In order to test study hypotheses simultaneously in the two samples, Mplus 7 (Muthén and Muthén, 1998–2012) was applied to test a multi-group full structural equation model (SEM) using Maximum Likelihood (ML) as estimation method. The following goodness-of-fit criteria were considered in order to assess models (Bollen and Long, 1993): the χ 2 goodness-of-fit statistic; the Comparative Fit Index (CFI); the Tucker Lewis Index (TLI); the Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA); and the Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR). Finally, in order to verify whether mediation effects were significant, we applied bootstrapping procedure (Shrout and Bolger, 2002).

### RESULTS

Correlations between study variables and scales' internal consistency are shown in **Table 1** for female and male samples. α values ranged between 0.86 and 0.95, respecting the cut-off of 0.70 (Nunnally and Bernstein, 1994). As for correlations, they showed the expected directions in both groups.

Family life satisfaction and partner's family life satisfaction are strongly and positively correlated in both groups, as expected (F: r = 0.67, p < 0.01; M: r = 0.74, p < 0.01).

Analysis of variance between female and male samples did not show significant differences in the variables' means.

The hypothesized multi-group SEM showed a good fit to the data: χ 2 (312, NFemale = 183, NMale = 161) = 710.03, p = 0.00, CFI = 0.94, TLI = 0.93, RMSEA = 0.08 (90% CI [0.07, 0.09]), SRMR = 0.07. The model with standardized parameters for the two samples is depicted in **Figure 1**.

Considering the measurement model, item loadings were acceptable for all variables in the two samples. As for the structural model, job insecurity showed a significant negative association with job satisfaction in both samples (F: β = −0.59, p < 0.001; M: β = −0.40, p < 0.001). Job insecurity did not present

TABLE 1 | Means, standard deviations, Cronbach's alpha, and correlations among the study variables for female (N = 183) and male (N = 161) groups.

Correlations for the female group below the diagonal; correlations for the male group above the diagonal. Cronbach's α for female/male samples on the diagonal in italics. ∗p < 0.05; ∗∗p < 0.01.

a significant direct relationship with family life satisfaction and partner's family life satisfaction.  No significant differences between the two samples emerged. The model explained 35% of variance for job satisfaction, 25% for family life satisfaction and 14% for partner's family life satisfaction in the female sample; and 16% for job satisfaction, 32% for family life satisfaction and 32% for partner's family life satisfaction in the male sample.

Subsequently, bootstrapping procedure was used to evaluate mediating effects; 2,000 new samples were extracted from the original one and direct and indirect effects were calculated (Preacher and Hayes, 2008). Whether the confidence interval does not include zero it means that the mediation effect is significant. Statistically significant mediated effects are shown in **Table 2**. Particularly, the bootstrapping procedure confirmed that job satisfaction was a full mediator between job insecurity and family life satisfaction in female and male samples, showing indirect effects equal to, respectively, −0.23 and −0.22. Moreover, job satisfaction was a full mediator between job insecurity and partner's family life satisfaction in female and male samples, showing indirect effects equal to, respectively, −0.13 and −0.23.

### DISCUSSION

The aim of this study was examining the association between job insecurity and family life satisfaction, with three peculiarities: taking into account the intermediate mediating role of job satisfaction, assessing both partners' evaluations of family life satisfaction, and differentiating analysis between genders.

Available evidence clearly showed that job insecurity has detrimental effects on well-being and health (De Witte et al., 2016), performance (Cheng and Chan, 2008), and job attitudes (Vander Elst et al., 2014). More in detail, several studies (Sverke et al., 2002; Callea et al., 2017) reported that job insecurity can negatively affect job satisfaction because, through the anticipation of job loss (thus acting as a powerful stressor), it can decrease the

#### TABLE 2 | Indirect effects using bootstrapping (2,000 replications).

All parameter estimates are presented as standardized coefficients. CI, confidence interval.

pleasant feelings associated with his/her own job. Based on such evidence, we anticipated that a negative association would have existed between job insecurity and job satisfaction. Results from multi-group SEM provided strong support allowing to accept Hypothesis 1. In particular, job insecurity decreased levels of job satisfaction both among male (β = −0.40) and female (β = −0.59) respondents.

Hypothesis 2 postulated that job insecurity would have been negatively associated with family life satisfaction of focal person (a) and his/her partner (b). In doing so, two prominent work– family theories were concerned: the spillover (Kanter, 1977) and the crossover (Westman, 2001) theories. The spillover theory was concerned in regards to Hypothesis 2a, that is job insecurity would have been associated with reduced family life satisfaction, given that negative individuals' experiences on the job can carry over into his/her non-work experience, and vice versa. Some studies have already provided partial converging evidence (Hughes and Galinsky, 1994; Mauno and Kinnunen, 1999b). The crossover theory was instead concerned to explain the expected negative association between focal person's job insecurity and his/her partner's family life satisfaction (Hypothesis 2b), given that individual feelings associated with experiences on one domain can be transmitted to individual's significant others and affect them. Also in this case, partial (Larson et al., 1994) and contrasting (Mauno and Kinnunen, 1999b) evidence is available. Results from multi-group SEM do allow to partially accept such hypotheses given that no direct associations were present but mediated ones. In fact, deeper examination (see Hypothesis 3) showed that significant indirect effects were present for both male and female respondents (see below for details).

As anticipated by both sparse evidence (Mauno and Kinnunen, 1999b) and theory (Bakker and Demerouti, 2013), it is possible that the spillover and crossover effects of specific job stressors (i.e., job insecurity) may be mediated by intermediate variables. Therefore, Hypothesis 3 stated that the negative effect of family life satisfaction (both focal person's and his/her partner's) regressed on job insecurity would have been mediated by job satisfaction. Said differently, fear of losing one's own job was not expected to impact directly on decreased family life satisfaction, but lowered job satisfaction (as a result of higher job insecurity) could reflect in impaired satisfaction about one's own and his/her partner's satisfaction about family life. Results from multi-group SEM provided strong support for Hypothesis 3, which thus can be accepted. In particular, job satisfaction mediated the effect of job insecurity on family life satisfaction (indirect effects: F = −0.23, M = −0.22) and on partner's life satisfaction (indirect effects: F = −0.13, M = −0.23).

As for the exploration of gender role, no differences have been found in this study, which indicated similar patterns for women and men in the spillover and crossover dynamics investigated. Contrary to theories that suggested that women are more likely to experience demands from the family domain spilling over their work role, while for men the opposite situation is more likely (i.e., work domain spilling over the family domain) (Pleck, 1977), our findings contribute to that literature that highlights a greater similarity in the interaction between work and family among genders (Naldini, 2007). Despite some differences still exist, they are decreasing probably because of changes that are involving how men and women perceive their family and work roles, as well as the degree in which these roles are central to their identity. Nowadays, work is considered a central part of their identity also for women, whereas men are more involved in family issues, which are less a women's prerogative.

### Limitations and Future Studies

A series of limitations need to be acknowledged. First, since a cross-sectional design was used, causality between variables cannot be established (Podsakoff et al., 2012). Moreover, being that only self-report questionnaires were used, common method bias may have partly inflated our results (Conway, 2002). Future studies should recur to longitudinal or diary approaches in order to examine the causal relationship between variables over time, considering also other-reported ratings (such as colleagues or supervisors for the workplace domain).

A second limitation is the use of the convenience sampling procedure that limits results' generalizability. Despite the sample was a heterogeneous one, the majority of participants had at least one child and a high educational level; this limits the chance to generalize findings to other groups. Moreover, the study involved inter-gender couples; therefore, results are not generalizable to

same-gender couples. As regards the procedure, instructions clearly requested each partner to fill out the questionnaire separately; nevertheless, we did not have control whether partners really filled out the questionnaires alone without comparing answers.

Finally, future studies should further examine the dynamics intertwining perceived job insecurity and family life satisfaction of both partners, through the mediation of job satisfaction, considering also buffer effects; particularly, the role of personal resources, such as core self-evaluations, psychological capital, Big Five dimensions, or generic coping strategies, job crafting and employability could be investigated (Silla et al., 2009; Ingusci et al., 2016; Mauno et al., 2017). Moreover, from an opposite point of view, future research should also investigate the crossover of family stressors to the work domain, since family stressors experienced by one individual might be transmitted to the jobrelated well-being and behavior of his/her partner (Mauno and Kinnunen, 1999b).

### CONCLUSION AND PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS

The present study may contribute to literature mainly for three reasons: (1) it highlighted a spillover effect of job insecurity on the family domain; (2) it found this effect for both the individual and his/her partner confirming a crossover effect; (3) in a working environment where stable jobs are becoming progressively less frequent than temporary ones (Allvin et al., 2013), it confirmed the need to investigate effects of job insecurity also for those workers with permanent contract.

Interventions at the level of Human Resources policies and practices should develop the necessary mechanisms to reduce the perception of job insecurity, considering that helping employees to decrease or tolerate job insecurity may improve their job satisfaction and have certain benefits also for their families. Job insecurity is often increased by the lack of clear information about what workers can expect in their near future (Abildgaard et al., 2017); therefore, organizations may improve their communication system and guarantee clear, objective and timely information, and be available to answer to any requests for clarification about future prospects of both the company and employees (Robinson and Morrison, 2000; Sora and Höge, 2014). Moreover, in case of organizational restructuring or change, which are prevalent today, authors suggested honest, open, and timely communication (Mauno et al., 2017) and a proactive

### REFERENCES

approach with high level of employees' involvement and participative decision making (Abildgaard et al., 2017) in order to outbalance perception of job insecurity.

Job insecurity issue may be addressed also at the individual level. Particularly, career practitioners may offer counseling and coaching interventions in order to strength workers' ability to deal with occupational changes, also improving their employability. In addition, life-designing interventions could support individuals in developing adaptive and flexible responses to possible occupational transitions and changing tasks (Savickas, 2012).

Knowledge on crossover between partners may also be useful for both individuals and organizations (Bakker et al., 2005). The former may get a better understanding about their own and their partners' attitudes and feelings, information that could be used to address potential needs of the couples. The former may use the knowledge on crossover in order to foster working conditions able to enhance job satisfaction, positive experiences at work and, as a consequence, at home. Furthermore, interventions to develop employees' coping strategies could be also recommendable in order to provide employees with adequate tools for dealing with the job insecurity experience (Sora and Höge, 2014). Particularly, psychological detachment after work, which has been indicated a good recovery strategy for work–family balance (Derks and Bakker, 2014) and well-being (Meijman and Mulder, 1998; Sonnentag and Fritz, 2007), could be effective against job insecurity (Kinnunen et al., 2010) and may be fostered by engaging in positive activities with family during off-job time.

### AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS

FE, MM, ALP, PS, and CG made a contribution to the present study. ALP and CG designed the research and collected the data. FE and MM carried out data analysis and interpretation. FE, MM, ALP, and CG wrote the manuscript receiving substantial input from PS. All authors approved the final version of the manuscript for submission and agreed to be accountable for all aspects of the work.

### FUNDING

This study was funded by the University of Campania "Luigi Vanvitelli", Programma VALERE.

