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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Public Health
Sec. Public Mental Health
Volume 13 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2025.1483746
This article is part of the Research Topic Feminine, Feministic, Feminists, and Feminisms View all 12 articles
Work-Family Conflict，Overwork and Mental Health of Female Employees in China
Provisionally accepted- 1 School of Humanities, Shandong Management University, Jinan, Shandong Province, China
- 2 Anhui Kecheng Intelligent Helth CO.,LTD, Hefei, China
- 3 University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China
- 4 School of Public Affairs, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, Anhui Province, China
The "Green Paper on the Mental Well-being of Chinese Career Women" indicates that around 85% of Career Women face mental health challenges such as anxiety, depression, and anger, with these issues being more common than in their male counterparts in China. Both work and family are identified as two major contributors to these problems. Utilizing Conservation of Resources theory, this paper examines work-family conflict and overwork as significant explanatory variables and develops a moderated mediation model to investigate the mechanisms affecting mental health issues among Chinese career women. Methods: Data were gathered through a questionnaire survey, with 500 questionnaires distributed and 393 responses received. Hayes' PROCESS macro for SPSS was employed to examine moderated mediation models, with Bootstrap resampling set at 1000. Results: (1) Work-family conflict (abbreviated as WFC) is significantly associated with emotional exhaustion (abbreviated as EE) and mental health problems in career women, with emotional exhaustion serving as a mediator between workfamily conflict and mental health. (2) Overwork is positively linked to emotional exhaustion and influences the relationship between work-family conflict and emotional exhaustion. (3) Overwork also moderates the mediation effect of work-family conflict on mental health via emotional exhaustion, amplifying the mediation effect when career women are overburdened.Discussion: This study provides fresh insights into the mechanisms underlying mental health issues among career women, offering valuable information for addressing these challenges.
Keywords: work-family conflict, overwork, Mental Health, Career Woman, moderated mediation model
Received: 20 Aug 2024; Accepted: 19 Mar 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Ma, Xu and Zhang. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Xuehe Zhang, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China
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