Work–family interference in urban China: gender discrimination and the effects of work–family balance policies

Abstract

Family responsibility discrimination is a form of discrimination against men and women because of their caregiving responsibilities. Unlike prior studies that have predominantly focused on Western contexts, this study shifts attention to observers’ differentiated discrimination against men and women in China involved in work–family interference. The findings across four main experiments (N = 2577) suggest that shouldering family responsibility in the context of both family interference in work and work interference in family would stimulate more discrimination against men in urban China. We also explore whether a firm’s work–family balance policies can mitigate such discrimination. The results demonstrate that such policies mitigate supervisors’ discrimination against men involved in family interference in work but not observers’ discrimination against men involved in work interference in family. Post-hoc experiments and further tests (N = 931) demonstrate the robustness of our findings and show additional insights. Our findings suggest that gender discrimination in non-Western contexts can be very different.