Phyllis Moen
Biographic Data
| ID | 128239 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Phyllis Moen |
| GIVEN NAMES | Phyllis |
| FAMILY NAME | Moen |
| SIGNATURE | MOEN P |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Minnesota |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5704-2824 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 128 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 2152 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 128 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1979 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 24 |
Work–nonwork boundary management strategies, boundary control and subjective well-being
How do workers manage the increasingly blurred boundary between work and nonwork domains? Who is more likely to manage the boundary successfully in terms of perceived control over the boundary, job satisfaction and psychological well-being? We draw on a nationally representative sample of U.S. workers who spent at least some time working remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic to address these questions. Through inductive coding of responses to an …
Human Meanings of Evolving Employment Geographies
A central tenet in social psychology is the importance of perceived control in the stress process; another focuses on the well-being implications of mismatches between preferred and actual arrangements. Integrating these perspectives and leveraging the pandemic-driven shift to remote work, we examine “work-place captivity,” the misalignment between employees’ actual and preferred work locations combined with feeling a lack of control over locatio…
The Future(s) of Work? Disparities Around Changing Job Conditions When Remote/Hybrid or Returning to Working at Work
The future of work is ambiguous at best. Despite widespread shifts to remote/hybrid work during the COVID-19 lockdown, there is a paucity of knowledge about changing job conditions in tandem with different work locales. Is the move to remote/hybrid work a disrupter or accentuator of existing norms and inequalities? Drawing on nationally representative, four-wave panel survey data (October 2020 to April 2022) collected from U.S. workers who spent …
Remote/hybrid work in flux
The COVID-19 pandemic led to an unprecedented employer-driven shift to remote/hybrid work for those whose jobs allow it, but then came retrenchments, forging disjunctures between where one works (remote/hybrid or in-person) and individual preferences, which we term work-place mismatch. We draw on a combined worker power, employer biases, and adaptive strategy theoretical framing to investigate work-place mismatch in light of remarkable pandemic-p…
The Shifting Stress of Working Parents
Working remotely at least some of the time has long been seen as promoting a better integration of work and care obligations, even though prepandemic research is mixed as to the extent to which parents benefit emotionally from remote work. We exploit dual social experiments in schooling and work spawned by the COVID-19 pandemic to understand any stress-reducing effects of working from home under different school-closing state policy contexts. The…
Time Work in the Office and Shop
Increasingly popular post-COVID-19 4-day workweek trials challenge deeply embedded 5-day, 40-hour temporal policies and practices, fostering time-work strategies by employees in the face of reduced working hours. This qualitative study in a small business manufacturing customized products finds similar adaptive responses among both office and shop workers. We detect four prevailing time-work strategies: (1) (re) organizing tasks, (2) shifting (wo…
Employee Cardiometabolic Risk Following a Cluster-Randomized Workplace Intervention From the Work, Family and Health Network, 2009–2013
Objectives. To examine whether workplace interventions to increase workplace flexibility and supervisor support and decrease work–family conflict can reduce cardiometabolic risk. Methods. We randomly assigned employees from information technology (n = 555) and long-term care (n = 973) industries in the United States to the Work, Family and Health Network intervention or usual practice (we collected the data 2009–2013). We calculated a validated c…
Ongoing Remote Work, Returning to Working at Work, or in between during Covid-19
The COVID-19 pandemic precipitated a massive turn to remote work, followed by subsequent shifts for many into hybrid or fully returning to the office. To understand the patterned dynamics of subjective well-being associated with shifting places of work, we conducted a nationally representative panel survey (October 2020 and April 2021) of U.S. employees who worked remotely at some point since the pandemic (N = 1,817). Cluster analysis identified …
The Uneven Stress of Social Change
As the COVID-19 pandemic underscores, disparities in stress exposure, vulnerability, and protective resources are often magnified in times of rapid change. I argue that Leonard Pearlin’s integration of life course and stress process frameworks constitutes a useful model for advancing a research agenda on the stressors and corollary mental health impacts of the social disruptions and dislocations defining life in the early twenty-first century. So…
Derailed by the Covid-19 Economy? An Intersectional and Life Course Analysis of Older Adults' Shifting Work Attachments
This paper addresses the uneven employment effects on older Americans (aged 50-75) of the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on monthly Current Population Survey data from January through December 2020, we take an intersectional and life course approach to study the labor market effects of COVID-19 on older Americans. First, we chart monthly labor force states throughout 2020 for older adult subgroups defined by age, gender, and race/ethnicity. We then e…
