Planning for Family and Career: Whose Job is it Anyway?

This correlational study investigates traditional gender roles, self-efficacy for career and parenting, and socioeconomic status (SES), as they relate to university undergraduates’ planning for career and family and anticipation of work-family conflict regarding their future families. Unmarried, undergraduate women and men of varying socioeconomic status will complete an online survey consisting of several scales. Proposed results predict that women must often choose between career goals and family care, whereas men usually do not. Expectedly, women will show higher self-efficacy for parenting and increased anticipation of work-family conflict and planning for career and family compared to men. It is proposed that men will exhibit greater self-efficacy for career. Women of lower SES and women who aspire to obtain leadership positions at work will likely report higher anticipated work-family conflict. Those of lower SES will likely hold more traditional gender beliefs than the middle and upper SES groups, and men whose fathers helped in the home will likely have higher self-efficacy for their own parenting. The anticipated results indicate a discrepancy between men’s and women’s and those of differing SES’s planning for work and family. Women will tend to undertake an increased burden; however, a switch to more family-friendly workplace policies for men and women would likely help couples become more egalitarian in their division of family and career labor and planning