You or Me? Gender and Graduate Students' Orientations Toward Sacrifice and Migration

Abstract

In an exploratory study of graduate students moving expectations, a self-administered survey was utilized to examine the compromises and sacrifices they expect themselves or their potential partners to be making in moving decisions, as well as their willingness to sacrifice or ask their partner to sacrifice in a move. This study focuses on this work-life decision due to its being understudied in previous literature; it aims to start to establish migration decisions as an important work-family balance topic as well as explore what role gender plays in expectations and willingness to move, especially regarding who sacrifices in a moving decision. The study focused on the potential impact of gender on migration orientations, comparing men’s and women’s attitudes. It also looked at the influence of gender ideology, program’s gender composition, perceived transportability, salary, partner’s relative salary and Money as Power attitudes as well as some demographic data. Previous literature has suggested that women are more likely to be willing to sacrifice in a moving decision while men are more willing to ask their partners to do so. Findings from this study generally confirm this. Some individual factors related to being willing to ask the partner to sacrifice more were: holding a traditional gender ideology, being in a male-dominated program, having a higher expected salary, belief in money as power, and belief in moving as important to a career. Results also suggest that this is a fruitful area for further study.