Internalised gender stereotypes can lead to working mums feeling higher guilt than working dads, suggests research.
The Netherlands-based study also found that the more parents implicitly associate women with family, and men with work, the more guilt mothers experience, and the less guilt fathers experience when work interferes with family time.
In the study, published in the British Psychological Society’s British Journal of Social Psychology,105 mothers with at least one child aged 13 years or younger completed a daily diary assessing how many hours they’d worked, and how much work-family conflict and work-family guilt they’d experienced throughout the day. On the days they worked longer hours, women reported feeling guiltier and experienced more work-family conflict. This was more the case among mothers with more traditional stereotypes of a women’s role compared to those who held less-traditional stereotypes.
The study also asked 135 mothers and 116 fathers to consider an imaginary work-family conflict situation in which they were unable to stay home from work to take care of their sick child while their partner was able to stay home with the child. They then had to assess how guilty they expected they would feel in such a scenario. Mothers on average reported higher guilt than fathers while the stronger the implicit gender stereotypes held by fathers, the less guilt they reported feeling.
Lianne Aarntzen from the University of Twente, and lead author of the study, said: “Our research highlights that these gender stereotypes do not only shape evaluations of others but also shape how parents themselves feel about their work-family choices.”