WASHINGTON, D.C. -- A new Cornell University study suggests that childless couples who work for the same employer tend to experience lower life quality and have less egalitarian marriages than coworking couples with children and childless couples who work for different employers.
In fact, childless couples, particularly those under 50, who are coworkers in the same company or university report a variety of problems, ranging from job dissatisfaction to stress and depression, the study finds.
But parents working for the same employer may actually find that coworking helps them juggle their lives, and they tend to cooperate more regarding housework and to value each other's careers more.
Although coworking has the greatest impact on members of a childless marriage, the study found, it is especially negative for wives who work at the same firm as their husbands.
"Coworking may help couples with children manage their multiple roles, while it may increase the blurring of work and non-work roles for couples without children," reported Phyllis Moen, the Ferris Family Professor of Life Course Studies at Cornell, today (Feb. 18) at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) annual meeting in Washington, D.C.
"Being a coworker seems to have predominantly negative effects on coworking women without children and both positive and negative effects on coworking men without children. Much to our surprise, coworking seems to have mostly insignificant effects on those raising children," Moen said.
The study found that, in general, couples who work for the same employer are more similar to each other in their education, salary, commutes, job tenure, work hours and control over work, compared with couples who don't work for the same employer, Moen said. Coworking husbands, in general, do 30 more minutes of housework on workdays (130 minutes total) than do men whose wives work elsewhere (100 minutes total).
But the effects of coworking on work and family life are the greatest among childless men and women under age 50, said Moen, who also is director of the Cornell Employment and Family Careers Institute, funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
"We found that women under 50 without children have been at their jobs longer than their non-coworking colleagues, but feel much less secure about keeping them. They reported the least success at work, the least satisfaction with their salaries and the lowest levels of positive feelings from work carrying over to home than any other group of women," said Moen. These women also do almost an hour more housework (2.5 hours total) on workdays than their non-coworking counterparts (1.6 hours total) as well as more housework than most coworking mothers.
Coworking husbands under 50 without children, on the other hand, reported the highest workload, highest job prestige and the greatest sense of control over their lives. However, they also had the highest levels of negative stress from their jobs carrying over into their home life and reported more depression than either coworking fathers or non-coworking men.
"We thought that the experiences of men and women raising children would be most influenced by being a coworker, but to our surprise, this was only the case for women raising preschoolers. They reported that they felt they had fewer constraints in their lives than non-coworking mothers of preschoolers," Moen said in presenting her paper "When Couples are Coworkers: Stressors, Strategies and Life Quality" at the AAAS symposium "Three Jobs -- Two People: 21st Century Solutions to Overwork."
Why do childless coworking couples appear more vulnerable? "Our evidence suggests that childless couples under 50 may experience difficulties with spouses investing heavily in their jobs. It could be that paid work plays a fundamental role in working spouses' lives; when they can't disengage by focusing on children at the end of the day, the stress of work tends to pervade non-worktime," Moen speculates.
Moen and her colleagues -- Stephen Sweet, Deborah Harris-Abbott and Shinok Lee, all associated with Cornell Careers Institute -- conducted hour-long telephone interviews with 236 coworking men and 236 women, 273 non-coworking men and 166 non-coworking women. The interviewees were employed by either a Fortune 500 manufacturing firm or one of two universities and are a subsample of the 1998-99 Cornell Couples and Careers Survey of middle-class couples. The researchers also looked at the effects of coworking at various life stages and compared coworking couples working for the manufacturing sector with those working in higher education.
Related World Wide Web sites: The following sites provide additional information on this news release. Some might not be part of the Cornell University community, and Cornell has no control over their content or availability.
-- For information on the Cornell Employment and Family Careers Institute:
http://www.lifecourse.cornell.edu/
http://www.human.cornell.edu/faculty/facultybio.cfm?netid=pem3&facs=1
EDITORS: Phyllis Moen will be staying at the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel at (202) 328-2950 from Feb. 16-20.