Working More, Less or the Same During Covid-19? A Mixed Method, Intersectional Analysis of Remote Workers
The COVID-19 pandemic has transformed where paid work is done. Workers able to do so have been required to work remotely. We draw on survey data collected in October 2020 from a nationally representative sample of 3,017 remote workers, as well as qualitative survey data collected from 231 remote workers, to examine perceived changes in work hours from before to during the pandemic. Results indicate women are at greater risk of change (either a ma…
The Uneven Later Work Course
This research highlights the importance of intersectional analysis, recasting the gendered work course in later adulthood into a framework of even greater complexities within mutually shaping categories of race/ethnicity, class, and age. Older Americans experience patterned, uneven pathways around work and nonwork. We recommend additional scholarship on the dynamics of constrained and disparate choices unfolding across multiple intersecting socia…
Overload
Overload
Why too much work and too little time is hurting workers and companies—and how a proven workplace redesign can benefit employees and the bottom line Today's ways of working are not working—even for professionals in "good" jobs. Responding to global competition and pressure from financial markets, companies are asking employees to do more with less, even as new technologies normalize 24/7 job expectations. In Overload , Erin Kelly and Phyllis Moen…
Understanding the effects of Covid-19 through a life course lens
Disparate Disruptions
These are unprecedented times, as the COVID-19 pandemic disrupts public health, social interaction, and employment attachments. Evidence to date has been about broad shifts in unemployment rates as a percent of the labor force. We draw on monthly Current Population Survey data to examine subpopulation changes in employment states across the life course, from January through April 2020. COVID-19 downturns produced disparate life-course impacts. Th…
Overload
Involuntary vs. voluntary flexible work
Building on insights from the early stages of our research partnership with a U.S. Fortune 500 organization, we came to differentiate between voluntary and involuntary schedule variability and remote work. This differentiation underscores the complexity behind flexible schedules and remote work, especially among white-collar, salaried professionals. We collected survey data among the partner firm's information technology (IT) workforce to evaluat…
Stress Proliferation? Precarity and Work-Family Conflict at the Intersection of Gender and Household Income
We theorize a stress proliferation process whereby the stress of job precarity translates into the stress of work-to-family conflict (WFC). We test whether this process differs by gender and household income. Using four cross-sectional waves of the General Social Survey ( N = 2,340), we find a positive association between job insecurity and WFC for women but not men. Examined by household income levels, the association is found only for responden…
Postretirement Life Satisfaction and Financial Vulnerability
Results suggest full retirement predicts improved life satisfaction only for those most advantaged financially. Financially vulnerable older workers may adjust more effectively to retirement if they have access to resources that facilitate greater control over their lives
W illiams, R obin M ., Jr . (1914–2006)
Robin M. Williams Jr. (1914–2006) tracked some of the most challenging social issues of contemporary society. He devoted his career and writing to studies of intergroup tensions, race relations, war and peace, ethnic conflict, and altruism and cooperation. Born in 1914 he earned a BS (1933) from North Carolina State, MS (1935) from NC State and University of North Carolina and MA (1939) and PhD (1943) from Harvard. He began his long and scholarly…
Family care work
This article addresses the need for policy-relevant research agendas on family care in transaction with formal care and public as well as organisational norms and policies in light of the crisis in caregiving for older adults. We propose a combined institutional and life-course theoretical approach, suggesting seven ways of organising scholarly enquiry to promote understanding of the changing nature of family care in the 21st century, inform poli…
For Better or Worse? Couples’ Time Together in Encore Adulthood
Encore adults are living longer as couples; results suggest couple relationships may occupy most of their days, with potentially positive implications for emotional well-being. Men and women are happier during time with a spouse when the woman works, with men reporting even higher levels of happiness than women. This is important as contemporary couples navigate increasingly complex work/retirement transitions in gendered ways
The Psychosocial Implications of Managing Work and Family Caregiving Roles
An increasing number of adults, both men and women, are simultaneously managing work and family caregiving roles. Guided by the stress process model, we investigate whether 823 employees occupying diverse family caregiving roles (child caregiving only, elder caregiving only, and both child caregiving and elder caregiving, or 'sandwiched' caregiving) and their noncaregiving counterparts in the information technology division of a white-collar orga…
Can a Flexibility/Support Initiative Reduce Turnover Intentions and Exits? Results from the Work, Family, and Health Network
We draw on panel data from a randomized field experiment to assess the effects of a flexibility/supervisor support initiative called STAR on turnover intentions and voluntary turnover among professional technical workers in a large firm. An unanticipated exogenous shock—the announcement of an impending merger—occurred in the middle of data collection. Both organizational changes reflect an emerging employment contract characterized by increasing …
