The Social Costs of Career Success for Women

• DOI: 10.1177/0734371X08315343
• Author: Mohamad G. Alkadry,Leslie E. Tower
• Published date: 01 June 2008
• Date: 01 June 2008
• Subject Matter: Articles

Review of Public Personnel
Administration
Volume 28 Number 2
June 2008 144-165
© 2008 Sage Publications
The Social Costs of Career
10.1177/0734371X08315343
http://roppa.sagepub.com
Success for Women
hosted at
http://online.sagepub.com
Leslie E. Tower
West Virginia University
Mohamad G. Alkadry
Old Dominion University
Women in the workforce, especially those in professional and management positions, are
doubly burdened by social traditions that expect workers to meet masculine standards at
the office while maintaining their feminine role of nurturer at home. This article studies the
social costs of female career progression using a survey of 1,600 respondents from differ-
ent levels of the public sector. The results show that working women have an increased
incidence of being single or divorced, married working women tend to have more house-
work responsibilities, and working women have fewer children or are childless. The arti-
cle concludes that government and business organizations need to pay serious attention to
this hidden problem of social costs that affect women and men disproportionately.
Keywords:
pay equity; social cost; divorce; housework; children; work climate
Segregation of women in support positions and in less valued and underpaid fields or
occupations is shaped by culture (Guy, 2003). Historically, women’s access to the
public sector has been through the lower ranks (Guy, 1993; Guy & Killingsworth, 2007;
Naff, 1994; Newman, 1994). Women who break from traditionally female jobs and are
successful in traditionally male jobs are less liked, more often personally derogated, and
paid less than their male counterparts (Heilman, Wallen, Fuchs, & Tamkins, 2004).
Culture also shapes gender roles of female and male workers in the domestic
sphere. Male gender roles are assumed in how work is organized and remunerated,
thereby advantaging men (Guy & Killingsworth, 2007). Male and female gender roles
shape organizational rules and routines. For example, office-based work for 8 consec-
utive hours and 5 days per week may not be easily followed by women whose gender
roles prescribe primary responsibility for caregiving. To cope with this “double shift,”
women may move to the part-time or contingent workforce that is less stable and lucra-
tive (Guy, 2003). A greater proportion of women than men are handicapped in career
Authors’ Note: We would like to express appreciation to Dr. Donna McCarthy from the National Institute
on Government Procurement for her assistance and guidance in data collection. We also would like to
thank Dr. Roger Lohmann for comments on earlier drafts of this article. Many thanks to Ashleigh Ochs
for her research assistance. We, of course, remain fully responsible for the contents of this article.
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Tower, Alkadry / Social Costs of Career Success
145
advancement by domestic constraints (Johnson & Duerst-Lahti, 1992) and receive
lower wages than their male counterparts (Newman, 1993).
Decades after they were ushered en masse into the workforce by industrialization
and World War II efforts, women continue to face many obstacles to equal access to
the workplace (Guy & Killingsworth, 2007; Kelly & Newman, 2001; Pynes, 2000;
Stivers, 1993). Issues of agency segregation, position segregation, the glass ceiling,
and pay equity have dominated the literature dealing with the integration of women
into the workforce. These issues continue to be key concerns in the struggle of women
to achieve equal access, opportunity, and pay (Alkadry & Tower, 2006; Dey & Hill,
2007; Hartmann, Sorokina, & Williams, 2006; Naff, 1993). However, women who
manage to break through some of these barriers continue to pay a social price for their
career success (Cardozo, 1986; Ferguson, 1984; Olshfski & Caprio, 1996; Stivers,
1993).
The social and workplace gender terrain is undoubtedly much different in 2007
than it was in 1963 when the Equal Pay Act became law. Trends show that more
women are contributing to the family income, and increasingly at equal levels to
men. In 2001, 70% of couples were dual earners, compared to 41% in 1970.
Husbands as sole providers decreased from 56% to 25%, whereas wives as sole
providers increased from 2% in 1970 to 5% in 2001 (Raley, Mattingly, & Bianchi,
2006). In 2001, 24% of couples contributed equally to household earnings, com-
pared to 9% in 1970.
In the face of a changing workplace terrain, the relationship between the public
and private lives of working men and women seems to follow the conventional ide-
ology of a successful career “based on the notion of organization men and family
women” (Johnson & Duerst-Lahti, 1991, p. 15). Under this conventional ideology,
organization men (Alkadry & Nyhan, 2005; Whyte, 1956) work outside of the home
and are devoted to their organizations, whereas women stay at home and are devoted
to their family and household. When women enter the workplace, they do so under
male terms—“women could adjust to meet the demands of the organization, not the
other way around” (Johnson & Duerst-Lahti, 1992, p. 64). Guy (2003) describes
organizations as “workplaces designed for men, but inhabited by women” (p. 257).
Whereas organization men managed for decades to be devoted primarily to work
and secondarily to household, organization women’s charge was much more com-
plicated. Devotion to family responsibilities and devotion to work simply could not
coexist (for men and for women, except that men traditionally had fewer family
responsibilities; Cardozo, 1986). Faced with this reality, women often find them-
selves having to choose between being “organization women” with less family or
“mommies” with less devotion to career. The Mommy Track (Schwartz, 1989),
where women trade slower upward mobility at work in exchange for the ability to
spend more time at home, is an obvious externality of this coexistence problem. For
women who choose the organization-women track, the social cost of their success in
the workplace is evident in demographic trends such as delay in marriage (Frazier,

