A new Cornell study suggests that childless couples who work for the same employer tend to experience lower life quality and have less egalitarian marriages than coworking couples with children and childless couples who work for different employers.
In fact, childless couples, particularly those under 50, who are coworkers in the same company or university report a variety of problems, ranging from job dissatisfaction to stress and depression, the study finds.
But parents working for the same employer may actually find that coworking helps them juggle their lives, and they tend to cooperate more regarding housework and to value each other's careers more. Although coworking has the greatest impact on members of a childless marriage, the study found, it is especially negative for wives who work at the same firm as their husbands.
"Coworking may help couples with children manage their multiple roles, while it may increase the blurring of work and non-work roles for couples without children," reported Phyllis Moen, the Ferris Family Professor of Life Course Studies at Cornell, at the AAAS annual meeting.
"Being a coworker seems to have predominantly negative effects on coworking women without children and both positive and negative effects on coworking men without children. Much to our surprise, coworking seems to have mostly insignificant effects on those raising children," Moen said.
The study found that, in general, couples who work for the same employer are more similar to each other in their education, salary, commutes, job tenure, work hours and control over work, compared with couples who don't work for the same employer, Moen said. Coworking husbands, in general, do 30 more minutes of housework on work days (130 minutes total) than do men whose wives work elsewhere (100 minutes total).
But the effects of coworking on work and family life are the greatest among childless men and women under age 50, said Moen, who also is director of the Cornell Employment and Family Careers Institute.
Why do childless coworking couples appear more vulnerable? "Our evidence suggests that childless couples under 50 may experience difficulties with spouses investing heavily in their jobs. It could be that paid work plays a fundamental role in working spouses' lives; when they can't disengage by focusing on children at the end of the day, the stress of work tends to pervade non-worktime," Moen speculated.
Moen and her colleagues Stephen Sweet, Deborah Harris-Abbott and Shinok Lee, all associated with Cornell Careers Institute conducted hour-long telephone interviews with 236 coworking men and 236 women, 273 non-coworking men and 166 non-coworking women. The interviewees were employed by either a Fortune 500 manufacturing firm or one of two universities and are a subsample of the 1998-99 Cornell Couples and Careers Survey of middle-class couples.
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