**Conflict of Interest Statement:** The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Copyright © 2018 Emanuel, Molino, Lo Presti, Spagnoli and Ghislieri. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

# Gender Inequality in Household Chores and Work-Family Conflict

#### Javier Cerrato1 \* and Eva Cifre2

1 Department of Social Psychology, Faculty of Labour Relations and Social Work, Universidad del País Vasco (UPV/EHU), Bilbao, Spain, 2 Department of Developmental, Educational and Social Psychology and Methodology, Universitat Jaume I, Castellón de la Plana, Spain

The fact that the permeability between family and work scopes produces work-family conflict (WFC) is well established. As such, this research aims to check whether the unequal involvement in household chores between men and women is associated with increased WFC in women and men, interpreting the results also from the knowledge that arise from gender studies. A correlational study was carried out by means a questionnaire applied to 515 subjects (63% men) of two independent samples of Spanish men and women without emotional relationship, who lived with their heterosexual partner. As expected, results firstly show unequal involvement in household chores by women and men as it is higher in women that in men, and the perception of partner involvement is lower in women that in men. Secondly, those unequal involvements relate differently to men and women on different ways of work-family interaction. They do not increase WFC in women comparing to men, although there are tangentially significant differences in work conflict (WC) and statistically significant in family conflict (FC). However, perception of partner involvement on household chores increases WFC both in men and in women but not WC nor FC. Nevertheless, increase on marital conflict (MC) by domestic tasks neither affect in a significant way WFC in women nor in men, but increase WC in both women and men and FC only in women. Results also confirm that subject involvement on household chores is not a significant predictor of WFC in women nor in men, and that MC by domestic tasks is a statistically significant predictor in women of WFC and FC, but not in men. Thus, results show that traditional gender roles still affect the way men and women manage the work and family interaction, although the increased WFC due to involvement in housework is not exclusive to women, but also occurs in men. Personal and institutional recommendations are made on the basis of these results to cope with these conflicts.

Keywords: gender inequality, work-family conflict, households, organizations, Gen Xers

### INTRODUCTION

Occupational health psychology promotes labor risk prevention intervening both on the organization and on the person, but also on work-family interface. It seeks the goodness-offit among these dimensions in order to reduce psychosocial risks on occupational health and concurrently to improve organizational efficacy. The effect of psychosocial stressors at work does not remain within the working sphere as it extends also to personal life. This permeability between family and work scopes has produced work-family conflict (WFC) to be one of the psychosocial

#### Edited by:

Renato Pisanti, Università degli Studi Niccolò Cusano, Italy

#### Reviewed by:

Anna Maria Dåderman, University West, Sweden Chiara Ghislieri, Università degli Studi di Torino, Italy Kavita Morparia, Newark Beth Israel Medical Center, United States

> \*Correspondence: Javier Cerrato<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
#### Specialty section:

This article was submitted to Organizational Psychology, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology

Received: 12 April 2018 Accepted: 11 July 2018 Published: 03 August 2018

#### Citation:

Cerrato J and Cifre E (2018) Gender Inequality in Household Chores and Work-Family Conflict. Front. Psychol. 9:1330. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01330

**69**

risks receiving more attention during the past years (Eby et al., 2005; Ammons and Kelly, 2015; French et al., 2017; Lapierre et al., 2017; Wayne et al., 2017; Carvalho et al., 2018). WFC negatively affects both health and general life such as work performance and work satisfaction within the organizational context, but it also increases conflict rates and decreases family satisfaction. From this perspective, and within a context of a more technological and digitalized society, gender equality at work is a matter of paramount importance, which must start with a gender equality at home. The aim of this study is to check whether the unequal involvement in household chores between men and women is associated with increased WFC in women, and explain it in terms integrating the knowledge of gender studies.

### Work-Home Conflict and Gender

Individuals may experience conflict between their work and home roles due to limited time, high levels of stress, and competing behavioral expectations (Greenhaus and Beutell, 1985). Although most of the work-home research has focused on how work variables affect home from the point of view of the conflict between the two spheres (Major and Cleveland, 2005), organizational psychology also begins to study how family variables affect job performance and satisfaction.

In the psychosocial scientific literature, there is a wide tradition on the work and home interface studies (i.e., Kopelman´s et al., 1983; Edwards and Rothbard, 2000; Pitt-Catsouphes et al., 2006; Mills, 2015; Paulin et al., 2017). Two primary perspectives have been offered in this literature based on the incompatibility between individuals' work and home domains (Michel and Hargis, 2008). One perspective focuses on the mechanisms that generate conflict between both domains. The other perspective focuses on the segmentation mechanisms between the work and the family domains. In this study, we adopt the conflict model in examining the influence of home roles (differential involvement of men and women on household chores), on work roles.

Some research has shown that role pressure in work and home domains generates negative consequences on the other one bidirectionally. So the degree of participation in the home role will create difficulties for participation in work, resulting in the home-work conflict (HWC); conversely, the degree of participation in the work domain can hinder performance on the family role, producing an increase of strain-based, time-based or behavior-based work-home conflict (WHC) (Huang et al., 2004).

Gender roles are essential for understanding the work-home interface. They are shared beliefs that apply to individuals on the basis of their socially identified sex which are the basis of the division of labor in most societies (Wood and Eagly, 2010). In Western societies, the home sphere, and the household chores as part of this sphere, it is assumed to be in charge of women, which could in turn affect more highly the home to work conflict of women than of men. However, to our knowledge, this has not been checked empirically. In this study we will focus on the effect of the relationship between gender and dedication to household chores on WFC among women.

Different meta-analyses (Byron, 2005; Eby et al., 2005) have demonstrated the key role played by gender, but how it relates to work-family constructs is still both theoretically and empirically debated (Shockley et al., 2017). Research has found differences in work-home conflict repeatedly, ranging from differences in the experience of WFC to the existence of different work and home backgrounds to women and men. However, most studies in the field of work-home interface do not consider gender as a variable, identifying at most correlates and differential associations for men and women (Martínez and Paterna, 2009). Thus, we posit that work-home interface studies should include gender as key variable due to the influence of gender ideology and gender-role orientation might have on the work-home relationship from a cultural point of view.

From a cultural and discursive perspective (Gerstel and Sarkisian, 2006), gender ideology, defined as beliefs and values maintained about what is right for men and women, determines the patterns by which a particular society judges or evaluates the proper conduct of a man or a woman.

This gender ideology is also reflected in the social discourse, as frequently the couple recreates the dominant social discourse in which is referred the essential characteristics in which men and women differ ignoring the sociopolitical context. This discourse states that the differences between men and women in relation to home and work are the result of personal choice, that there are differences in innate abilities of men and women for household chores and work outside the home, and that these differences guide the choice for certain jobs and even that preference for home toward work is a free choice in the case of women (Martínez and Paterna, 2009; Kuo et al., 2018). Linked to this ideology, the traditional gender role model prescribes that work domain and instrumentality are more important for men than for women, whereas the home domain and expressiveness is more important for women. The traditional gender role model has a biosocial and cultural origin, and was described by Parsons and Bales (1955) in their delineation of instrumental (men) and expressive (women) roles. This model arbitrarily assumes that expressiveness and instrumentality are separate dimensions, and that expressiveness is always women gender role whereas instrumentality is that of men. Work and family interactions are embedded in the broader cultural, institutional and economic context in which individuals reside (Ollier-Malaterre and Foucreault, 2017). Of particular relevance to gender differences in WFC are cultural differences in gender egalitarianism, or belief or attitudes about de equality of the sexes within de culture (House et al., 2004; Lucas-Thompson and Goldberg, 2015).

As Martínez and Paterna (2009) indicate, gender ideology seems to determine the percentage of tasks considered traditionally feminine by members of the couple, such as washing, ironing, shopping, cooking, or cleaning. It also generates a differential meaning about household chores for men and women. Also, recent studies have shown that there is still a division of house chores by gender, depending on the gender role nuclei: instrumentality inside and outside home for men; expressiveness and instrumentality inside home for women (Fernández et al., 2016). All this rationale, leads us to formulate hypothesis 1:

H1: There will be a division of household chores between men and women based on traditional gender roles. Women will spend more time than men in traditionally female household chores and men in traditionally male ones.

Both men and women similarly perceive a lack of parity in performing household chores, but perceive greater equality in the care of daughters and sons (Yago and Martínez, 2009). This leads us to propose hypothesis 2:

H2: Women will perceive their partners much less involved in household chores and only focus on household chores traditionally considered masculine. Men will perceive their female partners more involved in traditionally female household chores, especially in those traditionally considered feminine.

### Implication in Household Chores and Work-Family Conflict (WFC)

Time required for household chores and caring for the family is one of the most important factors in the conflict coming from the family sphere, especially in families with children. So, the dualincome couples with children tend to have a greater number of conflicts between the partners and a higher level of stress than their counterparts without children (Michel and Hargis, 2008). From this point of view, the gender roles model assumes that the nature of the role demands differs in men and women, and these roles act as moderators of WFC (Barnett et al., 1995).

The highest level of family to work interference in women comes from the different implication of women and men in household chores, including the care of children. This different implication has been proven by various studies and research (Bianchi et al., 2000; Korabik, 2015; Borelli et al., 2017) and still persists in society as has been found in different surveys (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development [OECD], 2014; Eurobarometer, 2015). In concrete, this model keeps very persistent in Spain, where women spend almost double the amount of time on unpaid work as men National Institute of Statistics (INE), 2018). This time is spent on activities such as caring for children (38 h a week women versus 23 men) or family members (20 h women versus 14 men) or household chores (20 h women versus 11 men). So although women have begun to strongly form part of the labor force and to spend more time with their children taking care of them, they neither assume a decrease in their salary as much as women do for work interruptions due to family issues nor stay at home to take care of their children (Gerstel and Sarkisian, 2006). Most men still maintain full involvement in their work because their feminine couple assume the responsibility for caring their children. Thus, we can deduce that women will suffer more by the interference of the family at work, because their greater involvement in the family will can subtract them time, strength and dedication to their work; however, men will suffer more by the interference of work in the family. In fact, a high implication in the family sphere has been shown linked to a higher family-to-work interference only in women (Hammer et al., 1997).

Moreover, men do not feel an obligation when they are involved in the home as women do, as they perceive it more as a hobby or a free choice. Also, those house chores that keep the home every day (shopping, cooking, washing dishes, washing clothes, and cleaning the house) are considered feminine, while those considered male or neutral tasks (paying bills, taking care of the car or home maintenance) do not involve daily devotion. Some cultural interpretation argue that women are more involved in house chores and do not want to fully share because of the belief that this is central to their gender identity and a source of power in the family, whereas husbands, whose gender identity has traditionally been marked by paid work, would not object to do less household chores than their wives (Martínez and Paterna, 2009).

Besides, a crossover effect must be included: to the greater involvement of women in the family and household chores must be added the greatest involvement of men in the workplace (Bakker et al., 2008), which supposes an increased family burden for women. As husbands are not available for household chores, wives suffer overload by household chores and emotional demands related to children caregiving, which will increase still more women stress and family to work interference (Frone, 2003).

In short, the lesser involvement of men in household chores and greater transfer of stress from work to family causes increased domestic workload on women and marital conflict (MC), thus increasing the tension transfer from family environment to worksite in women. All this rationale, leads us to formulate hypothesis 3:

H3: The greater involvement of women in household chores and the perception of the lesser involvement of their men partners is linked to an increased family to work conflict (FWC) in women.

### Marital Conflict and Household Chores

This greater involvement of women in household chorus and increased family to work conflict may lead to an increase of MC. In this line, Pittman et al. (1996) provide evidence for this idea by showing that the contribution of women to household chores is higher on the days when their husbands express higher levels of work stress; in these cases, women must subtract energy and time from work due to their husbands' increased work stress. However, men do not adjust their contribution to household chores when their wives bring their work stress home. Research on family processes shows that stressed couples show a high level of negative interactions and conflicts. Thus, increased stress associated with WFC and its correlative frustration, leads individuals to initiate or exacerbate their sequence of negative interaction with the partner (Westman and Etzion, 2005; Huffman et al., 2017). This negative interaction may be understood as product both of social undermining which consist in behaviors that involve rejection, criticism and negative attitude toward the couple (Vinokur and Van Ryn, 1993) and hostile marital interactions (Matthews et al., 1996), which aims to express hostility toward the partner or MCs.

