In Pursuit of Understanding Gender Strategy

Gender strategy may help us better grasp the perplexing phenomenon of working women who continue to struggle with managing career and the non-paying workload of household duties and childcare responsibilities. Gender strategy is composed of emotion management, self-perception and strategy of action. The topic of gender strategy primarily emerged from research conducted by Arlie R. Hochschild in the 1970s and 1980s but has since remained a dormant construct. A valuable tool to enlist gender strategy’s ability to predict and help explain behavior may be Hochschild’s gender ideology model. The rise in dual income households over the past several decades represents the increase of women entering the work force. Along with the employment opportunities came the disproportionate increase in non-work responsibilities for females versus males at home. Early research on dual income households and life balance for women led to groundbreaking work on emotion and the discovery of how couples coped with the changing roles women faced at home. Current research continues to look at these same issues that challenge women in dual income households in today’s society. Implications from conducting research employing gender strategy may help build a practical foundation that creates better understanding and expectations of roles for both men and women. This paper recommends gender strategy as an area of research and identifies methods for additional study.