Women often report that work at home jobs reduces employmentfamily stress. But men also indicate this. And some men also report that work at home jobs helps them fulfill child care or other household duties or goals. Some women see their work at home jobs income as secondary family income whereas men often see their work at home jobs income as the primary family income, but not universally. For some households the income from women’s work at home jobs is the primary income. For some men as well as for some women, work at home jobs is a second job, or "moonlighting".

Gender determinations on how families intertwine enterprise and family should be assessed. Different life-style strategies–sharing, complementary, and segregated–are possible. Value shifts are often necessary to adapt to a more family-oriented life-style, which requires establishing family and work at home jobs as the focus of one’s life, with concerns and ideas about income generation considered from this perspective. Sharing a set of goals that are regarded as worth pursuing is likely important for the work at home jobs, the family, and each individual, to prosper and succeed.

Throughout the world, parents can have their children with them while preparing products for sale, such as foodstuffs or crafts, and also have their children under watch while the products are being distributed. Or a parent can take the children along while calling on customers. Children can be studying for school while their parent who is a real estate agent is searching a computer data base for homes for sale and talking to a buyer on the phone. Parents can telecommunicate/telecommute, service equipment or animals, create products, or provide information services, while keeping a watchful eye on children and cooking supper work at home jobs. Although men and women are able to combine parenting, household, and employment activities, it often appears it is women who are left to do so. The social construction of gender in many cultures has attached these duties to women.

Some authors’ conclusions support the contention that work at home jobs can be a panacea for juggling the competing requirements of earning a living, managing a household, participating with family, and engaging in leisure. An alternative view would argue that when combining family and livelihood, the amount of interruption to livelihood activities could be stressful, detrimental to business, and perhaps not safe for children. Additionally, as it is women who conduct most of the child care and household production tasks, this scheme for linking nurturing activities with those for pay or profit serves to engender these arrangements as "women’s" and serves to keep women marginalized in status and resources. The argument is that people with more human or social-cultural capital are likely to be less marginalized, be employed in the formal economic sector, and realize higher relative incomes. On the other hand, some studies found women expressing satisfaction with the ability to accommodate both paid-work and family responsibilities through work at home jobs. More theoretically motivated studies are necessary to ascertain the family and employment dynamics, how this is related to gender among families with members engaged in work at home jobs, and whether the arrangement is satisfactory for women and men.