Focusing on the conflict between the partners and their relationship with household chores, it has shown how increasing distress and frustration generated by the WFC tends to impair the interaction with the partner (Westman and Etzion, 2005). This can result in increased tension between the partners due

to the transfer of stress from work to family by men and their lesser involvement in household chores, which would generate an increase in MC and, therefore, an increase of conflict in the family especially in women due to unequal distribution of household chores. This leads us to propose hypothesis 4:

H4: The conflict between the partners due to unequal distribution of household chores generates an increase of more family to work conflict (FWC) in women than in men because of their greater involvement at home.

### MATERIALS AND METHODS

### Participants and Procedure

A correlational study was carried out by means of a questionnaire applied by professional surveyors during 2014. They selected a segmented sample of men and women working in public and private organizations from different productive sectors (teaching, services, and manufacturing sectors). The final sample consisted of 515 subjects, mostly (63%) were men, with an average age of 40 years old; all of them were married or living with a heterosexual partner, and they had children. Samples of men and women were independent from each other, without emotional/marital relationship between them. Regarding the organizational setting, 21% were working in public organizations and 79% in private ones.

### Measures

in this case it measures the subjects' perception of their partners' involvement in all the household chores. Subjects respond to each item using a dichotomous yes/no format about their perception of their partner's involvement in different family tasks. The final scale score is the total number of tasks they perceive that their partners dedicate to family tasks. An example of these items is Does your partner take the children to school in everyday life?

• Marital conflict about household chores was measured with the single question How many times do you and your partner argue about who must do the household chores and when? Subjects respond to this item on a Likert scale ranging from 1 (never) to 5 (every day).

We also measured socio-demographic (sex and age) and sociofamiliar (family status, number of children) variables for the sample description.

### Data Analyses

First, we performed skewness and kurtosis analyses to check normality among variables. Second, we calculated internal consistencies (Cronbach's α), descriptive analyses and correlations between conflict scales and subject/partner perceived involvement on household chores scales. Third, we computed Analyses of Variance (ANOVAs) in order to test whether there was any statistically significant difference betweengroup regarding gender for subject's involvement in household chores scale, and subject's perception of partner's involvement in household scale, and Kruskal–Wallis non-parametrical tests for item to item analysis due to its dichotomous level of response (Hypothesis 1 and 2). After that, we computed new ANOVAs and Regression Analyses to check gender, household chores, partner's implication and conflict on WFC, WC, and FC (Hypothesis 3 and 4). All data analyses were carried out using SPSS 21.0.

## RESULTS

**Table 1** shows skewness and kurtosis statistics. As expected, all scales show values equal or below 0.5 and −0.5 in both or at least at one of them. So we assume a normal distribution of the scores of these scales. However, item by item of subject's and partner's involvement in household chores scales do not follow that normal distribution, due to its dichotomical nature.

**Table 2** shows the descriptive analyses and Cronbach's alpha of the variables for both samples. The alpha values meet the criterion of 0.70 (Nunnally and Bernstein, 1994), except in the case of the perception of partner's involvement in household chores, which was above 0.60. As expected, the pattern of correlations shows that WFC, work conflict and FC are positively and significantly related in both samples. However, WFC is more related to conflict at work in women and to conflict in the family in men.

Marital conflict is only highly and positively related to WFC, work conflict and FC in women, but not in men. This could indicate that women assimilate the conflict with the partner into conflicts in the family, i.e., women integrate the couple into the family concept, while men consider them to be different.

#### TABLE 1 | Skewness and Kurtosis analysis of variables distribution.

TABLE 2 | Cronbach's alpha, means (M), standard deviation (SD), and intercorrelations by gender (N = 515).

∗∗p < 0.01, ∗p < 0.05.

Subject's involvement in household chores correlates significant and negatively with WFC in both men and women, but only with work conflict in men. Then, for both men and women, the higher their involvement is in household chores, the lower their WFC; moreover, the higher the work conflict is, the lower the men's involvement in household chores.

Finally, the correlation between the subject's and the perception of the partner's involvement in household chores is only highly, significantly and negatively related in women. However, the perception of the partner's involvement in household chores is only highly, significantly and positively related to WFC in men. Thus, women decrease their involvement

in household chores when their male partners increase their involvement; on the other hand, in the case of men, the greater the involvement of the partner (women) in the household chores, the higher the WFC is.

ANOVA results confirm these differences and inequality about men's and women's involvement in household chores. Women's involvement in household chores is more than twice that of men (4.0 and 1.7, respectively; F = 82.60; p ≤ 001). Consistently, women perceive lower involvement of their partner (men) in household chores than men do (1.8 and 2.8, respectively; F = 22.70; p ≤ 001).

Kruskal–Wallis tests also confirm that women are significantly more involved than men in seven of eleven household chores (see **Table 3**). These seven tasks are traditionally considered feminine: home shopping, house cleaning, free-time family management, taking children from home to school and from school to home, children's care, helping children with homework, and playing with them. Men only score higher than women on one task traditionally considered masculine: house repairs. There are no differences in family management. These results confirm Hypothesis 1.

Symmetrically, Kruskal–Wallis tests also show that these results are confirmed by the perception that men and women have of their partner's involvement in household chores: men consider that their partners (women) are mainly involved in traditionally feminine household chores: home shopping, house cleaning, free-time family management, taking children from home to school and school to home, taking care of the children, and helping children with homework, whereas women consider that their partners (men) are involved in typically masculine household chores: house repairs and family management.  On the whole, these results confirm Hypothesis 2.

To test the hypothesis 3 (the effect of the greater involvement of women in household chores and perception of lesser involvement of male partners in the increase in the WFC among women compared to men), and hypothesis 4 (the effect of MC in the increased level of WFC in women relative to men), we performed three separate ANOVAs (**Table 4**), complemented by multiple regression analysis (**Table 5**).

ANOVAs results confirm partially hypothesis 3 since greater involvement of women in household chores do not generate a statistically significant increase in WFC comparing to men. There are gender differences in the extent to which this differential involvement in domestic tasks affects FC and (in a tangentially significant way) WC that point to a gender effect. On one hand, in the case of women, when their involvement in household chores is high, their FC and WC levels are similar; however, when their involvement is low, FC decreases and WC increases. On the other hand, in the case of men, the WC is always greater than the FC regardless of their degree of involvement in household chores. That is, in the case of women when there is a lower involvement in household chores the FC is also lower, but increases the WC.

There are no gender differences regarding the WFC according to the perception of their partners: it increases significantly in both men and women when the involvement in household chores of the partner is high or low, being always higher among women than among men regardless of the involvement of the partner with household chores is high or low, which completely rejects hypothesis 3.

It is noteworthy that the effect of the perception of involvement of the partner in household chores by gender does not affect WC or FC in a gender-specific way, but it affects the WFC globally statistically significantly, although these differences were not gender effects manifest. This indicates that the WFC is affected by the involvement of the partner in household chores, but not for the involvement of the subject in them, which segmentally would affect the FC and WC.

Regarding hypothesis 4, the increase of conflict by domestic tasks among the partners does not affect the WFC in a statistically significant way in women nor in men, but it does on WC and FC: when MC is high WC increase both in women and men, but FC increase only in women.

As a confirmation of this results, regarding the relationship between the subject's and partner's involvement in household chores and the different conflicts, regression analyses (see **Table 5**) show, first, that subject involvement on household chores does not predict WFC in women nor men, but only WC in men in a negative way. Moreover, the perception of the partner's involvement in household chores and MC is a predictor of women's WC and men's WFC. Again these results do not confirm hypothesis 3.

Nevertheless, regarding hypothesis 4, as a difference of the ANOVA results, the increase of conflict by domestic tasks among the partners predict the WFC, WC, and FC in a statistically significant way in women but not in men. So results show that MC in women predicts WFC. This result fully support hypothesis 4. In addition to this, the MC is the only variable of those studied that affects the FC in the case of women, whereas involvement in housework does in the case of men, supporting also hypothesis 4.

In the case of men, the perception of the partner's (women) involvement in household chores is a predictor of WFC. Results also show that men's involvement in household chores is a negative statistically significant predictor FC as their beta coefficient is negative. That is, it seems that when the involvement of men in housework increases, the conflict in the family decreases; but when the perception of involvement of their female partners is high, it increases in them the WFC. However, MC does not predict this FC in men, so the FC does not increase by the conflict with the partner for housework but by their low involvement in them.

### DISCUSSION

Home-work interaction has been the focus of a wide range of scientific literature during the past decades. It is generally accepted that both the family and the work scope affect each other in a different way. However, it was not studied in which degree the own and the partner's involvement in family issues affect different kind of work-home conflict from a gender point of view. Thus, the aim of this study was to check whether the unequal involvement in household chores between men

TABLE 3 | Kruskal–Wallis test of subject involvement on household chores and perception of partner involvement on household chores by gender (item to item) (N = 515).

The highest values, when significant, appear in bold. ∗∗∗p ≤ 001, ∗∗p ≤ 01.

and women is associated with increased WFC in women, and explain it in terms integrating the knowledge of gender studies.

First, results confirm inequality because it indicates that the involvement of women in household chores is, on average, more than double the involvement of their male partners. In addition, men are more involved in traditionally masculine household chores (i.e., home repairs and family management), and women are more involved in traditionally feminine chores (i.e., childcare or shopping). Symmetrically, the subject's perception of the partner implication confirms this difference: women perception of their men partner involvement in household chores much less than men perception of their woman partner involvement. Therefore, hypotheses 1 and 2 of our study are confirmed.

Secondly, we checked if those unequal involvements relate differently to men and women on different ways of WF interaction. We found that the greater involvement of women in household chores does not affect the level of WFC differentially in men and women, so hypothesis 3 is not met. This gender inequality in the distribution of household chores and child care does not imply a higher level of WFC in women compared to men. Rather the opposite happens: when more involved are both men and women in household chores, lower is the WFC. Although the hypothesis 3 is not corroborated, it should be noted that when the involvement of women in household chores is high, their level of FC increases; when men's involvement increases, their level of WC increases, which in some way supports hypothesis 3. That is, the high involvement in household chores has negative consequences in the family sphere for women and in the workplace for men, possibly because of the greater respective importance that women give to family and men to work, as it poses the traditional gender role model.

In addition to this, results show that when the involvement of women in household chores is high, their levels of WC and FC are similar, i.e., it equally affects both areas. When this involvement is low, FC is lower than the WC. However, among men, WC is always greater than the WC regardless of their involvement in household chores. Furthermore, when the conflict with the partner for household chores is high, women report a higher FC but not a higher WC, whereas in man this conflict does not affect neither the FC nor the WC.

However, in the case of women, MC affects conflict related WC and FC and WFC, so hypothesis 4 is fully corroborated. This is very interesting because although hypothesis 3 is not met, however, the conflict with the partner due to this inequality in the distribution of housework seems to generate this WFC. That is, it would not be the greatest involvement in household chores itself that might cause and increase WFC in women, but the conflict with their partner which might produce it.

These results may be related to the absence of perception of injustice in the relationships regarding to inequality in the distribution of domestic and family responsibilities between men and women, so that in many cases women neither do perceive

TABLE 4 | Analysis of variance of work-family conflict, work conflict and family conflict by subject involvement on household chores and subject perception of partner involvement on household chores and marital conflict by gender (N = 515).

∗∗∗p ≤ 0.001, ∗∗p ≤ 0.01, ∗p ≤ 0.05, +p ≤ 0.10.

TABLE 5 | Regression analyses predicting work conflict, family conflict and work-family conflict (dependent variables) in women and men by involvement on household chores, subject perception of partner involvement on household chores and level of marital conflict (independent variables).

∗∗p < 0.01, ∗p < 0.05. Standardized beta coefficients (N = 515).

injustice in their relationships nor are dissatisfied. Following the review of Yago and Martínez (2009), it has repeatedly shown that the perception of an unequal distribution of housework between men and women does not necessarily lead to a perception of unfairness. This perception of justice on the division of domestic work and the ideology of traditional gender that supports it explain why gender inequalities remain in the family sphere mediating the relationship between the perception of injustice and perceived quality the relationship. In fact, when women are more socially and emotionally independent from their partners, they are more likely to consider unfair the inequality in the distribution of household chores.