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Review of Public Personnel Administration
Arikian, Benson, Losoff, & Maurer, 1996), not marrying at all (Choi, 1996; Johnson
& Duerst-Lahti, 1992), having fewer children (Budig, 2003, Johnson & Duerst-
Lahti, 1992; Olshfski & Caprio, 1996), and experiencing higher divorce rates than
men (Frisco & Williams, 2003).
This article is less interested in whether a conventional ideology of work and family
continues to exist in today’s workplace. Rather, it is interested in the larger toll that
such conventional ideology takes on working women compared to working men. The
key research question is: Do women at different levels experience social costs for their
career progression? We use an online survey of 1,611 public servants to study the
social cost of women’s careers. We look at characteristics of women who have made
it to the top of a professional hierarchy in comparison to other women who are on var-
ious rungs of the hierarchy ladder. We also compare women laterally to men who are
at comparable levels of the hierarchy. We are particularly interested in how women and
men, and women at different levels, compare on variables such as hours of housework,
marital status (e.g., nonmarriage, delay in marriage, and divorce), and children.
Literature Review
Women in the workforce are doubly burdened by social expectations of family
responsibility and a conventional organizational ideology that emphasizes devotion
to work (Guy, 2003; Johnson & Duerst-Lahti, 1992). The pressures of the conven-
tional ideology of work and family are exacerbated by the constant pressure on
women to demonstrate their leadership abilities in the workplace. Women not only
have to be devoted to work but also often have the constant challenge of having to
demonstrate that they possess masculine leadership skills (Stivers, 1993). This cre-
ates an image paradox between being feminine and being a leader—to the detriment
of women’s progression to the leadership ranks.
The focus of this literature review and subsequent analysis is the double-burden
paradox between societal expectations regarding family responsibilities and the con-
ventional ideology of utter devotion to the organization (Guy, 2003; Johnson &
Duerst-Lahti, 1992; Whyte, 1956). In the face of “organization woman” expectations
(Johnson & Duerst-Lahti, 1992, p. 64), women continue to be burdened by the social
charge of “nurturing and caring for dependent children” (Arendell, 2000, p. 1192),
despite their entry into the workforce; cultural contradictions; and variant practices
(Arendell, 2000; Graham, Sorell, & Montgomery, 2004).
The paradox between conventional ideology of work and conventional ideas of
caregiving stretches across many fields. In a study of the male-dominated field of
engineering, Ranson (2005) argues that images of “mother” conflict with workplace
expectations. Despite the strides that women have made over the last few decades,
mothers’ “downshifting” to accommodate children continues to be much different

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147
from fathers’ actions to accommodate their families and children. Mothers may tem-
porarily leave work, permanently leave work, or reduce their work hours, whereas
fathers opt for office-based work with predictable hours. Fathers continue to work 8
to 10 hours per day, but have a partner who is employed either part-time or not at all,
to “pick up the slack.” Work expectations are often centered on the masculine arche-
type, which includes a support person (most likely a wife) to...