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Currently, both men and women face the challenge of balancing their work and childcare responsibilities, which is not always straightforward. When individuals experience tensions between their work and family life, they are likely to prioritize one over the other, often facing penalties for failing to fulfill a specific role. Thus, the present study aims to examine how people evaluate workers who briefly de-prioritize work or childcare. To achieve this, two experiments were conducted using factorial vignettes. The first experiment examined how briefly de-prioritizing childcare affects an individual’s perception in the family domain, considering their gender. The second explored the opposite effect: how briefly de-prioritizing work influences the evaluation of the worker in the workplace, also incorporating gender as a variable. Study 1 had 262 participants and study 2 had 251. Participants were Business students in a private university. To test the hypotheses, each dependent variable was analyzed using a multiple independent group mean comparison. The results showed that even a slight de-prioritization of a role can trigger a perceptible reaction. In the family domain, a positive effect was observed for men when they prioritized their family. Each of the studies showed interesting results for implementing strategies that help workers harmonize their work and life without being penalized when briefly prioritizing one of them.
Fuchs et al. (Sun,) studied this question.