The perception of injustice is a mediating factor between an unequal distribution of domestic work and the perceived quality of the relationship; the relationship may be perceived as satisfactory although the sharing of responsibilities is not equal, if it is not perceived unfair (Yago and Martínez, 2009). However, these results were mediated by gender ideology so this inequal distribution do not generate distress in the more traditional women whereas it does in women with an equal gender ideology.

In this line a study of Ogolsky et al. (2014) shows that the discrepancies at a cognitive level between men and women with regard to equality in household chores affects the quality of the relationship in the sphere of the couple in greater way to women than in men. However, when this inequality is manifested in a behavioral level, it does not seem to affect the quality of the relationship in women. That is, the real inequality does not affect the quality of the relationship in women, but it does at the cognitive level.

The involvement of the couple in household chores is related to an increased WFC, although it does not affect the WC or the FC separately by gender, but affects the WFC globally: it increases similarly in men and women when the couple's involvement is high. This indicates that the WFC is affected by the involvement

of the partner in household chores, but not for the involvement of the subject in them, which would affect to a segmented FC and WC. These results do not prove the hypothesis 3, but can indicate that the model of traditional gender roles does not serve to satisfactorily explain the influence of the division of household tasks and the effect of gender inequality in the WFC, as both in the case of men and women more involved in household chores generate that their female and male partners feel an increased WFC.

Men's and women's perceptions of their partners' involvement in household chores contribute significantly to the perception of WFC; their own involvement also contributes significantly to FC, but negatively, which means that the more involved their partner is in the household chores, the greater their WFC.

Although our study seems to show that gender is an important variable in the involvement in household chores, and that gender inequality and the model of traditional gender roles is still valid in our western society, it also seems to suggest that increased WFC due to a high involvement in household chores is not exclusive to men but also occurs in women. This could be an indicator of a change in the model of traditional gender roles that began in the 80s, where new generations equate the importance of work and family spheres in the cases of both men and women.

In fact, results of some recent research (Shockley et al., 2017) indicate that men and women appear to be more similar than different in their WFC experiences; gender differences in WFC appear to generally be small, regardless of which specific subgroups are examined, and when there is meaningful variation in the magnitude of gender differences in WFC the key factors that determine this variation is currently not well understood.

From this point of view, several alternative models other than the conflict perspective might explain these results. This tis the case of models such as the synergy between work and family, positive balance, work-family facilitation, or work-family enrichment (Beutell and Wittig-Berman, 2008; Lapierre et al., 2017), which would better understand the effect of gender on the individual's relationship between work and family.

The use of this new model integrative approach is justified by the social changes that characterize the values of the new generations, Gen Xers (born between 80 and 2000 population). They seem to consider that both work and family are equally important in their life, and try to find the most appropriate way to reconcile both aspects (Beutell and Wittig-Berman, 2008), giving less importance to presentism at work and being supporters of flexibility. This understanding of the work is based, in addition to the facilities provided the digital revolution and technologies for work, making workers less dependent of a particular physical space and a fixed schedule to perform their work, together with the values of personal autonomy and responsibility that are shared by this new generation. This facilitates that people can now have more time to devote to other areas of their life within the scope of non-work such as family or leisure, with a progressively greater importance in their social identity.

From this point of view, research on work and family interaction has evolved from the study of isolated variables within the conflict and segmentation models toward more complex models that try to understand from the boundary theory, and the models of facilitation and synergy, how transitions are made from one scope to the other, and how they integrate with each other. They do not consider them as separate domains but as something unitary and unbreakable within the life of people. In the same way, an approach that takes into account the gender ideology is progressively being imposed, since it is inseparable from the relationship between work and the family from a cultural point of view.

### Study Limitations

This study focuses on the effect of different kinds of conflict related to the home and work settings. However, due the lack of clear differences in results regarding WFC in men and women when partners' implication in household chorus is high, it would be necessary to include facilitation and synergy models that would make it easier to understand the work-family relationship in all its facets, including the role played by gender and gender inequality. Research on the positive reciprocal effects of work and family is fundamental to understanding the complexity of the work-family interaction.

In addition, this study has other methodological limitations. First, we studied the effect of gender and involvement in household chores on the work-family relationship using independent samples of men and women, without collecting data from their partners. However, we analyzed the perceptions of these people (men and women) about their own involvement and their partner's involvement, and this perception was shown to be significant. Nevertheless, it would be interesting to include the whole couple as a unit in future studies to increase the reliability of the proposed model.

Second, this study is based only on quantitative analyses. It would be interesting to support these results with qualitative studies (through interviews or focus groups) that would help us to interpret the analyses of the results framed in both the traditional gender roles and cross-effect theories, but also in people's interpretations, increasing the model's validity. They would also allow us to understand the gender role in the direction of the cross-effects of work stress from men to women, or from women to men, as our results only partially support this crosseffect, contrary to previous results (Bakker et al., 2008). In any case, the quantitative methodology used in this study allowed us to detect, in a relatively simple way, the existence of changes in the relationship between gender and the traditional division of roles as a first step.

Also, the household chores used are those that might be generalized to mostly couples with children at school age. However, we have not considered specific situations (i.e., living in their house, living in a large or in a small town, grandparents support in caring children, age of the children) that might have help us to better describe the sample and interpret our results. Future studies could include this kind of sociodemographic variables.

In addition, may be other methodological limitations that may have conditioned the results. One of them is the imbalance in the percentage of men (63%) regarding women (37%). However, this limitation is assumable given the correlational nature of the study and the breadth of the sample. Finally, the reliably of the involvement of the partner in household chores is not too high (Cronbach's alpha 0.62) which could raise doubts about its effect as an independent variable in the WFC in men and WC among women. Nevertheless, it met widely accepted criteria to assume its reliably (over 0.60).

### Practical Implications

fpsyg-09-01330 August 3, 2018 Time: 15:30 # 10

These results raise a number of practical implications for equality between men and women in terms of gender issues in the effective management of organizations in order to establish social integration and equality policies in both family and work settings (Wharton, 2015). The management of work and working time within organizations must take into account the social changes occurring in gender roles, and start to consider that both men and women gradually tend to give the same importance to their work and family environments (Kuo et al., 2018), with the accompanying increase in WFC and stress in both partners. Thus, although in many cases traditional gender roles are still valid (the family sphere continues to be more important for women than for men), it is necessary to consider the vision and specific attitudes that both workers have about their involvement in work and family, and establish organizational policies that help to reconcile both spheres in both genders (Lucas-Thompson and Goldberg, 2015).

Moreover, public and social institutions specializing in family matters should incorporate these progressive changes in traditional gender roles into their strategies, in order to facilitate the homogenization of women's and men's roles within the family and workplace. For instance, they can design family counseling and couple training campaigns that help them to discover how to best coordinate their dedication to the family in a way that will reduce stress and conflict, and how to minimize WFC, even translating it into work-family synergy.

### REFERENCES

But also organizations might participate in this social change. They might contribute for instance through the inclusion of family friendly politics to support the search for home-work balance of their workers, men and women (Sprung et al., 2015; Lin et al., 2017; Matias et al., 2017). It would mean a way to improve the quality of working life of their workers and, at the same time, a return of investment (ROI) both for the organization (Dowd et al., 2017) and for our, hopefully, every time more equitable society.

### ETHICS STATEMENT

All participants provided written informed consents before to complete the survey, in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki, and researchers guaranteed the anonymity of data. This study was approved by the institutional review board of the Faculty of Labour Relations and Social Work of the University of Basque Country.

### AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS

JC has been the director of review of the scientific literature, theoretical justification, methodology design, data collection, statistical analyses, and results description. EC has coordinated the improvement of the whole design and redaction paper, including conclusions and research limitations.

### FUNDING

The authors gratefully thank the financial support provided by Generalitat Valenciana (Grant AICO/2017/073).

Greenhaus, J. H., and Beutell, N. J. (1985). Sources of conflict between work and family roles. Acad. Manage. Rev. 10, 76–88. doi: 10.2307/258214

**Conflict of Interest Statement:** The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Copyright © 2018 Cerrato and Cifre. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

# Well-Being, More Than a Dream: Women Constructing Metaphors of Strength

#### Antoni Barnard\*

Department of Industrial and Organisational Psychology, University of South Africa, Pretoria, South Africa

Research on gender inequalities in well-being, attribute lower levels of wellness in women to the burden of multiple role demands, particularly during midlife. Using mostly quantitative measures of subjective well-being (SWB), such studies tend to narrow the concept of well-being and overlook the value of in-depth, context-specific inquiry. Work-life balance is also a consistent causative narrative in studies on women's well-being. Yet, such a narrative frequently emphasizes individual agency in a seemingly unattainable quest, implying an anomaly on how women then actually manage to sustain their well-being. The present study therefore explored the work-life experiences of women in their midlife. The aim was to reach a deeper understanding of the psycho-social dynamics at play in sustaining a psychologically-well self. Meta-theoretically the study built on non-traditional and gendered career models that augment female employees' unique career needs. From a socioanalytic stance, this study investigated secondary data gathered from focus groups, which were based on the socioanalytic method of social dream drawing. The data originated from four sessions of social dream drawings, in which the researcher as participant-observer, investigated work-life experiences of seven women. The gathered information was managed through Atlas.ti and processed through phenomenological hermeneutic analysis. The findings contribute to the discourse on women and well-being and give insight into the application of a unique socioanalytic methodology to research in this field from a gendered perspective. Results were analyzed by developing metaphors from the data. These metaphors reflect women's well-being as they present three unique career needs, namely challenge, balance, and authenticity, during their midlife career stage. Findings show how women's projective identification with outdated gender role norms may perpetuate a gendered notion of work-life balance, which consistently challenges their well-being. Projective identifications are evident in introjected feelings of self-doubt, self-stereotyping, and in the tension between female employees' personal and social identities. The study ultimately points to well-being as a dynamic phenomenon, which women sustain by engaging both positive and negative experiences and through identity tasks such as self-awareness, self-authorisation, self-regard, and authentic self-expression. These findings highlight the importance of creating self-reflective space in organizations to facilitate women's psychological well-being.

Keywords: women, eudaimonic well-being, psychological well-being, work-life balance, women career models, socioanalytic, social dream drawing, phenomenological hermeneutic analysis

#### Edited by:

Eva Cifre, Universitat Jaume I, Spain

#### Reviewed by:

Gary Pheiffer, University of Hertfordshire, United Kingdom Arantxa Grau Muñoz, Universitat de València, Spain

> \*Correspondence: Antoni Barnard<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
#### Specialty section:

This article was submitted to Organizational Psychology, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology

Received: 28 February 2018 Accepted: 19 June 2018 Published: 10 July 2018

#### Citation:

Barnard A (2018) Well-Being, More Than a Dream: Women Constructing Metaphors of Strength. Front. Psychol. 9:1186. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01186

### INTRODUCTION

Documented evidence confirms the importance of employee well-being to deliver positive work and organizational outcomes (Harter et al., 2003; Bloom et al., 2013; Colling, 2013; Cooper and Bevan, 2014). This evidence makes the study and management of employee well-being imperative (Sieberhagen et al., 2011; Bloom et al., 2016). Despite equivocal findings on gender variations in well-being (Ferguson and Gunnell, 2016), studies show concern that women seem to be displaying lower levels of well-being than men (Dreger et al., 2016). Women, particularly during midlife, seem to face challenges to their well-being, as is evident from a recent multilevel analysis of suicide trends peaking, and overall life satisfaction decreasing for female employees during their middle age (Case and Deaton, 2015).

