Abstract
This research explored identity conflict among aspiring professionals, and the association between this conflict and anticipated difficulty in managing parent and career roles. Women (n = 281) and men (n = 300) enrolled in advanced degree programs in the United States completed implicit (session 1) and explicit (session 2) measures of work and parent identity strength. Women identified more strongly with the parent role on the implicit measure, but with the career role on the explicit measure. The degree to which their identities shifted across measures predicted how much conflict they anticipated in navigating parent and professional roles. Anticipated conflict in turn predicted poorer outcomes on an aggregate measure of health and well-being and accounted for (mediated) the gender difference on this outcome. Having a mother who worked, and perceiving greater equality in gender roles, were associated with lower levels of expected role-conflict for women students. The findings speak to the role cultural stereotypes continue to play in generating greater identity conflict for women, but also to avenues for combatting inequality through the normalization of women in professional roles and men in parenting roles.
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Data, Materials, Code: All data, analysis code, and research materials are available at: https://osf.io/kwf7s/?view_only=8397a015a80a424fbfa73bb86749435d
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This research was supported by National Institute of Child and Human Development Grant R21058176A and by National Science Foundation Grant NSF1551099, both awarded to Bernadette Park.
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The first two authors designed and executed the study. All three authors contributed to data analyses, to discussions regarding the findings, and to the writing of the manuscript.
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Data Transparency Appendix
Data Transparency Appendix
The data and statistical analyses reported in this manuscript have not been previously published although a brief summary of several findings was included as part of a review article (Park & Banchefsky, 2019). The review article covered a large number of studies and findings and was 52 published pages. The findings reported in this manuscript that appear in the review article include: (1) the data in the right portion of Fig. 1; these appear as part of a figure that includes data from other studies discussed in the review article; (2) a table reporting the regression coefficients for student gender, ESRC, and their interactions in predicting the individual health and well-being measures included in Fig. 3 but not the SEM analyses included in this manuscript; and (3) a brief 1.5 page text description summarizing the results on work hour accommodations with no descriptive or inferential statistics, and a similarly brief (1 page) text-only description of the implicit-to-explicit identity shifting results. The Quad Modeling results included in the supplemental materials are also described in the chapter.
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Park, B., Hodges, A.J. & McPherson, E. Culture’s Clashing Identities: Gendered Differences in Anticipated Role Conflict for Students in Graduate Degree Programs. Sex Roles 89, 311–327 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-023-01400-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-023-01400-x