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Gender, Work and Organization

10th Biennial International Interdisciplinary Conference 

Sydney, 13-16 June 2018

Social reproduction: Family upbringing, households and inequalities in work and organizations

Convenors

Mayra Ruiz Castro, Kingston Business School, UK 

Kathleen McGinn, Harvard Business School, USA 

Ioana Lupu, Queen Mary University, UK

Maria Daskalaki, Roehampton University, UK 

Marc Grau-Grau, Harvard Kennedy School, USA

Individuals do not enter organizations as a completely 'blank slate' (Porter, Lawlor, & Hackman, 1975). They bring with them a set of dispositions and expectations formed as a result of socialization in the family and larger community. However, research has traditionally focused on gendered work practices and individual characteristics to study inequalities at work and paid less attention to non-organizational factors affecting women's and men's engagement with and experiences in paid work, including family upbringing and household dynamics. This gap limits our understanding of the complexity of inequalities in work and organizations.

According to anticipatory socialization literature, the family has consistently been found to be the primary agent of work related values (Dekas & Baker, 2014; Jablin, 2000; Levine & Hoffner, 2006; Lucas, 2011; Medved, Brogan, McClanahan, Morris, & Shepherd, 2006). Children learn a great deal about work by observing their parents in work-related activities or by hearing their parents talk about their jobs (Levine & Hoffner, 2006). Parents often act as role models that serve as an indication to their children of what is possible and desirable (Bandura, 1977; Cunningham, 2001). For example, the small number of studies looking at the influence of maternal employment on adult children's employment outcomes have found that having been exposed to an employed mother positively affects adult daughters' employment  status,  earnings  and  supervisory status  (McGinn,  Ruiz Castro, & Lingo, 2015; Olivetti, Patacchini, & Zenou, 2016; Stinson & Gottschalk, 2016). On the other hand, a recent study suggests that working fathers in higher level occupations are more likely to increase the cultural capital of their children, by explaining their jobs to them (Grau-Grau, 2016). Looking at both female and male professionals, a study found that work-family balance decisions are grounded in individual history and dispositions embodied during one's upbringing (Lupu, Spence, & Empson, forthcoming). In this stream, we are interested in studying both maternal and paternal employment in more depth, for example, by identifying the effects of its type (e.g. formal/informal, low- skilled/highly-skilled, full-time/part-time, self-employed) and length on women's and men's later involvement in work and work-family decisions.

In line with feminist theorizing, paid work cannot be viewed in isolation from their social reproductive roles in the home and community (Nagar, Lawson, McDowell, & Hanson, 2002; Roberts, 2015). The study of inequalities must also pay attention to the productive and reproductive work performed within the household, with its gendered labour and familial mode of governance (Weeks, 2011). Household dynamics especially regarding the distribution of childcare and housework, affect the patterns of participation of women and men in organizations and modes of engagement with paid work. On average, women spend twice as much time on household work as men and four times as much time on childcare (Duflo, 2012), thereby 'freeing up time for male household members to participate in the formal labour force' (Elborgh-Woytek et al., 2013: 8). Yet, while women in dual-career couples experience higher levels of stress and overload than men (Moen & Yu, 2000), men involved in child care enjoy greater job satisfaction and work–family enrichment and lower levels of work–family conflict (Ladge, Humberd, Watkins, & Harrington, 2015), although recent empirical evidences also suggest that involved fathers might suffer femininity stigma and flexibility stigma in their workplaces (Rudman & Mescher, 2013; Vandello, Hettinger, Bosson, & Siddiqi, 2013). However, the aforementioned studies predominantly focus on traditional households, that is, married and heterosexual couples with children. In this stream, we want to go beyond traditional explorations of social reproduction, households and employment/careers by also paying attention to parents in families outside the heterosexual, two parent norm.