Institutional perspectives on law, work, and family

Abstract Work and family scholarship increasingly focuses on how institutions constrain the choices of families struggling to balance market work with care work. Recent legal reforms, including the Family and Medical Leave Act, also focus on institutional reform to alleviate work/family conflict. This article reviews important empirical questions raised by this institutional turn in both law and social science. How have changes in the institutions of family and work contributed to work/family conflict? Have legal reforms produced more egalitarian sharing of care work between men and women? How do work organizations respond to these legal mandates? How have organizational and cultural institutions hindered or given support to laws that attempt to reform the relationship between work and family? Empirical research indicates that legal reforms have brought about important changes but that entrenched work practices and cultural norms around work, family, and gender continue to generate institutional resistance to social change

Allies Already Poised to Comply: How Social Proximity Affects Lactation-at-Work Law Compliance

This study demonstrates how legal compliance may be better achieved when organizations include individuals who will advocate for newly codified rights and related accommodations. To understand compliance with a new law and the rights it confers, this article examines as its case study the Lactation at Work law, which amends the Fair Labor Standards Act to mandate basic provisions for employees to express breast milk at work. In particular, this study interviewed those organizational actors who translate the law into the policies affecting workers\u27 daily lives: supervising mangers and human resources personnel. Those studied in this article were “Allies Already:” friends or relatives of breastfeeding workers, or ones themselves, who held pro‐breastfeeding values and understood the complexities of combining lactation and employment. They mobilized within their organization to comply with the law swiftly and fully—often even overcomplying. This article demonstrates how heightened compliance, particularly with new laws, may be achieved even without directly affected actors mobilizing their own rights if allies champion needed accommodations

Law’s Normative Influence on Gender Schemas: An Experimental Study on Counteracting Workplace Bias against Mothers and Caregivers

Status-based theories of labor market inequality contend that, even when workers have identical qualifications and performance, employers evaluate them differently based on stereotypes about their status group. Gender and parenthood are status characteristics that affect decisions about hiring, pay, and promotion through stereotypes that mothers should not work, fathers should not take leave, and caregivers of either gender are less reliable, committed workers. We contend that family-leave laws mitigate these status effects by conveying a consensus that both men and women can legitimately combine work and family. An experiment testing this theory shows that, when the law is not salient, participants pay mothers (whether or not they take leave) and fathers who take leave less and rate them as less promotable than other identical workers. Participants also rate these employees as less competent, committed, and congenial than other identical workers. By contrast, when participants review family-leave laws before they evaluate employees, they treat mothers and caregivers no worse than other workers. Reviewing an organizational family-leave policy did not reduce the effects of stereotypes as much as reviewing formal law. These findings suggest that making law salient during workplace evaluations can reduce inequality through law’s expressive effects