When women work outside the home, families actually benefit, a recent study by a UW-Madison professor found.
In a paper published in the magazine American Psychologist, UW-Madison professor Janet Hyde, along with Brandeis University psychologist Rosalind Barnett said expanded social roles for both men and women are beneficial to families, contrary to previous theories about women in the workplace.
Hyde said many benefits come from women working outside the home, including added income.
“The added income to the family [is] not a trivial matter,” she said. “There are a number of families that can’t live on one income.”
Hyde said the lack of a second income is a major factor of stress in families.
UW sociology professor Aimee Dechter agreed income, or lack of income, can cause family stress.
“Income is an important factor in the development of children and the relationship between partners,” she said. “Economic stress is one cause of instability.”
The report also said working outside the home provides more support from different social networks.
“If you’re home full time you don’t have many people you interact with,” Hyde said. “If you work and have a life at home, you have more people to support you to help you through those hard times.”
Another benefit from expanded social roles is a balance between work and home. The study said when something goes wrong in one social role, dissatisfaction can be offset by success in another.
Conversely, Hyde and Barnett said taking on too many roles caused stress in the family.
Hyde said after so much time dedicated to more roles they can handle, “people start feeling psychological distress.” She said there should be a limit in both the number of roles and time dedicated to each one in order to ensure satisfaction.
“More roles are good,” she said. “But they probably get more benefits out of forty hours a week outside the house rather than ninety.”
Barnett and Hyde researched data collected over the past twenty years by previous studies.
The researchers used resources from both UW and Brandeis University. Their data showed improved health in women when they had a positive attitude toward their jobs.
Since the 1950s, the nature of gender roles in society has changed drastically. With the women’s rights movement in the 1970s more women have left traditional roles as stay-at-home mothers to join the workplace.
Previous theories about gender and social roles held that women going into the workplace and neglecting their traditional roles as homemakers caused familial stress.
Hyde said most of these theories, many formulated in the 1950s, were flawed and outdated.
“The problem is that some previous theorists have put forward theories … that they said were universal, meaning they pertained to all cultures,” she said.
The study mentions that its theories only pertain to the current sociological state of men and women, which changes over the years and does not represent every culture.
Dechter also stressed that sociological trends change over time.
“I think [society] is always evolving, so research is never timeless,” she said.
“Society is always changing. Various social phenomena appear, and some disappear and reappear.”
