Understanding Backlash Against Family Friendly Work Policy:

Sandy Uyekubo

For my senior thesis project, I investigated predictors of attitudes toward parent-friendly work policies using three components: perceived justice, attitudes toward women, and attitudes toward working mothers. I hypothesized that parents and females would view parent-friendly work policies as fairer than nonparents and males, respectively, that elder-care policies would be viewed as fairer than parent-friendly work policies, that traditional attitudes towards women would be associated with more negative attitudes toward working mothers, and that negative attitudes toward working mothers would be associated with less supportive attitudes towards parent-friendly work policies. In addition, I predicted that working mothers who have younger children would be viewed more negatively than working mothers who have older children and that mothers who choose to work outside the home for personal fulfillment would be evaluated more negatively than mothers who choose to work for financial need.

Participants were 154 alumni of Claremont McKenna College and were predominantly Caucasian and male. Assessments included a self-designed instrument of perceived fairness of parent-friendly work policies, with policies for elder-care used as comparison, the Attitudes Toward Women Scale (ATW; Spence & Helmreich, 1978), and scenarios describing a working mothers, with the age of the working mother's children and the reason why the mother was considering returning to work varied. Results indicated that participants had relatively fixed attitudes stemming from their degree of self interest in using family-friendly work policies, their general attitudes toward women, and their political orientation: females perceived family-friendly policies as fairer than males, elder-care policies were perceived as fairer than parent-friendly work policies, and traditional attitudes toward women and conservative political orientations were associated with more negative attitudes toward working mothers. Surprisingly, the age of the mother's children and the reason why the mother was working did not significantly affect people's attitudes towards working mothers. These results suggest that attitudes toward working mothers are fairly rigid and do not depend on individual circumstances such as the age of the children or the reason why mothers work.

Research in this area will increase our understanding of how people make their judgments about family-friendly work polices and has practical implications for corporations and public policy. Given the overall importance of gender and political orientation, these variables will need to be considered in changing people's attitudes toward family-friendly policies. Only then will the necessary broad-ranging support be gained to implement family-friendly work policies, which may potentially benefit both parents and nonparents and males and females.