Is your home life holding your career back? 

By Professor Cathy Cassell, November 2024

It’s a typical scenario: the alarm goes off in the morning, Mum gets up, washes and dresses before getting the children out of bed, preparing their breakfasts and getting them ready for school. Packed lunches are made, uniforms are laid out and school bags are ready with signed slips for class trips and updated homework diaries. Meanwhile, Dad gets up, showers and is ready for the office. Everyone is out of the house by 8am – the children to school and both parents to work. 

According to the Modern Families Index, published by Working Families and Bright Horizons Family Solutions, the vast majority of two-parent households operate with both parents working full-time hours (74% of those surveyed), with mothers increasingly being positioned as equal breadwinners. It seems society has progressed! Long gone are the days when mothers were expected to stay home to raise children and take care of the home. 

… Or has it? 

As women have gradually taken on greater responsibility for bringing income into the household and have been expected to maintain and grow a career, how much of both the physical and mental load of home life has been lifted from their shoulders to allow them to do so? 

From research I’ve carried out alongside Laura Radcliffe and Leighann Spencer of the University of Liverpool Management School, it turns out: not very much. Women and mothers remain responsible for the bulk of responsibilities at home. 

More concerningly, the lack of balance at home has wider implications beyond being generally unfair (and a little sexist). Not only are women working harder, they’re also seeing their careers slow down or become stunted as a result.  

Our study explores the interdependent relationship between home and professional lives, focusing on how the ways in which couples make decisions about family dynamics are instrumental in perpetuating existing gendered stereotypes, holding female progression back.  

We explored the day-to-day experiences of 30 heterosexual dual-earner couples in the UK, conducting interviews with each and reviewing diary entries they made over a month-long period. Through this, we identified a troubling pattern in how couples made day-to-day decisions and the resulting impact on working mothers. 

Our study found that typical household duties such as the school run, arranging medical appointments for children, keeping on top of housework and meal-planning were still, in the vast majority, given over to mothers, and sometimes even grandmothers, rather than fathers. 

Worryingly, we saw such situations occur even in instances where fathers had greater autonomy or flexibility in their working commitments than their partners did. 

As a result, women experienced a higher overall workload and a greater level of conflict in balancing work and family responsibilities than men did. 

Why does this happen? We found the answer lay in the habitual style of decision-making, which held three biases at its heart. 

The first of these is an incorrect perception by both parents that their home responsibilities were shared equally, even when the evidence of their reality proved otherwise. This is known as reality blindness. This can occur unconsciously through habit and routine, and because many household tasks are typically taken on by mothers without being asked, fathers are left blissfully unaware of the admin of ensuring there’s a clean uniform each day, that bags are packed, that shopping lists are made so that cupboards don’t run bare, and so on. 

The second is known as option blindness. Here, the habits of doing things the same old way mean that couples can fail to seek alternative options for managing situations like resolving work–family conflicts. As a result, fathers fail to step in and step up to responsibilities, and mothers continue to suffer under gendered parenting norms. 

The last, and perhaps most troubling, is what we identified as gendered competency traps. This refers to the belief among couples that a mother, or women, are simply better at handling certain tasks around the home than fathers are. As a result, men step back by default, and women continue to take on more than their fair share. 

An example of this habitual decision-making could be seen in an instance we recorded where a child fell ill. It was decided that the mother would take time off work to care for the child, despite the fact that the father had more annual leave available, greater flexibility in his work, and even disregarded the possibility of other family members, such as grandparents, lending a helping hand. 

These instances, aside from the mental stress of looking after a poorly child on top of other household responsibilities, took the mother away from her work, impacting her colleagues and possibly the perception held of her reliability in the workplace.  

This latter point is crucial when it comes to levelling the playing field between men and women in the workplace. It’s been well noted by research that gender equality cannot be achieved in the workplace until it’s achieved at home, as these circumstances harm women’s professional participation and, as a result, their career advancement. 

To further drive this home, we explored the circumstances of families that took a far more equal approach to household responsibilities. 

The contrast was stark. By having a mutual awareness and appreciation of one another’s professional commitments, and by taking conscious steps to ensure clear communications over childcare arrangements and establishing agreements such as turn-taking when it came to compromising professional commitments in favour of family needs, not only did women hold equal status in all senses at home, but their circumstances professionally also improved. 

It can be hard to change the habits of a lifetime – especially when at first it’s not apparent that things need to change, which is why our research paper is so important. Not only does it push to change the narrative for women at home and provide positive results for professional life too, it also helps to highlight the issue of such unconscious bias and encourages readers to consider their own family dynamics. 

While the daily decision-making required to encourage equal arrangements may take more effort, taking the time to do so is key to improving gender equality and providing a real freedom of choice regarding career and family engagement, for both men and women.