Asymmetric Moral Reconstruction: Aspirational Identities and the Uneven Reconstruction of Work and Care

Talia Shiff, Tel Aviv University

How do people negotiate competing moral ideals when they collide? Drawing on 40 interviews with senior software engineers who are mothers, this article examines how women engage and transform the tension between two powerful cultural schemas: the ideal worker and the ideal mother. I identify a patterned asymmetry in how these ideals are renegotiated. Women frequently blur the boundary of motherhood, redefining devotion to children as compatible with—and even enacted through—paid work. By contrast, efforts to revise the ideal worker tend to expand acceptable practices—such as flexible schedules or remote work—without redefining devotion itself. Commitment remains anchored in productivity and the prioritization of work. To explain this variation, I develop a framework of prospective boundary work. The framework distinguishes between enabling relational schemas and derivative narratives, and specifies how the location of interpretive authority and the structure of discursive fields shape the depth and direction of cultural transformation. These findings refine sociological accounts of cultural change and illuminate the moral mechanisms through which gender inequality at work is sustained—even amid apparent flexibility and reform.

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 Presented in Session 117. Morality in Economic and Political Transformations