Spouses' gender role attitudes, wives' employment status, and Mexican-origin husbands' marital satisfaction

Informed by Peplau's (1983) theory of roles, this study examined the complex interplay between spouses' gender role attitudes and wives' employment status as a predictor of Mexican-origin husbands' marital satisfaction. Dissonance between spouses' gender role attitudes about how marital roles should be and the actual behavior enacted within the couple was hypothesized to be inversely related to husbands' marital satisfaction. Data were gathered during in-home interviews with 120 Mexican-origin, legally married and "living as married" couples living in North Carolina in 2007-2008. Hierarchical regression analyses revealed (a) a negative association between wives' employment and husbands' marital satisfaction, (b) that wives' sex-typed gender role attitudes were negatively related to husbands' marital satisfaction only in marriages in which husbands were more sex-typed, and (c) that the negative association between wives' sex-typed gender role attitudes and husbands' marital satisfaction was stronger for employed wives than non-employed wives. These findings were further qualified by a three-way interaction between wives' employment and spouses' gender role attitudes, indicating that in couples with non-employed wives, wives' more sex-typed gender role attitudes were more negatively associated with the marital satisfaction of husbands with more sex-typed attitudes than husbands with less sex-typed attitudes. Specifically, the three-way interaction showed that for couples with non-employed wives, husbands' marital satisfaction was lowest in marital contexts in which both spouses endorsed more sex-typed gender role attitudes.