The Relationship Between Couples’ Gender-Role Attitudes Congruence and Wives’ Family Interference with Work

BACKGROUND: Previous research on female employees’ family interference with work (FIW) has demonstrated that such conflict is affected by their or their spouses’ gender-role attitudes. However, few studies have considered the perspective of husbands-wives congruence, which is further meaningful of the research on FIW. The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between husband-wife congruence of gender-role attitudes and wife’s FIW. METHODS: Data were collected from 148 husband-wife dyads from eight companies in China. The average age of the husbands was 31.86 years (SD = 8.75) and that of the wives was 28.39 (SD = 6.38). The hypotheses were tested by the combination of polynomial regression and response surface methodology. RESULTS: Four results were drawn. First, wives’ role overload is lower when husbands and wives are aligned in terms of gender-role attitudes than when they are not aligned (a(4) = 0.53, p < 0.01). Second, on the condition of husband-wife congruence, role overload is positively correlated with their gender-role attitudes (a(1) = 0.59, p < 0.001). Third, on the condition of incongruence, wives’ role overload is stronger when husbands’ traditional gender-role attitudes are higher than wives’, compared to when wives’ traditional gender-role attitudes are higher than husbands’ (a(3) = 0.23, p < 0.05). Fourth, role overload mediates the relationship between husband-wife congruence of gender-role attitudes and wives’ FIW (indirect effect = 0.15; 95% CI [0.05, 0.27]). CONCLUSION: Guided by the role theory, the current study suggests that the husband-wife incongruence of gender-role attitudes augments wives’ role overload and further leads to FIW.