@article{Professionals:1632,
      recid = {1632},
      author = {Wong, Jaclyn Samantha},
      title = {Negotiating Competing Desires: How Young Professionals  Make Career and Family Decisions},
      publisher = {University of Chicago},
      school = {Ph.D.},
      address = {2018-06},
      pages = {155},
      abstract = {Researchers persistently document gender inequality in  work and family roles. Yet, contemporary young adults in  the United States increasingly espouse egalitarian  attitudes towards careers and relationships. Further,  workplace and family structures are changing, making equal  work-family arrangements more possible than in the past. Do  the egalitarian attitudes of young adults lead to  egalitarian work-family outcomes? What processes link  attitudes to outcomes? Does gender inequality in young  adults’ work and family roles persist? To answer these  questions, I advance a framework for gendered projectivity  and linked lives in Chapter 1 and apply it to the case of  heterosexual young adult couples deciding to move for job  opportunities. I argue that integrating the life course  concept of linked lives with a social-structural theory of  gender enables a closer assessment of the couple-level  processes that challenge and reproduce gender inequality in  work and family. Chapter 2 uses longitudinal in-depth  interviews with twenty-one graduate and professional school  couples (N=40) who were negotiating relocation for career  opportunities to illustrate three decision-making pathways  that contest and reinforce gendered work and family roles.  Chapter 3 uses data from an original survey of career and  family plans among professional school students (N=174) to  show that although young professionals report wanting  careers, families, and egalitarian relationships in the  future, women do more mental labor to balance their  anticipated career and personal obligations than men do.  Chapter 4 examines data from an experimental vignette  embedded in the survey. I find that attitudes toward  gender, work, and family shift over time to compensate for  structural gender inequalities in careers and family. These  studies show how individuals’ egalitarian attitudes can  still lead to gendered and unequally shared work-family  decision-making behaviors at the couple-level, which in  turn can reproduce gender-unequal work and family  outcomes.},
      url = {http://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/1632},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.6082/uchicago.1632},
}