male who has a wife at home taking care of everything.

The concept reflects the breadwinner-homemaker model that dates back to the Industrial Revolution and worked fairly well through the 1960s until women were given freedoms to enter the formal workforce. At this point, women had to not only try and live up to the “ideal worker” norm to compete alongside their men, but they also had to keep up with their “intensive mothering” norms and household responsibilities as society expected.

To this day, modern workplaces still surprisingly operate with the understanding that there is someone at home taking care of all the family, household, and childcare needs, despite the numbers telling a different story. The facts today are that the numbers of working mothers and dual income families has been on a steady rise for the last 2 to 3 decades (*until, of course, the pandemic which forced nearly 3 million women and mothers out of the workforce).

As is evidenced by the pandemic, this model advantages men and disadvantages women. If we look deeper at the intersectionality of the data, we also know that the ideal worker model disadvantages both men and women of color as well.

So, the origin of work family conflict makes much more sense when we look at it through a historic socio-cultural lens. 

Plain and simple, working mothers are faced with competing devotions – women who are committed to career are thought to violate the family-devotion model and women who are committed to mothering are somehow letting society down by not embracing the work freedoms that have been granted to them. It’s a conflict with little way out unless things change.

As modern thinking humans who believe in gender equality and equity at home and work, the continuation of these outdated models can all sound pretty ridiculous but the reality is that they still exist in all their fullness. Our long lasting historical and social constructions don’t just disappear in an instant, and must continue to be addressed head on for cultural norms to shift. Until organizations can embrace the fact that it is imperative for both men and women to better integrate work and home life, and until we have greater equity at home with our partners around unpaid work and childcare, we will continue to have conflict between work and family.

So, yes, this is how we got here.