Most studies pointing to potential gender differences rely heavily on measures of subjective well-being (SWB) and report on statistical trends rather than provide in-depth context to explain these trends. Well-being in this regard has been assessed predominantly from Diener's (1984) perspective of hedonic or SWB, indicating a self-evaluation of the degree to which an individual experiences high positive affect, low negative affect and a high degree of life satisfaction or happiness (Deci and Ryan, 2008). This perspective, namely acting to maximize pleasure or to avoid displeasure, does not involve the pursuit of meaningful purposes in life (Ferguson and Gunnell, 2016) such as those foundational to perspectives of eudaimonic or psychological well-being (PWB) (Waterman, 2007; Deci and Ryan, 2008).

According to the eudaimonic perspective, well-being should optimize individuals' true potential and purpose in life, helping them experience their existence as meaningful, worthy, and valuable (Ferguson and Gunnell, 2016). Eudaimonic wellbeing presupposes self-realization and authentic self-expression (Waterman, 1993). PWB is related to eudaimonic well-being and incorporates flourishing, personal growth, environmental mastery, autonomy, positive interrelationships, life purpose and meaning as well as self-acceptance (Ryff, 1989). As such, eudaimonic and PWB perspectives acknowledge people's potential for wellness by striving for meaning and purpose, despite encountering difficulties and challenges in life. A recent study shows a decline in well-being as people age, but points out that orientation toward eudaimonic well-being, in which life purpose is maintained, can hold health benefits for older adults (Ryff, 2017).

When positive psychology was established as a new field, its criticism of psychoanalytic perspectives (Seligman, 2003) led to conceptualizing dualistic categories of well-being and ill-being (Linley and Joseph, 2004). In this regard, positive psychology theoretically rejected the negative category of human experience and negated the use of depth-psychology principles as a constructive way to study human behavior (Cilliers and May, 2010). In the present study, principles of depth psychology, as expounded in the psychoanalytic1 tradition, are regarded as relevant and crucial for a broader understanding of wellbeing. Well-being from a psychoanalytic stance acknowledges the relatedness between positive and negative human experience (Cilliers and May, 2010) and understands well-being as the manifested phenomenon of behavioral dynamics at play above and below the surface of consciousness (Clarke and Hoggett, 2009). Eudaimonic and PWB conceptualisations of well-being are therefore relevant as it provides scope for looking at interrelated positive and negative experience as fundamental to understand optimal behavior such as flourishing and personal growth.

Work-life balance is associated strongly with employee wellbeing (Gröpel and Kuhl, 2009; Lyness and Judiesch, 2014; Nzonzo, 2017) and considered highly important for women's well-being across their career lifespan. Studies showing women reporting lower levels of well-being, attribute this to their weaker socio-economic and power position in life and at work and to the burden of multiple role demands (Dreger et al., 2016). Thus, work-life balance can be considered as a consistent dynamic in women's attempts to maintain well-being throughout their career (Whitehead and Kotze, 2003; Poms et al., 2016). Women's empowerment and hierarchical representation in the work context is a global drive, yet traditional norms for gender roles continue to regard women as primarily responsible for domestic roles. Consequently, female employees are expected to devote less time to work than their male counterparts (Wattis et al., 2013; Sullivan, 2015; Toffoletti and Starr, 2016). As a result, women face unique challenges in work-life balance as their career progresses (Potgieter and Barnard, 2010). Furthermore, their evolving work identity and building career success differ extensively from that of men (Mainiero and Sullivan, 2005; Zimmerman and Clark, 2016).

Contemporary conceptualisations of work-life balance espouse a relativist ontology, emphasizing the attainment of work-life balance as a subjective individual experience that fluctuates over time in response to changing life contexts, career needs, identities, and priorities (Kalliath and Brough, 2008; Potgieter and Barnard, 2010; Barber et al., 2016; Kristensen and Pedersen, 2017). Such a relativist ontology and subjectivist stance developed in response to criticizing conventional perspectives on work-life balance for its objectivist epistemology of work and life as separate and mutually exclusive domains, whether it be conflictual (involving constructs such as work-life conflict or negative work-life spill-over) or enriching (using constructs such as role enhancement, work-life enrichment, positive work-life spill-over, or work-life integration) (Barber et al., 2016; Toffoletti and Starr, 2016).

On the one hand, a subjectivist understanding of work-life balance recognizes the importance of individual differences and in this study is relevant to reflect women's unique experience. On the other hand, such an understanding does not necessarily recognize the dynamics of socio-cultural and organizational contexts where individuals work and live. Instead, it places the responsibility of attaining work-life balance solely on the

1Long (2013), (p. xxi) prefers the term "socioanalytic," yet recognizes that "others might use the terms system psychodynamics or psychoanalysis." For consistency

the terms socioanalytic and psychoanalytic will be used interchangeably in this study.

individual. Naturally, this creates unrealistic expectations and the additional anxiety to be an ideally balanced individual (Ford and Collinson, 2011), which applies especially to female employees (Sullivan, 2015; Adame et al., 2016; Toffoletti and Starr, 2016). Taking a psychoanalytic perspective to understanding the work-life balance dynamic, Bloom (2016) recognizes above and below surface dynamics at the intersection of the individual and the system. He highlights the elusive idea or fantasy of achieving "balance" as fundamental to the work-life balance discourse, emphasizing a never-ending and continuously disappointing quest for balance. Individuals identify and introject an imbalanced work-life identity, which provides the impetus for continued yet ultimately disappointing efforts of work-life balance in the context of corporate work demands (Bloom, 2016).

Women are therefore expected to manage the "impossible task" of work-life balance (Toffoletti and Starr, 2016, p. 490) in a socio-economic context with sustained stereotypic norms for gender roles (Burnett et al., 2010; Lyness and Judiesch, 2014). Such roles permeate organizational cultures, resulting in a gendered operationalisation of seemingly gender-neutral policies on work-life balance (Burnett et al., 2010; Ford and Collinson, 2011). To this end, female employees make multiple role transitions during a day with consequent physical and psychological costs to their well-being (Amon, 2017), especially since work-life balance remains elusive. Moreover, some women often return to careers that accommodate their role as primary caregivers (Cha, 2013; Wattis et al., 2013). Thus, they frequently opt for discontinuous, interrupted, non-linear career trajectories as opposed to the traditional career-progression patterns men tend to follow (Lewis et al., 2015; Zimmerman and Clark, 2016). Herman (2015) labels such a-typical career movements as a "frayed career" or "careerscape" to express women's range of nontypical career patterns, which include multiple career identities and career change and flexibility over their life course.

In response to the work-life balance dichotomy and due to increasing demands for work efficiency, non-traditional career models such as the boundaryless and protean ones recognize the emergence of multiple careers across organizations and time, where individuals proactively manage and reshape their career roles (Cabrera, 2009). Women applying such non-linear career models to manage work-life demands is not a new phenomenon (Mainiero and Sullivan, 2005). However, for career success, female employees are still regarded as deviating from the norm, which impedes their career advancement and hampers their well-being (Cabrera, 2009). In addition to the boundaryless and protean careers, career-path models were designed unique to women's work-life demands and disparate roles across the career life span. In light of the importance of need fullfilment for well-being, these models highlight that women's predominant career needs from their early, mid to the late career life-stages oscillate between challenge, balance, and authenticity (White, 1995; Mainiero and Sullivan, 2005; O'Neil and Bilimoria, 2005). Women's needs shift from seeking challenging work in the early career stage, to an increasing concern for balance in the midcareer and during the late career striving for authenticity and meaning (Mainiero and Sullivan, 2005; O'Neil and Bilimoria, 2005). Studies show, however, that balance remains a continuous struggle for women across generations and career stages even though it is defined differently in the various career life stages (Darcy et al., 2012; Roebuck et al., 2013).

It is evident how important well-being and women's unique career needs and their experiences of work-life balance features in a gendered socio-organizational context (Amon, 2017). Therefore, the objective of the present research was to explore the work-life experiences of women in their midlife career to gain a deeper understanding of the psychosocial dynamics at play in sustaining a psychologically-well self.

### METHODS

### Methodological Orientation

Two qualitative methodologies directed the design of this study. Rooted in socioanalytic methodology, the method of social dream drawing (SDD) (Mersky, 2008, 2013) was fundamental to how data were collected. Then, data were analyzed from the methodological tradition of hermeneutic phenomenology, by employing the method of phenomenological hermeneutic analysis (Lindseth and Norberg, 2004).

Socioanalytic inquiry and hermeneutic phenomenology are epistemologically congruent, because both methodologies are fundamentally based on social constructionist assumptions. Social constructionism is a theory of knowledge or epistemology (Andrews, 2012; Galbin, 2014) emphasizing interactive meaning-making in social contexts (Schwandt, 1994) and the co-construction of knowledge between the researcher and the researched (Charmaz, 2006). Such an epistemological understanding is central to socioanalytic inquiry, which believes that knowledge is collectively generated (Mersky, 2015). Socioanalytic methods of inquiry such as SDD is further rooted in systems theory and the psychoanalytic tradition (Long, 2013). It emphasizes the collective unconscious in understanding human behavior (Sievers, 2006) and focus on group rather than individual level of data collection and analysis (Mersky, 2015). As such, the objective of SDD as a socioanalytic method, is to access collective unconscious thinking about a social or organizational phenomenon and to generate data that can be developed into working hypotheses (Mersky, 2013, 2015). The specific procedure underlying SDD is described in detail in the data collection and analysis section below and it is detailed by its developer (Mersky, 2008).

Hermeneutic phenomenology similarly emphasizes collective experience (Schwandt, 1994; Kafle, 2011) and regards the researcher as "creative contributor" central to co-constructing meaning (Dahlberg et al., 2008, p. 96). The researcher's theoretical and experiential preconceptions are central in the data gathering and analysis process, and should be transparently applied through critical and reflective interpretation (Laverty, 2003; Crotty, 2005; Dahlberg et al., 2008; Norlyk and Harder, 2010). The underlying meta-theoretical conceptualisations of well-being and work-life balance was therefore clarified at the onset of the article, it being key to the focus of the present study and interpretations of the data.

### Procedure

The researcher was involved in a project aimed at introducing and developing the SDD method for research and consulting purposes in the South African context. The original project recruited women employed at a South African tertiary institution, with qualitative research expertise and interest, to train in the SDD methodology. From the original SDD workshop several SDD sessions followed, focussing on women in the work context. The data for this article were selected from four of these SDD sessions. The inclusion of SDD data was conceptually driven by this study's espoused theoretical framework and its research objective. Four sessions included women in their midlife career stage involved in work characterized by independent and flexible work schedules and multiple career identities typical to the "frayed" career (Herman, 2015). Purposeful sampling as defined by Yin (2011) directed the selection of these four SDD sessions as "data sources" or "sampling units" (Gentles et al., 2015, p. 1781), based on their relevance and richness to the stated research objective. Ethical clearance for using the SDD data as secondary data (because this study was not part of the original project) was obtained from the relevant institutional ethics committee at the University of South Africa (Reference number: 2016\_CEMS/IOP\_079). Prior to engaging in the project's SDD sessions, consent was generally obtained from participants to digitally record the sessions, as well as process the generated data for research purposes. The four SDD sessions relevant here, consisted of 14 dreams used to elicit collective thinking about work-life themes such as women working in research and the work-life role of women. The SDD data were managed with Atlas.ti and processed through a phenomenological hermeneutic analysis (Lindseth and Norberg, 2004).

### Participants

Of the seven women who participated in the four sampled SDD sessions, four women work in academia, of which two simultaneously freelance as consultants. Another participant is a professional nurse working shifts at a hospital, whilst also teaching part-time at a higher education institution. One of the participants runs her own home-based business, and the last one is involved in various non-profit activities such as writing for a local newspaper and doing developmental work in an Afrikaner Youth movement. Of the seven women, six are married; one without children and five having either two or three children. The seventh participant is a single parent with one child. All seven participants fall within the age range of 40–50. Baruch and Barnett (1986) label women in mid-life as represented by the age category 35–55, which places the participants in this inquiry within the mid-life age category. In terms of racial distribution, five white and two black women participated. Four of the women took part in three SDD sessions and three women participated in only one SDD.

