In a March 9th article by Meredith Melnick called "Why Women Feel More Guilty About Taking Work Home," she cited the University of Toronto study that concluded that women do have more guilt than men.
Women manage all aspects of their lives just as well as men, yet they have more negative feelings about being contacted after hours. Melnick added that women feel distress even if their work doesn't interfere with their family time.
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| A woman's traditional role. From Chattahbox.com |
This distress could be caused by remaining traditional gender roles, though times have changed since Leave it to Beaver.
Women are no longer expected to remain at home to raise children or to be responsible for all domestic work. Despite changing attitudes towards women's roles, old traditions die hard. Women still feel it is their duty to raise their children. When work interferes with that innate duty, the result is guilt.
Men, on the other hand, have historically been the breadwinners and protectors of the family and their role hasn't changed as drastically as women's. So when work interrupted their family time, it was expected that the breadwinner will just take care of business, leaving the mother with the children. Now, with both parents working in many families, who will tend the children while the other works? How parents answer this question could lead to conflict.
In 2008, 59 percent of fathers in dual-income families reported interference between work and family life compared to 35 percent of fathers in 1977, said a March 26, 2009 article from USAToday. The article explains the increase:
Changing gender roles from Cartoonstock.com It does signal more equality of expectations — that men are no longer let off the hook," says Scott Coltrane, a sociologist at the University of Oregon.
Up until the past decade, "men weren't doing enough to add stress to their lives," he says.
Since then, men have been spending more time with their children and more time caretaking, which the survey finds has elevated the inner strife.
Women's guilt in response to work interfering with family time likely derives from remaining gender roles. Men are also feeling conflict because they are now expected to do more housework and more caretaking than in previous decades.
However, men and women agree on the changing gender roles. Overall, society is more accepting of working women, domestic dads, and dual-income families. More information on gender role statistics can be found here.
Overall, I thought you did a good job with the inverted pyramid. You told us right away what to look for in your article and stuck to it. The only thing I have for improvement would be to keep things in order right away. If you mention men's guilty feelings first, then talk about that first. It's a little nit-picky, but it helps to keep things simple for the reader.
ReplyDeleteCitation wise, I could guess/tell pretty easily what type of sources you were using (thank you for dating them:)). You also used a good number of sources as well.
For improvement citing wise, the way you cited the last source was a little awkward. I would just go ahead and say you got the info from about.com to keep it simple.
Overall, you have good topic choices and are very professional writing wise. Keep it up.
I really enjoy reading all of your posts. Your writing and quality of work show that you put a lot of effort into each post. I really like your topics you have gone with as well I think they are good topics.
ReplyDeleteI think you do a really good job of citing of your sources. I think it’s great that you put both the date, name of article and either where it’s from or who wrote the article. I would have to disagree with Nicole’s comment above. I think you cited your last source perfect. You should “over cite” your work rather then not putting enough in.
If I were to give you a suggestion I would say to incorporate a video into a post. Looking back at some of your posts you use a lot of pictures and not many videos. I think your pictures are great and add a lot to your post, but I think you are really creative and would be able to find and incorporate a video into your posts.
I really like the graphics in your blogs but think there could be some other media added to enhance you blog. In the latest posts regarding the gender roles just googling ‘gender roles in raising families’ came up with a fair amount of videos that could have been added. Some of the subjects are very recent and so there should be a lot of information online. I think some there is a fair amount of links in many of your blogs. You have done a good job citing all of your resources.
ReplyDeleteFor future blogs I think the emergence of the “alpha females” is an interesting subject. The women that are charge have created men that act more like boys. I think something I have really noticed is a man is a lot less likely to feel guilty about going out and doing something to relieve stress. A working woman recognizes they deserve it, but sometimes feel too guilty to take time away from home. I found a recent article called “Men May Be Jerks . . . But Women Are Insane” (http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2011/03/23/men_may_be_jerksbut_women_are_insane__109324.html) with some good examples.