Work, family, work–family conflict and psychological distress: A revisited look at the gendered vulnerability pathways.

Abstact This paper revisited the vulnerability hypothesis to explain the greater level of psychological distress among working women compared to working men. A comprehensive vulnerability model was tested in which work and family stressors and psychosocial resources are directly related to psychological distress and indirectly through work‐to‐family (WFC) and family‐to‐work (FWC) conflicts. Data came from a random sample of 989 women and 1,037 men working in 63 Canadian establishments. Multilevel path analyses were performed separately for men and for women. The results show that many work/family stressors and resources are linked to men's or women's psychological distress directly and indirectly through WFC and FWC. However, the z‐test used to assess whether the relationships differed significantly between women and men indicated that only two relationships differ significantly between the two groups: experimenting problems with children and a low self‐esteem are associated positively to psychological distress through FWC only for women. In addition to showing the specific involvement of work–family conflict in the psychological distress inequality, this study contributes to revealing that testing the differences in the magnitude of the relation offer a more suitable appraisal of the vulnerability mechanism involved in the psychological distress inequality between men and women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]