Working Moms’ Guilt
A study from the University of Toronto has found that the more a woman’s job encroaches on her family life, the more guilty she feels—and interprets the guilt as personal failure.
Men do not share women’s feeling of guilt when the line between work and family begins to blur. “The guilt had nothing to do with women’s actual ability to navigate competing obligations at work and at home; on the contrary, the study found that logistically, women were able to juggle the two spheres just as well as men. It’s how women felt about themselves while doing that juggling that set them apart. ‘This is really about the reaction and response of guilt and distress to this kind of work contact,’ says Scott Schieman, a University of Toronto professor of sociology and one of the study’s lead authors.”