### Data Collection and Analysis

The SDD method was developed by Mersky (2008). Approximately two to three weeks prior to an SDD session, participants receive an invitation to a themed session (in this case for example Women working in research, or Women's work-life roles). The invitation include instructions to prepare a drawing of any recent (no specific time frame given or required) or well-remembered dream. During a SDD session, participants are seated in a circle and systematically work through individual dreams according to an established procedure consisting of basically three phases (Mersky, 2008, 2013). During the first phase, the "owner" of the dream places the drawing on the ground in the middle of the circle, explains the dream drawing and answers clarifying questions from the other participants. A discussion follows in the second phase during which the other participants associate freely and expand on the dream drawing. As a method to access the unconscious, free association allows for collective reflection, drawing on the memories of participants and the social system to which they belong (Long, 2013). Thereafter and prior to the final phase, participants change seats. During the final phase, participants collectively reflect on issues emerging from the previous two phases, with the established theme in mind. Each step in the SDD process is managed according to a 15-min time boundary. Rest breaks of 15–30-min were included. As a conclusion to the SDD session, the facilitator facilitates a general concluding reflection on learnings and overall thoughts on the session and its theme as a whole. Ultimately each SDD session lasted approximately 4.5 h.

The SDD sessions were recorded digitally and transcribed. Transcriptions were loaded into Atlas.ti and a phenomenological hermeneutic analysis was done according to the typical stages of naïve reading, structural analysis, and comprehensive understanding (Lindseth and Norberg, 2004). The naïve reading and structural analysis are reported on in the results section below and the discussion section details the comprehensive understanding that emerged from the analytic process.

### RESULTS

Through an initial naïve reading of the transcriptions, the researcher became familiarized with and gained a holistic sense of the data; in the process developing an acute awareness of the communicative power of metaphor (Shinebourne and Smith, 2010) and it being a tool to help bring to the surface emotional representations of women's well-being experiences (Grisoni and Page, 2010). The free associations and collective reflection on the dream drawings offered various metaphors. The metaphors were used to explore patterns of significance in and construct an in-depth understanding of participants' work-life experiences (Morganan, 1986; Shinebourne and Smith, 2010). During the subsequent structural analysis, several sub-themes emerged, which could be clustered meaningfully into three main themes according to the three, predominant career-development needs unique to women, namely: challenge, balance, and authenticity (Mainiero and Sullivan, 2005; O'Neil and Bilimoria, 2005). Each subtheme respectively was elucidated through the metaphors: "Icarus: Soaring dangerously"; "Centaurs: being both and"; and "Comparing notes with a stranger." These metaphors are discussed below.

### Icarus: Soaring Dangerously (Challenge)

In free associating to a particular dream drawing that depicts a colorful plane in the air, participants brought up the metaphor of Icarus:

I hear the fragility, but there is also something about surviving. You know really this is like Icarus. You kept on saying that you were flying near to the edge and that went near to the sun. And you know every time you survive; you didn't fall, I mean in the dream my free association is that you are not falling out of the sky. And that you really get close to danger and this is not like slightly close to danger, this is really close to danger.

The metaphor is derived from the Greek myth of Icarus who escapes imprisonment, yet fails because in his flight he ventures too close to the sun. As a result, the wax of his wings begin to melt so that he ultimately falls and dies. The Icarus metaphor vividly illustrates women's need for challenge but also a duality of emotions they experience in their drive to achieve career success. On the one hand, there is excitement and a sense of empowerment, on the other hand, they experience anxiety and doubt. The metaphoric scenario is the context of escaping imprisonment, which potentially represents breaking free from the shackles of entrenched gendered stereotypes that inhibit women's career success. Whereas the escape provides a sense of empowerment by achieving freedom, there is also anxiety in the prevailing gendered expectation. This is namely, that women who attempt to "fly high" are a dangerous endeavor, beset with potential failure and the imminent danger of getting hurt. The anxiety that is felt seems somehow rooted in women's own sense of "buying into" such a gendered expectation.

Discussions in the SDD groups reflected how women feel trapped despite work-life opportunities to empower them. The reason is that they work and live daily in a society entrenched with success norms that are traditionally male dominant. Thus, the participants drew on the image of a woman winning a competitive race because she "runs like a man." Another image emerged in one of the sessions of feeling trapped like a gladiator fighting in a Roman arena. In this case, entrapment results from society's expectation that female employees will fail when they express their drive for achievement, competition and need for challenge. As one participant explained: "That makes me also think you know, this Gladiator movie and the coloseum and being trapped inside. And not able to get out, because the steep stairs only lead down, but she never reaches the bottom."

The participants also reflected on how their needs for achievement are set up for failure by their own doubts:

Is it safer to stay with the crowd and not stand out by choosing the easy road, even if you know that might be the best thing for you, because you are tiny?  Because... you choose to stay with the crowd, almost intuitively knowing you are never going to get anywhere.

It seems that women's need to belong may perpetuate their projective identification with society's entrenched expectations about gender roles. In this way, "standing out" (achievement/success) is self-sabotaged in favor of metaphorically staying with the gendered norms and low achievement expectations of the crowd. Thus, ultimately in this dynamic inner struggle between wanting to achieve and wanting to belong in a gendered society, women find their well-being challenged.

The same inner dynamic also helps build resilience where women take on the challenge of working and living in a gendered society. Thus, they embrace both their "fragility" and their "surviving", thereby reframing the outcome of the Icarus narrative into non-failure. As a participant explained: "Every time you survive; you didn't fall... you are not falling out of the sky." Resilience evolves when women develop a self-awareness of the need to belong and be accepted, which potentially may be fundamental to self-doubt. As attested by a participant: "It relates to the fear of being acceptable to others... and my own doubt, let me be honest about that, my own doubt in what I do." Such self-awareness seems fundamental to well-being as it creates a willingness to take responsibility for overcoming intrapersonally entrenched gendered stereotypes. The self-awareness leads to self-authorisation to take on challenges and be successful:

... myself as a woman can I dare to break away from the crowd... because the moment that you break away from the crowd, that is when you will be, I mean you can get into serious trouble. I understand that, but that is also the time that you will be celebrated beyond imagination... if you run and you succeed, do you actually, do you actually allow yourself to be successful?

### Centaurs: "Being Both... and..." (Balance)

The metaphor of the Centaur depicts the phenomenon of worklife balance as more than consciously managing multiple roles within a limited timeframe. The women are thus associated with Centaurs: "I thought you drew those horse people... horses with human bodies and heads like the ones in the movie Narnia." In this regard, they embody work-life balance by containing the psycho-social consequences and gendered expectations linked to the variable roles in their lives. Stated differently, they embody the gendered rhetoric that underpins conventional conceptualisations of work-life balance. Related associations to the Centaur metaphor are women compared to being "both fish and bird" and "both an airplane and an insect."

Centaurs, the half-human, half-horse. creatures from Greek mythology are regarded as liminal beings. Thus, they embody contrasting natures and occupy anomalous or dual positions at the same time (Clauss, 2007). Women often find themselves in a position that simultaneously presents mutually excluding as well as conflicting expectations. On the one hand, they fullfil the traditional role of mother and wife, which is presented as sub-important to the so-called full-time working role. Thus, by implication the maternal role is also sub-important to that of male employees who continue pursuing hierarchical and financial career success. On the other hand, women fullfil a work role that is loaded with expectations to be productive and to utilize the emancipatory and empowering opportunities available for women in the workplace. As one participant stated: "Linking with that again the whole thing about contradictions, being both an airplane and an insect all at once. Being both strong and vulnerable, both agile and quite sluggish."

Fulfilling differential roles with conflicting expectations, represent above-surface behavioral dilemmas that reflect typical issues of work-life balance and managing of time and resources between different roles. However, in-depth reflection on the embodiment of their contrasting natures by using metaphors and free association, revealed below-surface dynamics. This particularly applies to women's preoccupation with maleness, as the following excerpt illustrates:

I'm just wondering about our pre-occupation with the penis. Because it appears after and in our association with the drawings . . . we are pre-occupied with men. It is almost as if the men are drawing themselves into our dreams . . . Excuse me, we draw them into the dreams.

The preoccupation was given meaning during the SDD sessions, where participants split male and female qualities stereotypically. The participants projected onto maleness the characteristics of strength, leadership, and control, while femaleness was depicted with comparatively smaller feats: "In the plane you are not the pilot. But with the insect you are steering, you are controlling where you are going" and "one might think of the men being the pilots." Due to this preoccupation with maleness, it seems that women unconsciously avail themselves to embody the gendered rhetoric that underlies the discourse on work-life balance. According to this rhetoric, men are privileged by having more career opportunities and less concerns with work-life balance. A participant elaborated: "The women is in darkness and the men know everything... the only opportunity for seeing what is out there is at the tail end and only the men seem to have access to open that space." Women's well-being is thus challenged by their limiting perspective of balance as a gendered issue.

Nevertheless, ultimately the Centaur metaphor emerged as an image of strength. Female participants also identified within themselves a reservoir of both maleness and femaleness: "I like that about her because I like to be male and female. I really like that. I don't like only the one... because what she then brings to my mind is that she holds the ambivalence inside..." In being "both . . . and . . . " women see the potential for different rules of being in the world. This insight is described by the following excerpt:

For me it is almost like a fish crossed with a bird and I know you get these movies—"Journey to the center of the earth," where the rule is everything is the opposite than normal. So, the elephants are small where the insects are big; and you get, let's say, ducks with a buck's head or a fish with bird's wings and the bird's beak.

By understanding the possibility of different societal norms there is also the potential to forge new constructions and meaning. A participant remarked: "So, maybe it's about male and female, you know. Maybe it's not just about male... like I mean, for me the courtyard now is a space for something to be birthed." Women's well-being in this case, seems to be their embodiment of difference and their capability to in fact assume a liminal position. This may be on the boundary of work and life where they present both male and female qualities.

### Comparing Notes With a Stranger (Authenticity)

An interesting dream shared in one of the SDDs, illustrates two figures sitting back-to-back each with religious notes on their laps. The participant titled her dream drawing, "comparing notes with a stranger." She identified herself, a Christian woman, as one of the figures sitting with her back to that of an unknown Islamic man. In the dream she experiences surprise and relief when realizing that the notes on his lap are similar to her religious notes: "I looked over and said, 'Hey it's the same' . . . and it was appropriate."

"Comparing notes with a stranger" metaphorically reflects the tension that women experience when they attempt to retain their personal identity and their authenticity, in relation to their gendered social identity (Kreiner et al., 2006; Brown, 2015). The dream carries a strong spiritual theme. It speaks to the core of one's being and expresses what one believes, relating to the need for authenticity and a distinct personal identity. This dream metaphor expresses how women experience their gendered social identity through negative emotions: feeling judged and not being good enough. The stranger resembles the object of badness (projected onto him) and how the woman identifies (introjection) with the good and preferred characteristic of being non-judgemental. The projection of badness and participants' response to it, represents women's expressed need to be accepted and not be judged:

Central to the dream is something I believe very strongly in. One shouldn't judge. I feel there are people in my house that are terribly judgemental. Just like that, judge, judge, judge, and it's something I've felt my whole life: I can't judge others. I just immediately felt this guy, maybe from ISIS or whatever, I can't judge him.

