Maternal Decision-Making and Family-to-Work Spillover: Does Gender Ideology Matter?

ABSTRACT Making parenting decisions is inherent in the responsibility of raising children. Past research suggests that employed mothers may designate themselves “in charge” of these decisions in order to reconcile employment obligations with cultural gender ideologies around mothering. Despite substantial literature suggesting that the more family responsibilities one has, the more likely that family matters are to “spill over” into one’s work, little is known about how employed mothers’ “maternal decision-making” is related to spillover or how mothers’ own personal gender ideologies may influence this link. Based on a sample of employed mothers (N = 316) derived from waves 2002 and 2012 of the General Social Survey, this paper examines how maternal decision-making (i.e., mothers acting as the primary authorities on childrearing decisions) and shared parental decision-making (i.e., mothers and fathers sharing such decisions equally) are differentially associated with negative spillover and how gender ideology plays a role in these experiences. Regression results suggest that for employed mothers, maternal decision-making is associated with greater spillover but that this link is moderated by gender ideology. Among maternal decision-makers, those holding traditional gender attitudes experience greater spillover, whereas those holding egalitarian attitudes experience less spillover, similar to the spillover rate of mothers in shared parental decision-making arrangements. By shifting empirical attention from routine childcare tasks to less visible parenting responsibilities and from societal gender ideologies to individuals’ own beliefs, this study makes important contributions to research on spillover, mental labor, and gender.