Great post, Jessie.  However, I think you've mischaracterized what Emily wrote about the study (and I may be mischaracterizing the study since I haven't read it).  Where you write that the workers had less feelings of "professional achievement" and think she is actually talking about personal satisfaction.  She writes:

Happily, according to a new study, family dinner appears to be good for parents, too. The research by lead author Jenet Jacob of Brigham Young University found that among 1,580 parents who worked at IBM, those who said their jobs interfered less with being home for dinner tended to feel greater personal success, and success in relationships with their spouses and their children. The working parents—both mothers and fathers—had all of these buoyant feelings if they made it home for dinner more regularly, even if they still worked long hours. They also felt more kindly toward their workplace. Parents who missed dinner at home because of work, on the other hand, felt gloomy about their professional futures. "It is noteworthy that although longer work hours predicted significantly greater perception of success in work life, work interference with dinnertime predicted lower perception of success in work life," Jacob and her co-author write.

This actually makes tons of sense to me.  As Emily points out, much is said about the benefits of having a family dinner together.  I think it makes excellent sense that women that aren't able to do what modern behavioral science seemingly demands of them -- have daily dinner with all of her family sitting around the table discussing the day's events -- will feel less successful, less balanced, if you will.  I think that many professional women equate success in work life with success in finding work/life balance.  I think that women are not as apt at separating professional success from personal success and are less likely to see a successful professional life ahead of them if they don't see the whole picture of their life as successful.

But i think the act of eating together is key, not cooking, cleaning, etc. It's not always possible to eat together since we both have crazy jobs (I'm a summer associate in a large firm and I've been lucky to get some very interesting work that occasionally keeps me in the office late, and my husband is a part-time ER doc and full-time fellow), but we really make an effort to have a family meal.

My husband probably cooks more than I do, at least this summer, but I don't think that's a bad reflection on me and it doesn't make me feel bad. On the contrary, I think it's a better example for our son than if I worked in a job that is just as demanding as my husband's, and still did all the housework. I tend to ignore most of these sorts of studies and focus on what works well for our family. For us, it's dinner together as often as possible, even if that dinner is take-out, or tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches.

I really try to make dinner something my daughter and I do at a table with no TV. On occasion I slip because I'm just too tired to talk, but overall we're pretty consistent. Friday is movie and pizza night so we put out a blanket on the carpet and have a sit-in movie.

I think perhaps as a single parent this is an easier task than for married households. I only have my schedule to think about and she goes everywhere I go.

One thing I don't stress about is trying to make an entire meal from scratch. I love Rachael Ray's 30 Minute Meals, and we do mac 'n cheese with veggies sometimes once a week. I hope to carry on eating as a family into my second marriage (whenever that should occur) and with future kids. Whatever it is that we eat, I plan to keep it at a table as often as possible.

That said, my boyfriend is a better cook than I, my dad better than my stepmom, and my sister has a gourmet chef for a boyfriend. Perhaps we're odd, but in my family, the men are better/more frequent cooks than the women.