• October 2025
• Article

Objective: This paper investigates contemporary household economies of gratitude and resentment, assessing how discrepancies between partners' expectations relate to their emotions and household labor allocation. Background: Women shoulder greater shares of cognitive and physical housework than men. Prior research suggests expressions of gratitude reveal the underlying expectations that reproduce and/or challenge gender-traditional labor allocations. Methods: This article draws on qualitative analysis of 209 interviews with 37 men and 41 women in dual-income, mixed-gender couples with children, interviewed two or three times each. Results: Expressions of gratitude and resentment revealed considerable divergence between men's and women's expectations. Some women were grateful for men's participation in physical labor; others expected significant physical and cognitive contributions and resented their absence. Most men expected to contribute physical household labor and were grateful when women's unpaid housework left more time than expected for men's paid work. Men's resentment emerged when they felt their physical contributions were underappreciated or their partner had unreasonable expectations for their cognitive labor participation. Resentment eased in cases where men increased their attunement and women their use of delegation. Conclusion: Our longitudinal dataset enabled us to examine implicit gender ideologies as reflected in respondents' gratitude and resentment and to chart shifts in expectations and labor allocations in close to real time. These findings broaden our understanding of why household labor remains strongly gender-typed and reveal how quantitative measures of gender ideology may not capture nuanced perspectives—particularly vis-à-vis the division of cognitive labor.

• 2025
• Article

Women are consistently underrepresented in leadership roles. One contributor may be that women are generally less willing than equally-qualified men to enter competitions (e.g., for jobs or promotions). We draw from research on “stereotype reactance”—the idea that telling people about stereotyped expectations can encourage defiance—to propose and test whether telling women about the gender gap in competition entry can increase their willingness to compete. Our prediction contrasts with prior work on stereotype threat and descriptive norms suggesting that highlighting the gender competition gap might lead women to refrain from competing. In two incentive-compatible, preregistered online experiments, we find that informing women about the gender competition gap increases their likelihood of competing for higher pay, and this effect is mediated by stereotype reactance, consistent with our theorizing. Moreover, exposing both men and women to information about the gender competition gap closes the gap. We then test this informational intervention in a large-scale field experiment on an executive job search platform (n = 4,245), examining whether telling women about the gender competition gap increases their willingness to compete for leadership roles relative to a control message that tells them about an identity-irrelevant competition gap. We find that relative to our control message, informing women about the gender gap in willingness to compete increases submitted job applications by over 20% on the day of condition assignment. This suggests that women’s willingness to compete is affected not just by confidence, but also by cultural expectations and motivation to defy stereotypical norms.

• 2025
• Book