Changing Workplaces to Reduce Work-Family Conflict
Work-family conflicts are common and consequential for employees, their families, and work organizations. Can workplaces be changed to reduce work-family conflict? Previous research has not been able to assess whether workplace policies or initiatives succeed in reducing work-family conflict or increasing work-family fit. Using longitudinal data collected from 608 employees of a white-collar organization before and after a workplace initiative wa…
Effective Work/Life Strategies
Effective Work/Life Strategies: Working Couples, Work Conditions, Gender, and Life Quality Get access Phyllis Moen, Phyllis Moen Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar Yan Yu Yan Yu Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar Social Problems, Volume 47, Issue 3, 1 August 2000, Pages 291–326, https://doi.org/10.2307/3097233 Published: 31 July 2014
Changing Work and Work-Family Conflict
Schedule control and supervisor support for family and personal life may help employees manage the work-family interface. Existing data and research designs, however, have made it difficult to conclusively identify the effects of these work resources. This analysis utilizes a group-randomized trial in which some units in an information technology workplace were randomly assigned to participate in an initiative, called STAR, that targeted work pra…
Scaling Back
Recent work has focused substantially on one subset of dual-earners, the high-powered two-career couple. We use in-depth interviews with more than 100 people in middle-class dual-earner couples in upstate New York to investigate the range of couples' work-family strategies. We find that the majority are not pursuing two high-powered careers but are typically engaged in what we call scaling back-strategies that reduce and restructure the couple's …
Retirement Transitions, Gender, and Psychological Well-Being
This longitudinal study investigated the relationship between retirement transitions and subsequent psychological well-being using data on 458 married men and women (aged 50-72 years) who were either still in their primary career jobs, retired, or had just made the transition to retirement over the preceding 2 years. The findings show that the relationship between retirement and psychological well-being must be viewed in a temporal, life course c…
Their Mother's Daughters? The Intergenerational Transmission of Gender Attitudes in a World of Changing Roles
Phyllis Moen, Mary Ann Erickson, Donna Dempster-McClain, Their Mother's Daughters? The Intergenerational Transmission of Gender Attitudes in a World of Changing Roles, Journal of Marriage and Family, Vol. 59, No. 2 (May, 1997), pp. 281-293
Successful Aging
Panel data from a sample of 313 women who were wives and mothers in 1956 and were interviewed both in 1956 and in 1986 are used to consider the pathways that lead to health and social integration. Possible relationships were explored between the number, duration, timing, and episodes of various nonfamily roles throughout adult-hood and subsequent health and multiple-role occupancy. It was found that occupying multiple roles in 1956, participating…
Time Work by Overworked Professionals
How are professionals responding to the time strains brought on by the stress of their higher status jobs? Qualitative data from professionals reveal (a) general acceptance of the emerging temporal organization of professional work, including rising time demands and blurred boundaries around work/nonwork times and places, and (b) time work as strategic responses to work intensification, overloads, and boundarylessness. We detected four time-work …
Does a Flexibility/Support Organizational Initiative Improve High-Tech Employees' Well-Being? Evidence from the Work, Family, and Health Network
This study tests a central theoretical assumption of stress process and job strain models, namely that increases in employees' control and support at work should promote well-being. To do so, we use a group-randomized field trial with longitudinal data from 867 information technology (IT) workers to investigate the well-being effects of STAR, an organizational intervention designed to promote greater employee control over work time and greater su…
From 'work-family' to 'flexible careers
In this paper we introduce key concepts that inform a life course perspective, including its focus on the temporal organization of career paths and life biographies. We demonstrate the value of a life course approach to theorizing about, studying, and considering work–family arrangements and their policy implications. To do so we draw primarily on findings from studies undertaken using the Ecology of Careers Study funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Fo…
Gendered Challenge, Gendered Response
This article integrates research on gendered organizations and the work-family interface to investigate an innovative workplace initiative, the Results-Only Work Environment (ROWE), implemented in the corporate headquarters of Best Buy, Inc. While flexible work policies common in other organizations “accommodate” individuals, this initiative attempts a broader and deeper critique of the organizational culture. We address two research questions: H…
Institutional Change and Job-Shift Patterns in Urban China, 1949 to 1994
Using life-history data on 4,600 respondents from 17 cities in China from 1949 to 1994, the authors offer two contributions to the literature on transitions from state socialism : (1) they focus on access to workplaces as reflected in individuals' job shifts across types of organizations and economic sectors. Patterns of job shifts over time reflect both institutional change and evolving mechanisms of stratification and they therefore provide inf…
