Paid Worker Role and Health 455higher-quality, more affordable, more widely
available childcare; flexible work hours; and
family-leave policies. All those improvements
are needed, but they fail to question the way
the problem is framed. They do not ask why
combining work and family is a female prob-
lem rather than a human problem, and thus
do not address it as a human problem” (p. 45).
Conduct Do Gender 12.2 to find out
for yourself what difficulties women and
men face when combining the paid worker
role with family roles.TAKE HOME POINTS
■ Multiple roles are good for both women’s and men’s
health.
■ There is greater support for the role expansion hypoth-
esis than for the role scarcity hypothesis. Roles provide
resources, and having more roles buffers us from the
strains that arise in any one role. The fewer roles we
have, the greater the effect that strain in any one role
will have on health.
■ The paid worker role and family role can both buffer
one from the distress associated with the other role as
well as exacerbate stressors that are associated with
other roles.The third tension is one that pervades
egalitarian couples who are heavily involved
in work outside the home. Husbands and
wives in these couples jointly devalue family
responsibilities to justify spending more time
on their careers. The egalitarian philosophy
leads such couples to share responsibilities
such that less time is devoted to home and
family—less time on housework, less time
with children, less time with each other—and
someone is hired to take care of most house-
hold tasks (cooking, cleaning, and child care).
The ideas about what a family needs change
to accommodate the couple’s egalitarian fo-
cus on careers. This issue reminds me of a
dual-earner couple I know who adopted two
children. After the first child was in preschool,
the husband proudly remarked to me that he
had never even met the preschool teacher or
attended any of the preschool programs for
parents because the nanny took care of all of
these chores. After the second child, the cou-
ple asked the nanny to move in with them.
The husband shared that he and his wife slept
downstairs while the nanny slept in a room
upstairs with the children, which was won-
derful because the nanny could console the
children at night. Hochschild (1989) calls it a
hollow victory “if the work of raising a fam-
ily becomes devalued because women have
become equal to men on traditionally male
terms” (p. 211). The homemaker role is now
being devalued by both women and men.
One way to increase the value of this role is
for men to become more involved in house-
hold labor and child care.
Although a great many changes have
been made over the past several decades
in terms of work and family roles, in some
ways our fundamental way of thinking about
men and women has not changed. Accord-
ing to Valian (1998), “... the usual solutions
proffered to solve ‘women’s’ problems areDO GENDER 12.2
Combining RolesInterview a group of women and men who
have combined the paid worker role with
family roles—preferably, people who have
children. Ask specific questions about the
challenges that they have faced in combin-
ing roles.M12_HELG0185_04_SE_C12.indd 455 6/21/11 9:16 AM