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Persisting gender disparities in contemporary parenthood: Considering parental narratives, gender beliefs, and workplace discourses: Symposium

par Eira Nunes, Cindy ;Lamprianidou, Elli-Anastasia ;Venard, Gaëlle; [et al.]
Référence the Annual BAPS Meeting (Brussels)
Publication Non publié, 2024-05-31

Communication à un colloque

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Résumé :

Despite changing societal expectations towards parents nowadays, important gender disparities in families persist within most Western countries (Sullivan et al., 2018). This symposium aims to facilitate discussion on contemporary motherhood and fatherhood. Through four papers, we propose to address persisting gender disparities in parenthood from different perspectives, including couples’ perceptions of societal demands, parents gender beliefs, and dynamics within both families and workplaces. The first paper of Venard et al, entitled Exploring Intensive Parenting Ideology and Parental Couple Coordination: Narratives from Parents of Adolescents, explores the narratives of couples on parenthood in a current context that emphasizes intensive parenting. Intensive parenting is an ideology marked by directives promoting deeply engaged parenting practices with the goal of maximizing a child's development. While existing research focuses on how parents, particularly mothers, manage the demands of intensive parenting for young children, gaps remain regarding its impact on parents' daily lives, especially for both mothers and fathers of adolescents. Moreover, the effects of intensive parenting ideology on parental cooperation and household responsibilities have yet to be explored. This study aims to address these gaps through 12 semi-structured interviews with six couples raising adolescents aged 14 to 17 in Switzerland. Preliminary thematic analysis identified three key themes. Firstly, parents described specific intensive parenting norms, emphasizing the importance of being present at home, engaging in extracurricular activities, and overseeing schooling to ensure their adolescent’s future success. The challenge of balancing these norms with respecting the adolescent’s autonomy also appeared. Secondly, gendered roles seemed to persist in certain parental and household tasks within couples, with mothers often assuming the role of “family managers”. However, collaborative efforts between partners emerged as crucial aspects of parenting. In summary, current analyses have highlighted the intricate interplay between parent’s adherence to intensive parenting norms, the enduring influence of gendered roles in parenting coordination, and the significance of effective partnership. Then, Lamprianidou et al’s paper, A Mother’s Intuition? The Link Between Mothers’ and Fathers’ Gender Essentialist Beliefs and Their Parental Involvement, focuses on parents’ gender beliefs and diverse forms of parental involvement. In this study, they used gender essentialism as a lens to examine culturally embedded gender inequalities between mothers and fathers. Gender essentialism pertains to the belief that men and women are biologically distinct, and thus better suited for different societal roles and behaviors (Bem, 1993), including parental roles (Hays, 1996). This study investigated the relationships between mothers’ and fathers’ gender essentialist beliefs and their engagement in positive (i.e., parental responsiveness, autonomy support) and negative forms of involvement (overprotection, controlling parenting). The sample consisted of 1,260 Belgian heterosexual parents (Mage = 49.6 years old; 62% of mothers) of adolescents. They examined relationships through actor-partner interdependence modeling, yielding evidence for several actor effects. For both mothers and fathers, the endorsement of gender essentialist beliefs was related to more controlling and overprotective parenting. In addition, among fathers, gender essentialist beliefs were associated with less responsiveness and autonomy support, while these relationships were not significant for mothers. There were no significant partner effects. These findings highlight the importance of considering parental gender beliefs when studying parenting, as these can play an important role in understanding the quality of parents’ involvement in their children’s lives.The third paper, “Fathers’ Involvement and Mothers’ Gender Essentialist Beliefs About Parenthood: A Longitudinal Study”, from Eira Nunes and colleagues specifically explores the mechanisms underlying the relationship between gender beliefs and parental involvement. This paper investigated the role of mother-father dynamics in fathers’ involvement but also in mothers’ endorsement of more traditional gender beliefs about parenthood. It tested two hypotheses: fathers’ lower involvement would predict mothers’ endorsement of gender essentialist beliefs, according to which fathers are biologically less suited to parenting (Pinho & Gaunt, 2021), that in turn reinforces lower involvement; mothers’ gender essentialist beliefs would predict fathers’ involvement through mothers’ gatekeeping—discouraging and controlling fathers’ involvement in childcare. Using longitudinal data from 373 heterosexual Belgian couples, they tested the direction of effects in the relationship between mother's essentialist beliefs and father's involvement, focusing on the quality of parenting (i.e., responsiveness, autonomy support, overprotection, and controlling parenting). In addition, the intervening role of maternal gatekeeping was examined. The cross-lagged models offer partial support to the first hypothesis. Fathers’ overprotection and controlling parenting predicted mothers’ essentialist beliefs, but not the other way around. Mothers’ essentialist beliefs predicted fathers’ responsiveness at T3, but this relationship was not explained by maternal gatekeeping. Throughout the analyses, no evidence was found for the second hypothesis. Research is thus still needed to better understand the mechanisms underlying fathers’ involvement. In this regard, the last paper from Grootjans and colleagues, entitled “We Know What Men Want - Or Do We? Insidious Processes That Maintain the Powerful Impact of Traditional Norms on Men’s Work-Family Choices”, opens the discussion on work-related mechanisms that may underlie contemporary parenthood. While much has changed for women regarding work-family (W-F) arrangements in past decades, much less has changed for men. Men’s lower family care participation also impacts women on the work front, presenting a remaining barrier for gender equality. Despite men’s clear lower care participation, almost all of the focus in science and policy has gone to addressing the lower work participation of women. In the current proposal, we shift this focus to address the care gap, and focus in particular on men. We take the perspective of the employee and examine the implicit and explicit messages men are receiving within organizations, and the impact of these messages on W-F choices. For this analysis we combine social, psychological, and sociological/work-organizational perspectives, to understand the world from the perspective of the individual in context and identify the underlying mechanisms that maintain W-F gender gaps. We start with a consideration of the role of masculine organizational climates in men’s perceptions of what is possible regarding W-F roles, and then examine three mechanisms by which climates may affect W-F choices.Together, these papers paint a complex picture of contemporary parenthood underscoring the multiple factors that may reinforce (or challenge) remaining disparities between mothers and fathers.