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

描述（由申请人提供）：作为社会科学家，我们对男性和女性在职业和家庭结果上的差异的当前趋势了解很多。当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的努力相结合，从而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，对于男性来说，在完成成功的职业角色的同时，也完成了成功的父亲角色。相反，对于女性来说，这两个角色是直接冲突的。在专业领域表现出精通所需的行为，必然会削弱作为一个成功的母亲所需要的表现。因此，重视这两种角色的女性在考虑自己在其中一种角色中的目标时，需要改变自己的自我概念。我们认为，这种转变产生了一种冲突感，可能会导致女性最终选择一种身份而不是另一种身份。本应用程序中的研究通过测量自我定义的内隐变化，并预测这些变化作为参与者性别、角色认同以及将女性与儿童保育和男性与专业领域配对的内隐角色关联强度的函数，来检验这一分析的可行性。研究生和专业培训头两年的男女学生来自五个不同的学科，这些学科中男性的比例各不相同。人们认为，男性在这两种角色中对自我的定义更一致，而且男性个体所持有的角色联系越传统，这一点就越正确，这可能会导致在男性主导的领域中，性别对自我定义的转变经历的差异更大。据推测，女性经历的更大转变会在认知功能、状态焦虑、工作家庭平衡自我效能方面产生直接代价，并随着时间的推移产生压力、抑郁和较低的生活满意度，至少在一个人在父母和职业领域中发展身份的早期阶段是这样。一旦在每个角色中建立了安全的身份，双重角色可能会为女性提供缓冲，使其免受对自我的威胁。在过去50年里，家庭组织发生了前所未有的变化，大量妇女进入劳动力市场，家庭规模明显缩小，离婚率飙升，单亲家庭数量增加。家庭结构对每个家庭成员的幸福产生深远的影响，从而对更普遍的公共健康产生深远的影响。理解平衡职业和养育角色以维护自我价值感的努力是构建健康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.