Implicit Associations and Shifting Self-Definitions Across Work and Family Roles

描述(由申请者提供)：作为社会科学家，我们对当前男女职业和家庭结果差异的趋势非常了解。目前研究的目的是了解关于性别角色分配的根深蒂固的文化期望如何与努力将自我视为有能力和有效的、履行产生归属感和接受感的核心角色相结合，以决定有关工作和家庭的决定。我们认为，性别之间存在着不对称性，对于男性来说，履行他们作为成功专业人士的角色，同时也履行着成功父亲的角色。相比之下，对于女性来说，角色是直接冲突的。在职场中表现出精通所需的行为，必然会削弱作为一名母亲取得成功所必需的表现。因此，重视这两个角色的女性在考虑其中一个角色的目标与另一个角色的目标时，需要改变她们的自我概念。我们认为，这种转变产生了一种冲突感，这可能会导致女性最终选择一个身份而不是另一个。本应用程序中的研究通过测量自我定义中的内隐变化并预测这些变化作为参与者性别、对角色的认同以及将女性与儿童保育和男性与职场配对的隐性角色关联的强度来检验这一分析的可行性。在研究生和专业培训的头两年，男性和女性学生从五个不同的学科招募，这些学科中男性所占比例各不相同。男性被认为在这两个角色中对自我的定义更一致，男性个人的角色关联越传统，这就越应该是真实的，这可能会导致在更多男性主导的领域中，性别对自我定义的经历变化有更大的差异。女性经历的较大转变被假设为在认知功能、状态焦虑和工作家庭平衡自我效能感方面立即付出代价，并随着时间的推移产生压力、抑郁和生活满意度下降，至少在父母和职业领域发展个人身份的早期阶段是这样。一旦在每个角色中建立了安全身份，双重角色可以为妇女提供针对自我威胁的缓冲。过去50年，随着妇女大量进入劳动力大军、家庭规模显著缩小、离婚率飙升、单亲家庭数量增加，家庭组织发生了前所未有的变化。家庭结构对个别家庭成员的福祉有深远影响，因此对更广泛的公共健康也有深远影响。理解在保持自我价值感的服务中平衡事业和育儿角色的努力是构建健康的家庭单位的基本组成部分。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): As social scientists, we know quite a lot about current trends regarding differential career and family outcomes for men versus women. The purpose of the current studies is to understand how ingrained cultural expectations regarding gender role distributions combine with efforts to view the self as competent and efficacious, fulfilling core roles that produce a sense of belonging and acceptance, to determine decisions regarding work and family. We argue that an asymmetry exists for the genders such that for men, fulfilling their role as a successful professional simultaneously fulfills the role of successful father. In contrast, for women the roles are in direct conflict. Performing the behavior required for mastery in the professional world necessarily detracts from performing that required for success as a mom. As a result, women who value both roles are required to shift their self-concepts when considering their goals in one role versus the other. We argue this shifting produces a sense of conflict that may contribute to women eventually choosing one identity over the other. The studies in this application examine the feasibility of this analysis by measuring implicit shifts in self- definitions and predicting these as a function of participant gender, identification with the roles, and the strength of implicit role associations pairing women with childcare and men with the professional world. Male and female students in the first two years of graduate and professional training are recruited from five different disciplines that vary in the proportion of males that make up the discipline. Men are argued to enjoy a more consistent definition of the self across the two roles and the more traditional the role associations held by an individual male, the more true this should be, perhaps resulting in even greater differences in experienced shifts in self-definitions by the genders in more male dominated fields. The greater shifts experienced by women are hypothesized to have immediate costs in cognitive functioning, state anxiety, and work-family balance self-efficacy, and over time to generate stress, depression, and lower life satisfaction, at least in the early stages of developing one's identity in the parent and professional domains. The dual roles may provide a buffer to women against threats to the self once a secure identity in each role has been established. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE The past 50 years have witnessed unprecedented changes in the organization of the family with the mass entry of women into the workforce, significantly smaller family sizes, soaring divorce rates, and an increased number of single parent families. Family structure has profound implications for the well-being of individual family members and consequently, public health more generally. Understanding efforts to balance career and parenting roles in the service of preserving a sense of self-worth is a fundamental component of constructing healthy family units.