From Gender-family to the Gendered Life Course and Fit: Five challenges to the Field

Professor Phyllis Moen provides a very brief history of the work-family intersection from a US vantage point, along with an overview of organizational response by employers to the ‘work-family’ conundrum. She introduces the concepts of the ‘gendered life course’ and ‘life-course fit’ to provide a broader, dynamic, and contextual perspective on the match or mismatch characterizing the social environments confronting male and female workers, their families, and their communities. Moen summarizes five challenges confronting scholars of community, work, and family: (1) updating outdated concepts and categories; (2) incorporating the gendered life course and family strategies; (3) recognizing social change; (4) seeking transformation, not assimilation or accommodation; and (5) focusing on prevention. There is growing recognition that a sense of fit or misfit on the part of workers and families is a public health issue. The next step is for employers and policy makers to break open the time clocks around work – the tacit, taken-for-granted beliefs, rules and regulations about the time and timing of work days, work weeks, work years, and work lives – that contribute to individual and family stress, limit options, and perpetuate gender inequality.

Phyllis Moen holds a McKnight Presidential Endowed Chair and is Professor of Sociology at the University of Minnesota. She studies occupational careers, gender, families, policy and well-being over the life course. Her publications include Women’s Two Roles: a Contemporary Dilemma (1992), It’s about Time: Couples and Careers (2003), and The Career Mystique: Cracks in the American Dream (2005), with Patricia Roehling, named Best Publication in Sociology for 2005 by the Professional and Scholarly Publication section of the Association of American Publishers. Both It’s About Time and The Career Mystique are based on research conducted as part of the Cornell Work and Family Careers Institute that she directed from 1996 to 2003. While Professor Moen was at Cornell University, she also founded the Bronfenbrenner Life Course Center in 1992.

Her current research focuses workplace policies aimed at promoting productivity by giving employees greater latitude over when and where they do their work and whether such policies will also affect the health and well-being of employees and their families.