Attempting to maintain a personal identity of competence, women find it challenging to reconcile a competent self with stereotypic gendered expectations of performing inferior work. Confirming this dynamic is another dream in which one female participant receives flowers from her husband's work, while she is at a workshop: "I didn't know it was for me; it was very weird. I thought the flowers came from my husband's work and it was extremely weird that they knew I was at the workshop." Women's need for recognition as being competent seems evident in the dream, yet it is conflicted by their experience that others do not expect them to be productive: "I couldn't understand that they knew I was there and not at home." The tension between the personal identity and the gendered social identity was first recognized where women feel judged. The tension was affirmed in this dream where the participant had a sense of not being valued.

To resolve and balance the conflicting expectations between their personal and social identities, women frequently assess their self-worth through constant interpersonal comparison. This is typical to conceptual definitions of identity work (Adams and Crafford, 2012). Participants attested that they frequently were negotiating who they are (personal identity) in comparison to others and others' expectations for them (social identity). Reflecting on her interaction with a group of young adult women at a wedding, a participant stated:

I wish I was as sorted out as they are at that age . . . they know what they want and how and what; this girl is 24 and she knows exactly what she wants. I mean, when I was 24 everything was confused and then I think: 'Wow! I am actually not even where she is now.' She is spiritually sorted.

Another participant affirmed: "You know our family is unstable, and then I think yours always looks so sorted." From such a discussion comparing oneself with and idealizing others, it seems evident that women's well-being is challenged by the tension created between their sense of self and of an idealized social construct of self. The idealized self is rooted in their gendered identity and their beliefs about the gendered expectations flow from that identity.

The dream, "comparing notes with a stranger," ultimately demonstrates how women sustain their authenticity and wellbeing by working across differences. This movement is reflected where women integrate the projected bad and introjected good in themselves. In the case of the dream, the woman ironically identifies strongly with the stranger: "He was totally strange to me, but I felt an immediate connection with him." By embracing difference, women accept the good and the bad within themselves, expressing the need for an integrated, authentic self. Furthermore, women experienced relief as a strong emotion when they realize the similarity of core beliefs across above-surface differences such as gender and religion. This identification of similarities that transcend differences, reflects the identity task of integration and expresses self-regard.

### DISCUSSION

The aim of this inquiry was to reach in-depth understanding of the fundamental psycho-social dynamics explaining how women in their mid-life career sustain well-being. This discussion details the comprehensive understanding that resulted from the analysis and includes a reflection on its implications, potential limitations and directions for future research.

### Comprehensive Understanding

Career needs unique to women's careers are: challenge, balance, and authenticity (Mainiero and Sullivan, 2005). All three needs emerged in the data as persistent career issues that impact participants' well-being dynamic. In the discussion above, balance was found to be important across the career life-stages of women (Darcy et al., 2012; Roebuck et al., 2013). In this case, the data provided convincing evidence that in addition to balance, challenge remains a need women have to contend with in midlife, while authenticity is already a relevant issue in this career stage. The results thus demonstrate that, apart from balance, challenge and authenticity needs are also prominent in the midlife career stage and are not exclusive to women's early and late career life-stages. The present study did not aim to compare the extent to which these needs manifest in different career life stages. The focus was rather on the psycho-social dynamics at play when these women deal with their need for challenge, balance, and authenticity to sustain their well-being in work and life.

Regarding the need for challenge, well-being is evidenced in women's need for purpose and self-optimisation. However, at the same time, their well-being is challenged by introjections of self-doubt and anxiety, which participants described. These impediments arise from their struggle with internally entrenched gendered stereotypes and identification with masculine norms of success. Women's need for challenge is paralleled by their psycho-social need for belonging, the latter prompting projective identification with gendered expectations about career success and achievement. This detrimental identification is thus exacerbated by a conflicting dynamic that underpins the women's fundamental psycho-social needs. These needs are striving for achievement and to stand out, weighed against wanting to belong (Knez, 2016). In the same vein, Grisoni and Page (2010) report ambivalence about their competence to be rooted in their need to succeed being in competition with their need to collaborate.

Similar to challenge, the gendered notion of work-life balance is linked to enduring values and beliefs relevant to the sociocultural context of work life. The findings of the present study have shown that the gendered notion of work-life balance is also perpetuated through women's projective identification with its underlying outdated norms for gender roles. Thus, women are not only sustained by society but sustain themselves by containing the gendered role expectations in work-life balance. Evidence in this regard is participants' preoccupation with male privilege and superiority as well as the stereotypic splitting of male and female qualities. This self-stereotyping prevents women from flourishing and impedes autonomy. Self-stereotyping feeds the prevailing gendered perspective of work-life balance and hampers them in sustaining their psychological well-being.

Finally, regarding the need for authenticity, it became evident that conflicting role expectations impact women's well-being by challenging their identity work.  This reconciliation is key to wellbeing since it highlights the need for authenticity or the ability to express the inner self and engage in activities that reflect the true self (Vleioras, 2005; Vleioras and Bosma, 2006). The process guiding identity work strives to balance the tension that underlies the psycho-social needs of differentiation (negotiating a unique self) and integration (associating the self with others) (Adams and Crafford, 2012; Knez, 2016). Participants' identity work revealed extensive challenges to their well-being since their social identities entrenched negative connotations to traditional female roles set against their personal needs for recognition, value, and competence. In their autoethnographic research, Grisoni and Page (2010), (p. 22) similarly reflect on their having "internalized the rational male gaze from the organization, and when confronted with it we were unable to sustain a sense of the value of our own enquiry." Such entrenched gender role stereotypes inhibit authentic self-expression or "personal expressiveness" (Ferguson and Gunnell, 2016, p. 429; Waterman, 1993, p. 678) and leaves women feeling judged and under-valued despite attempts to realize their career potential and express their personal identities.

When examining the three metaphors, it seems that women's projective identification with stereotypic gender roles may set up the primary intrapersonal barrier to their well-being. This is firstly, evidenced in self-doubt encouraged by the introjected belief that it is dangerous for women to respond to challenges due to the high potential of failure. Introjecting gendered role norms result from women's need to belong, yet conflicts with their need for challenge. Secondly, this barrier became apparent when participants split male and female qualities, where the male represents a projected superior competence in comparison to the female. Splitting of male and female qualities lead women to self-stereotype and embody the gendered rhetoric underlying work-life balance. Lastly, women's struggle to reframe their stereotypic gendered social identities, highlights the difficulty to express an authentic personal identity congruent to the need for challenge, recognition, success, belonging and acceptance. While formulating an identity, the self is continuously negotiated in relation to a socio-cultural and organizational context (Adams and Crafford, 2012). Thus, the self becomes a product of a sociocultural past and its entrenched memories (Knez, 2016). It is therefore not surprising that as women, the participants attested that they find it hard to disengage them from identifying with gendered norms and expectations since these actually represent their social identity.

Insight into the complex nature of well-being does not only require in-depth inner understanding. The relational dynamic between or intersection of the individual, the organization, and society (Ali et al., 2017) is important as it provides understanding of systemic conscious and unconscious behavior (Cilliers, 2017). As a result, the psycho-social dynamics uncovered in the present study, highlight how intrapersonal dynamics collude with the gendered socio-cultural and organizational system to sustain disparaging stereotypes. On the one hand, work-life balance is indeed a subjective phenomenon, which women experience in a unique way. On the other hand, it is informed collectively by socio-cultural norms, which emerge from the unconscious of the individual, the organization and society. Women's introjected beliefs and projective identification with gendered role expectations mirror and perpetuate societal and organizational dynamics in this regard.

The results show evidence of women's well-being that is impacted, however the metaphors are also images of strength and provide evidence of how women sustain their well-being. In this investigation, well-being ultimately emerged as a dynamic phenomenon that requires engagement with both positive and negative emotions and experience. According to Vleioras (2005) negative emotions trigger self-exploration leading to either more negative emotions and/or positive emotions, which further promote exploration and the development of new frames of reference. The dynamic of working with both positive and negative emotion and experience seem inevitable and important in sustaining women's well-being. This is due to a process of constant negotiation to balance the tension between the self and the idealized or social self, referred to as identity work (Adams and Crafford, 2012; Knez, 2016). Whilst the intrapersonal dynamics underlying identity work reflected women's well-being being challenged, it also reflected identity tasks applied to sustain well-being. This finding is congruent with the conclusion reached by Vleioras and Bosma (2006, p. 405) that "not dealing with identity issues is related to less psychological well-being" and "dealing with identity issues is related to more psychological well-being." Through the SDD sessions, women were able to demonstrate how they engage with the full spectrum of inevitable positive and negative experience in identity work. In this regard, the SDD group sessions provided a space for identity tasks, in particular self-reflection and the development of self-awareness, self-authorisation, self-regard and authentic self-expression.

In this study, hope and resilience came to the fore as participants developed self-awareness of their entrenched gendered beliefs and how these influence their personal growth and confidence. Women self-authorized to be successful and thus demonstrate the potential to break free from the narrative of gendered success. By acknowledging their capacity to incorporate both male and female qualities, women also developed the potential for a self-regard that is gender neutral. They furthermore gained sight of the potential to construct a new narrative around their career identity and success. Ultimately, self-regard lead to an integrated and authentic self that "can be celebrated beyond imagination." Seeing that authentic selfexpression is crucial for optimal well-being (Waterman, 1993; Vleioras and Bosma, 2006), female employees should be provided with opportunities such as demonstrated in this study, to selfreflect on their identity work.

### Implications

Understanding well-being from a gendered perspective requires a multi-level analysis that incorporates behavioral dynamics above and below the surface of consciousness, and at the intersection of the individual, the organization, and society. Thus, an understanding of well-being is incomplete when it focuses solely on above-surface manifestations such as feeling positive, happy and satisfied. Operationalisation of SWB perspectives in research may therefore impede a fuller understanding of the phenomenon. The present study aimed to demonstrate the importance of mining unconscious experience to develop a more complex and deeper understanding of the enduring well-being dynamic. The study also demonstrated the interrelatedness of individual experience with the norms and expectations of society and the organization.

Furthermore, well-being is a complex phenomenon that cannot be conceptualized adequately as dichotomy, juxtaposing well-being with ill-being, or by negating negative experience. When working with women's well-being (in research or psychology practice) forums are necessary that will allow women to self-reflect, engaging with and integrating positive and negative experience, thoughts and feelings (cf. Cilliers and May, 2010). Women's well-being lies in their capability to work with both positive and negative experiences and emotions linked to their potentially conflicting work-life needs. This helps them deal with both the balance and the imbalance that result from fulfilling multiple roles, instead of focusing only on the positive (denying negative emotions) or constantly attempting to overcome negative emotions as if it is an abnormal state of ill-being (cf. Harris, 2009).

Well-being is related closely to identity work (cf. Vleioras and Bosma, 2006). This implies that doing identity work with women may facilitate their experiences of well-being during a particular career-stage. Such identity work should focus on going beyond recognizing gendered stereotypes in society and in the work context. It should create an awareness in women about their inner dynamics that collude with contextual stereotypes to sustain gendered expectations. Women can be coached to recognize how they project and introject gendered qualities and how these impact their self-worth. Ultimately, women should be guided toward self-regard. They should be helped to authorize themselves toward attaining their career needs, taking on their work-life roles and express a personal identity free from constricting gender stereotypes. The present study advances the value of action-research and demonstrates the benefits of group work (cf. Amon, 2017) to help women develop self-awareness, self-regard, self-authorisation, and authentic self-expression.

Employee well-being in organizations is facilitated when the work environment supports the individual's ability to think about, express and manage anxieties related to task accomplishments (Stefano et al., 2017). Therefore, implications of this study for the organization entail providing reflective space for women to do the identity work that has been described above. In providing such a space the organization will enable and facilitate female employees' self-reflection, growth, and psychological well-being. Selfreflective space could be provided explicitly through focus group forums but should also be implicit in the organizational culture.