Social Integration and Longevity
This paper investigates the implications of multiple roles for the longevity of women. Drawing on a two-wave 30-year panel study of 427 wives and mothers in upstate New York we use event history techniques to test the effects of both the number and the nature of roles on the duration of womens lives. We find that social integration defined by the number of roles occupied promotes longevity but that one form of integration--membership in a volunta…
Work and Family Over Time
Given the fundamental changes in the institutions of both work and family, the need to focus on the work-family interface is greater than ever. Most studies, however, examine this interface in terms of individuals and at only one point in time. The authors propose a coupled-careers model, based on a life course perspective, directly addressing the multiple interfaces between work and family and between men and women as they unfold over time. This…
Educational Stratification in Urban China
This article examines the effects of stratification processes, based on family social origins, gender, and residential location, on educational attainment in urban China from 1949 to 1994. The authors emphasize the importance of political processes and the State socialist redistributive economy, arguing that shifting State policies led to varying mechanisms of stratification over time. Analyzing the educational experiences of a representative sam…
From 'work-family' to the 'gendered life course' and 'fit
This article introduces the concepts of the 'gendered life course' and 'life-course fit' in order to provide a broader, dynamic, and contextual perspective on the match or mismatch characterizing the social environments confronting workers, their families, and their communities. It summarizes five challenges confronting scholars of community, work, family, and policy: (1) updating outdated concepts and categories; (2) incorporating the gendered l…
Clocking Out
This article draws on life history data of the cohorts of recent U.S. retirees to examine the temporal patterning of retirement. Three major dimensions‐‐historical context, social heterogeneity, and, most important, biographical pacing, measured by cohort, gender, and career pathway, respectively‐‐operate simultaneously, yet unevenly, to affect various aspects of the retirement process. Findings suggest that changes over the past few decades have…
Caregiving and Women's Well-being
This study demonstrates the utility of incorporating a life course, role context approach in investigations of the ties between particular roles and psychological well-being, using the links between women's caregiving and well-being as a case in point. We draw on panel data from a random sample of 293 women interviewed in 1956 and 1986, considering both current role occupancy and the duration of caregiving as well as a number of factors that may …
Understanding the Time-Squeeze
Many recent studies of the time-squeeze have used aggregate, trend data on work-hour behavior and inferred changing preferences among working men and women. This article begins with couple data and examines preferences as well as behavior in married-couple families. Work-hour behavior is conceptualized as an interaction between employee preferences, employer demands, and the institutional context. The article's analyses clearly indicate that ther…
Changing Work, Changing Health
This article investigates a change in the structuring of work time, using a natural experiment to test whether participation in a corporate initiative (Results Only Work Environment; ROWE) predicts corresponding changes in health-related outcomes. Drawing on job strain and stress process models, we theorize greater schedule control and reduced work-family conflict as key mechanisms linking this initiative with health outcomes. Longitudinal survey…
Does Enhancing Work-Time Control and Flexibility Reduce Turnover? A Naturally Occurring Experiment
We investigate the turnover effects of an organizational innovation (ROWE-Results Only Work Environment) aimed at moving away from standard time practices to focus on results rather than time spent at work. To model rates of turnover, we draw on survey data from a sample of employees at a corporate headquarters (N = 775) and institutional records of turnover over eight months following the ROWE implementation. We find the odds of turnover are ind…
Men's and Women's Definitions of 'Good' Jobs
Whether and to what extent men and women hold differing preferences for particular job attributes remains the subject of debate, with a sizable number of empirical studies producing conflicting results. These conflicts may have temporal sources-historical changes in men's and women's preferences for particular job attributes, as well as changes in preferences that commonly occur over individuals' life cycle. Most previous research has neglected t…
No more lock-step retirement
Disparate Disruptions
These are unprecedented times, as the COVID-19 pandemic disrupts public health, social interaction, and employment attachments. Evidence to date has been about broad shifts in unemployment rates as a percent of the labor force. We draw on monthly Current Population Survey data to examine subpopulation changes in employment states across the life course, from January through April 2020. COVID-19 downturns produced disparate life-course impacts. Th…
Couples' Work/Retirement Transitions, Gender, and Marital Quality
We investigate whether couples' employment/retirement circumstances predict marital quality differently for men and for women, using a life course framework and two waves of data. We find that the actual retirement transition (from one's primary career job) is related to declines in marital quality for both husbands and wives. Married men and women who move into retirement while their spouses remain employed report the greatest marital conflict, …
