Responses to the Intrusion of Family Responsibilities in the Workplace

This paper examines two of the ways by which working women resolve the competing demands of their household and employment roles. Using data from a large insurance company we first investigate the extent to which men and women take absence days or illness days for the purpose of attending to family obligations, presumably short-term crises. We examine how the pattern of illness day taking varies with age of the employee and with age of the youngest child. We next investigate terminations from the company, using logit and survival methods, and assess the extent to which gender differences in reason for departure can be attributed to long term conflicts between the responsibilities of work and family.