### Limitations and Directions for Future Research

Seeing that this study acknowledges the intersectionality of the individual, organization, and society, data was derived on an individual and group level, yet not on an organizational level. Assumptions about gendered norms and expectations on organizational and societal level, could therefore only be made to the extent that participants' gendered experiences of well-being reflect their interaction with and experience of gender dynamics within the organization and broader society. Studies providing a focus on the system psychodynamics underlying gendered work contexts as an interpretive model for studying women's well-being, continue to be needed.

To operationalise a socioanalytic inquiry is a complex task. Its methods challenged the researcher's skills for group-facilitation and required trustworthy interpretation. Being a participantobserver in SDD sessions may have limited the researcher's scope of interpretation. The researcher attempted to address this deficiency by being methodologically transparent and by clarifying the underlying meta-theoretical influences that impacted the results of this inquiry. To this end, there are boundaries to the methodology followed here. Thus, the results reflect a particular perspective to the data and the phenomenon under research; by implication, other perspectives may be possible.

Acknowledging the possibility of other perspectives highlights the need for continued similar research. Incorporating women in early and late career life-stages in similar studies may produce insightful data that can be added or compared to. For example, future researchers may explore whether gendered role expectations have shifted in the younger generations who enter the work force. The intersection of race and gender and the implications thereof have not been studied here, and will benefit from further exploration. Future research on identity work and work identity linked to well-being from a gendered perspective is also especially encouraged as a result of this study.

### CONCLUSION

The present study's contribution to the global body of knowledge regarding well-being from a gendered perspective, is evident in its advancing particular meta-theoretical assumptions about female employees' career needs, work-life balance and women's wellbeing dynamic. Meta-theoretically, the present study posits that it is inappropriate to apply conventional career theory to the study of women's work-life experiences. The more applicable alternative is to apply non-traditional, novel, and gender-specific career models, thus focusing on career needs unique to women. The study moreover refutes an over-emphasis on stereotypic work-life balance as fundamental to women's well-being.

On the one hand, the need for challenge and authentic selfexpression also permeates the career journey of women and are equally important career needs in sustaining well-being. On the other hand, a gendered emphasis on work-life balance may rather have a disparaging effect on women's well-being because worklife balance is a consistent pursuit which is never fully attainable (Bloom, 2016). Over-emphasizing work-life balance in such a manner potentially creates unresolvable anxiety and pressure to be an ideally balanced individual in a social context that is fraught with work-life demands incongruent to gendered expectations. In this way, the prevailing gendered rhetoric underlying the work-life balance phenomenon is maintained. Yet, changing our deep-seated gendered perspective on work-life balance, and by implication on well-being, will prove impossible if it is not accompanied by also shifting our norms about career success. A new and different narrative of career success seems necessary to truly advance a gender neutral work-life balance phenomenon. Conceptualisation of career success should reflect a subjectivist epistemology in which the unique career needs of the individual is acknowledged and celebrated. Whilst we continue to live in a gendered society, this may however be a challenging endeavor. The value of studying well-being from a systems perspective (cf. Ali et al., 2017) and a psychoanalytic stance (cf. Stefano et al., 2017) is therefore evident. This study highlighted how women's projective identification with gendered role norms affect their well-being, yet is a result of unconscious, interrelated dynamics at the intersection of the individual, the group and the organization.

The findings contribute meta-theoretically to the discourse on women and well-being, by highlighting the value of incorporating both positive and negative experience to not only understand the challenges women face in terms of their wellbeing but also how they succeed in sustaining a psychological well self. In this regard, the study provides insight into a unique socioanalytic methodology in well-being research applied from a gendered perspective. Social dream drawing provides a useful mechanism to explore the deeper dynamics underpinning the difficulties that women experience in efforts to sustain their well-being. It however also provides a vehicle to facilitate important identity tasks for sustaining well-being and is proposed as one way to provide female employees with opportunities for collective self-reflection in order to develop self-regard and uncover avenues for authentic self-expression. The study demonstrates how metaphor can be applied to provide an in-depth understanding of the psycho-social dynamics that impact women's well-being as their journey continued through mid-life. The findings denoting identity work and how women sustain their well-being, may be extrapolated to a genderised work environment and applied to different similar contexts globally.

### REFERENCES

### ETHICS STATEMENT

This study was carried out in accordance with the recommendations of UNISA Policy on Research Ethics and the CEMS/IOP Research Ethics Review Committee. The protocol was approved by the CEMS/IOP Research Ethics Review Committee. All subjects gave written informed consent in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki.

### AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS

The author confirms being the sole contributor of this work and approved it for publication.

### ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank the women who have shared their dreams, dream drawings, thoughts, and work-life experiences with me. Without them this work would not have been possible. I'd also like to acknowledge Mr. Claude Vosloo who proofread and edited the manuscript and gave me valuable advise on writing style and expression.

au/documentSummary;dn=296172059763109;res=IELBUS;subject=Maori %20studies

**Conflict of Interest Statement:** The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Copyright © 2018 Barnard. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

# Psychosocial Hazards in the Workplace as an Aspect of Horizontal Segregation in the Nursing Profession

#### Krystyna Kowalczuk 1 \*, Elzbieta Krajewska-Kułak 1 and Marek Sobolewski 2

1 Medical University of Bialystok, Bialystok, Poland, 2 Rzeszów University of Technology, Rzeszow, Poland

The purpose of this article was to assess the influence of psychosocial hazards as a factor affecting the presence of men in the nursing profession. The article refers to the topic of particularly low representation of men among nursing staff in Poland, in comparison to what similar statistics show for other countries. The aim of the study was to assess whether the psychosocial hazards in the nursing profession constitute a significant factor in the small number of men present in this occupation. In this article psychosocial hazards are considered as all the aspects of management and work organization that may negatively affect the employee's mental and physical health. The research was conducted from September 2017 to April 2018 in the Podlaskie Voivodeship (Poland). A total of 640 respondents working as nurses in inpatient health care facilities, of which 87% were women and 13% were men, were included in the study. A standardized Work Design Questionnaire for an objective assessment of work stressfulness was used as a research tool. The research has been run by a group of experts, who explained the aim and the meaning of the particular questions to the surveyed group. Afterwards, based on the answers and observations of the responders, the experts filled in the questionnaire. The results of the study show that in almost all the evaluated aspects, the nursing profession was assessed more negatively by surveyed men than women. The most negative aspects reported by women included hazards (a score of 60), complexity (58.3), and haste (50.0), while those reported by men included haste (70.0), complexity (66.7), and hazards (65.0). As a conclusion it has been noticed, that results received from the research confirm that psychosocial hazards may have significant impact on the number of men present in the nursing profession in Poland. This study also suggests that the greater psychosocial hazards experienced by male nurses in the workplace may be an effect of the particularly low representation of men among practicing nursing staff.

Keywords: gender, psychosocial aspects of work, male nurse, nurse, feminized profession, psychosocial hazards

## INTRODUCTION

In Poland and most countries worldwide, the nursing profession is considered to be a typically female dominated occupation. Such a view is based on the conviction that women, in line with their instincts, should perform care-related tasks (Myungkeun and Keogh, 2016; Kluczynska, 2017b). Statistical data confirm that the nursing profession is dominated by women on a global scale

#### Edited by:

Maria Vera, Universidad de Especialidades Espíritu Santo, Ecuador

#### Reviewed by:

Chris Myburgh, University of Johannesburg, South Africa Simon George Taukeni, University of Namibia, Namibia

\*Correspondence: Krystyna Kowalczuk<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
#### Specialty section:

This article was submitted to Organizational Psychology, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology

Received: 29 March 2018 Accepted: 04 October 2018 Published: 16 November 2018

#### Citation:

Kowalczuk K, Krajewska-Kułak E and Sobolewski M (2018) Psychosocial Hazards in the Workplace as an Aspect of Horizontal Segregation in the Nursing Profession. Front. Psychol. 9:2042. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02042

**92**

(Main Chamber of Nurses Midwives, 2010). This is particularly visible in Poland, where men constitute a mere 2.0% of all registered nurses, while in Canada, 4.6%; in Great Britain, approximately 9.0%; in Ireland, 10.0% and in Iran, 23.0% (Whittock and Leonard, 2003; Evans, 2004; Keogh and O' Lynn, 2007; Nursing and Midwifery Board of Ireland, 2012; Abshire et al., 2017; Kluczynska, 2017a).

These statistics cause that men are more sought after in Poland and other countries as nurses than women. Additionally, working in a female-dominated profession results in men being in a privileged position, which is demonstrated, for example, by being assigned more prestigious, administrative, and better paid tasks. This is known as the glass elevator effect, which allows men to advance only because of their gender. In the case of female nurses, a glass ceiling mechanism is activated, making it difficult for women in feminized occupations to get a promotion (Lipinska-Grobelny and Gozdzik, 2012; Williams, 2013). This is known as vertical segregation, wherein it is more difficult for women to be promoted from less-prestigious and less-paid positions, such as a unit nurse, due to the feminization of the profession. Most men working as nurses are aware that their professional development could be faster and easier due to their gender, and a promotion in the nursing profession typically means doing office work and withdrawing from patient care (Kluczynska, 2012; Lipinska-Grobelny and Gozdzik, 2012; Dudak, 2016).

Most countries around the world, including Poland, have permanent nursing staff shortages. Still, relatively few men work as nurses, despite being preferred for employment (LaRocco, 2007; Eley et al., 2012; Dudak, 2016; Kluczynska, 2017a).

One of the reasons for this is the firmly rooted stereotype that a man working as a nurse is not very manly (LaRocco, 2007; Eley et al., 2012; Dudak, 2016; Kluczynska, 2017a). The decision to perform an unmanly profession affects the perception of a man in the eyes of a large portion of society. Such a man is believed to have characteristics of laziness and submissiveness, or to be self-serving, a failure, a dependent, or of so-called subordinated masculinity. In Poland, a man who chooses the nursing profession may be perceived as a person who has failed to become a doctor and experienced defeat because he was not admitted to study medicine. Another unflattering stereotype prevalent in Poland is the perception that men working as nurses do it as secondary work, which due to the 12-h shift system enables men to do real men's work in the time between shifts (Kluczynska, 2012, 2017a; Dudak, 2016).

Undoubtedly, the prevailing stereotypes are not the only reasons for the low representation of men in the nursing profession. Another important factor influencing this issue can be the psychosocial hazards affecting this professional group, the nature, and the intensity of which may vary depending on the employee's gender (LaRocco, 2007; Eley et al., 2012; Kluczynska, 2017a).

Work under stress and psychosocial hazards corresponds to an increase in employee absenteeism loss of productivity, and high costs of health and social care (European Agency for Safety and Health at Work Topic Centre Risk Observatory, 2007). Psychosocial hazards in the workplace can be described as the aspects of work organization and management that may negatively affect the employee's mental and physical health (Cox and Cox, 1993). In the literature, there are many divisions of psychosocial hazards that consider the negative work environment determinants, also known as stressors. The classifications are usually based on theoretic models of stress or empirical data (Leka et al., 2010; Cox et al., 2016). A dynamic work environment is prone to developing existing or new hazards such as mobbing, aggression, and the introduction of new technologies (Hanna and Mona, 2014; Jamali and Ayatollahi, 2015).

No uniform classification of workplace hazards has been done so far in the scientific literature. The most common hazards classification pertains to the context and content of the work.

Hazards regarding the work context such as ambiguity and role conflict, lack of scope of control and decisions, threats, responsibility, and negative family relations resulting from a work–home conflict cause a decrease in work satisfaction (Jamali and Ayatollahi, 2015), leading to exhaustion, fear, low self-esteem, and professional burnout, finally resulting in leaving the profession (Gurková et al., 2013; Yamaguchi et al., 2016). Poor organizational culture, improper communication at all organizational levels, lowering employees' self-esteem, and mobilizing them to negative rivalry constitute sources of stress and contribute indirectly to inducing many diseases of somatic and mental bases.