Work and Family in the United States
Families and their learning environments
Family Impacts of the 1975 Recession
Using the Michigan Panel Study oflncome Dynamics, this study examines the likelihood of extended joblessness for breadwinners who were unemployed during the recession of 1975. Both husband-wife and female-headed faimilies with children under 18 are included in the analysis. Using log-linear techniques, several factors are fbund to increase the probability of unemployment lasting 15 weeks or more. A contextual variable, the county unemployment rat…
Measuring Unemployment
Unemployment statistics are based on aggregates of individuals, not families, yet the family as a unit suffers from unemployment-especially of the major wage earner. This paper explores the ramifications of using the individual rather than the family as the unit of analysis. Two issues in particular are discussed: the tendency to equate employment/unemployment with family economic well-being and the narrow operationalization of the term "unemploy…
Developing Family Indicators
Making Ends Meet
Approaches to Child and Family Policy
Unemployment, Public Policy, and Families
This paper speculates about the consequences of unemployment for families in the 1980s, using data from the recession of 1975 as well as findings from the period of the Great Depression. The paper addresses three issues: the likelihood of particular family types experiencing financial hardship in the face of unemployment, the implications of job and income loss for families and children, and the role of public policy in heightening or alleviating…
Child Development and International Development
Women Who Work
Women at work
Time as a Scarce Resource
Employed Parents
This research, analyzing data from the 1977 Quality of Employment Survey, examines the work-time preferences of 224 dual-earner couples with children aged 12 and under. Approached from the perspective of role strain, the study hypothesizes that six factors are related to an employed parent's stated preference for fewer work hours: gender, family obligations, current work hours, perceived work-family interference, occupational status, andjob flexi…
Personal Efficacy, Income, and Family Transitions
The gender discrepancy in feelings of personal efficacy has been implicated in the greater vulnerability of women to psychological distress. Previous research shows that men's sense of efficacy is related to their earnings. This study, using data from the University of Michigan's Panel Study of Income Dynamics, examines the income efficacy relationship for women heading households, placing it in the context of work and family roles. We consider t…
Passage Through Midlife
Life course researchers have recently examined the effects of normative and non-normative pathways into adulthood but little theoretical or empirical attention has been directed at the manner and type of transitions through the middle years of the life span for women. Women in midlife typically watch their last child leave the home and significant numbers also experience the dissolution of their marriages, either by divorce or widowhood. Using da…
Social Integration and Longevity
This paper investigates the implications of multiple roles for the longevity of women. Drawing on a two-wave 30-year panel study of 427 wives and mothers in upstate New York we use event history techniques to test the effects of both the number and the nature of roles on the duration of womens lives. We find that social integration defined by the number of roles occupied promotes longevity but that one form of integration--membership in a volunta…
Moonlighting Husbands
This study examines the extent and correlates of moonlighting at various stages in the life course for employed husbands (N = 2,118) in the United States in the mid-1970s. Using data from the Michigan Panel Study of Income Dynamics (1976-1977 waves), the study found that 21% of the husbands held two jobs, a figure substantially higher than official estimates. In estimating the likelihood of moonlighting, using a range of individual, family, and j…
Labor-Force Reentry Among U.S. Homemakers in Midlife
Guided by a life-course perspective, this article uses data from 11 waves of the Michigan Panel Study of Income Dynamics to examine the influence of human capital, family structure, and local labor-market demand variables on the reentry into the labor force of midlife homemakers in the United States in the 1970s. By looking at two contiguous time periods, the first and last halves of the 1970s, it investigates how the influence of these factors v…
Working Parents, Workplace Supports, and Well-Being
Phyllis Moen, Kay B. Forest, Working Parents, Workplace Supports, and Well-Being: The Swedish Experience, Social Psychology Quarterly, Vol. 53, No. 2, Special Issue: Social Structure and the Individual (Jun., 1990), pp. 117-131
Working Parents
Working Parents
Paid Work, Parenting, and Housework
Transitions in Mid-Life
Aiding and Aging
Motherhood, Multiple Roles, and Maternal Well-Being
This study examined the effects of social integration (number of roles occupied) on the psychological well-being of American women who were wives and mothers of young children in the 1950s. The sample, drawn from a 1956 data archive, consisted of 358 married mothers with children under age 13 who lived in upstate New York. The authors focused on two measures of psychological well-being, self-esteem and general life satisfaction, and three measure…
Psychology (102 works) · Sociology (74 works) · Work-Family Balance Challenges (69 works) · Economics (55 works) · Social Psychology (55 works) · Political science (46 works) · Medicine (40 works) · Employment and Welfare Studies (39 works) · Demographic economics (38 works) · Social Psychology (38 works)