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For many women, high-powered careers provide little respite from home-related work, and CU researchers are helping to explain why

Carol Greider was folding laundry at 5 one morning last October when the phone rang. After she hung up, she walked upstairs to rouse her two children.

As she told CNN, this is how she woke them: “I said, ‘By the way, I just won the Nobel Prize. You can go back to sleep now.’”

Greider, a molecular biologist at Johns Hopkins University, shared the 2009 Nobel Prize for Medicine with two other scientists. Four days later, President Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize. “I bet he wasn’t folding laundry,” she later told The Washington Post.

Neither Greider nor the president is an average person. But Greider could be seen as an everywoman, symbolizing those who balance burdens of work and home and make sacrifices men aren’t generally expected to make.

That’s one implication of research by Bernadette Park, a professor of psychology at the University of Colorado. Many studies have found that even as women have succeeded in historically male-dominated fields, they have not enjoyed a corresponding reduction in domestic work.

The research of Park and her colleagues helps to explain why.

Men and women may see their work and home lives as egalitarian. But how they act often differs from what they say they feel.

Even with their strides in the job market, many women still must, to some degree, choose career or family, Park says. “Having both is much more difficult for women than it is for men,” she adds.

One reason: Women are expected to perform household and family chores to a greater degree than are men, even when men and women are under equal job stress. These attitudes and expectations, Park shows, can be measured and compared.

Park and her colleagues measure the perceived “warmth” and “competence” of men and women. These perceived traits are a “subjective” gauge of gender perception. She and her colleagues compared the results of a subjective questionnaire to those of an “objective” questionnaire—one that asked about expected behaviors (rather than traits) of men vs. women.

Measuring people’s expectations gives a more candid picture of their deeply held beliefs, Park suggests.

In a 2008 article in the European Journal of Social Psychology, Park and colleagues J. Allegra Smith, a CU doctoral candidate, and Joshua Correll, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Chicago, surveyed 631 people at CU; 254 people completed a “subjective” questionnaire that identified “traits” of two hypothetical people “Lisa” or “Peter.”

“Lisa” and “Peter” were described as biomedical researchers with advanced degrees. They were described as married with two children and as working between 20 and 60 hours weekly.

Participants completing this questionnaire were asked to rate “Lisa’s” or “Peter’s” warmth-related traits (being warm, nurturing, good-natured or sincere). Subjects also rated “Lisa”/”Peter” on competence-related traits including being capable, skillful and efficient.

The hypothetical people who worked 40 hours a week (four 10-hour days a week) and cared for children three days a week were seen as most competent. Employees who worked more were seen as less warm. “Both of these effects were true to an equal extent for male and female targets,” the authors wrote.

Those results—how warm and competent men and women are perceived to be—differed sharply from what men and women are expected to do.

Another 377 people completed an “objective” questionnaire that identified the expected behaviors of “Lisa” or “Peter.” For instance, one question asked: “If one of Lisa’s children gets hurt, how often would they come to Lisa for support? _______ out of 10 possible times.”

When the hypothetical person was “Lisa,” the expectation was higher; when it was “Peter,” the expectation was lower.

“At a behavioral level, … the expectation remains that women perform a greater number of child-care and warmth-related behaviors than their male counterparts, even while maintaining an equivalent number of professional and work-related competence responsibilities,” Park and her colleagues write.

“Indeed, at every level of hours worked, the female protagonist was estimated to perform warmth-related behaviors at a higher frequency than the male protagonist,” they write.

Also, as the work hours increased, “Peter” was expected to perform correspondingly fewer child-care responsibilities than was an equally hard-working “Lisa.” Park and her colleagues add, “Looking at the objective measure of who does what … the data provide evidence that women ‘do it all.’”

In fact, a hypothetical “Lisa” who worked 60 hours per week was still expected to do an “average” amount of child-care, whereas the expectation for men was well below the “average” mark.

Park is continuing her work on gender-role dissimilarities through a $275,000 grant from the National Institute of Child and Human Development. Her latest research, not yet published, focuses on the perceived roles of moms and dads.

“There we would argue that there’s a minimal shift in (in long-held attitudes about) what moms should do and what dads should do,” Park says.

Generally speaking, dads are still seen as family leaders and disciplinarians, serving the same kinds of functions they do in professional life. Moms, on the other hand, are expected to be nurturing and compassionate. To the extent that those expectations are stable, problems arise, Park says.

In two related studies of 169 CU students, Park, Smith and Correll found evidence that traditional expectations of moms and dads persist, and that women were more strongly associated with the role of mom than men were associated with the role of dad.

Further, they found that these implicit assumptions, which reflect traditional stereotypes, propel the expectation that, unlike men, women should resolve work-family conflicts by choosing family.

Partly because of the tug of family duties, women in challenging careers leave their fields at higher rates than do men, studies show. Once they leave, it’s harder for them to re-enter career life, Park notes.

Further, those who do stay in their careers have different “family outcomes”—they tend to be divorced (as Nobel laureate Greider is) and are less likely to have one or more children, “whereas men in comparable positions don’t have to make those same sacrifices.”

“While there has been remarkable change in the presence of women in the workforce over the past 50 years, and corresponding changes in gender stereotypes, behavioral expectations of moms and dads appear to have changed much less,” Park, Smith and Correll write.

“The prototype of an individual fully committed to an organization, ready to drop everything at a moment’s notice to hop on a plane or spend the weekend on a big project, emerged during an era when someone else was available full time to manage children and a home,” they add.

“If women and men are to have equal access to family and work outcomes, this may require a new image of the ideal worker more in line with acknowledged family obligations on the part of both moms and dads.”