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

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.

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.

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]).

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.