European J. International Management, Vol. 2, No. 1, 2008
Work-life balance: working for whom?
Gatrell, C. J. and Cooper, C. (2008). Work-life balance: Working for whom?
European Journal of International Management. 2 (1). 71-86.
Copyright is held by Inderscience Enterprises Limited
www.inderscience.com/ejim
Caroline J. Gatrell*
Management Learning and Leadership,
Lancaster University, Management School, UK
E-mail: c.gatrell@lancaster.ac.uk
*Corresponding author
Cary L. Cooper
Management School,
Lancaster University, UK
E-mail: c.cooper1@lancaster.ac.uk
Abstract: Work-life balance policies are important in relation to employee
stress levels. This paper examines work-life balance and flexibility through
the dual lens of gender and the body. The paper observes how notions of
‘flexibility’ are applied differently to mothers and fathers. We observe how
social expectations about professionallyemployed mothers and fathers, and
work-life balance, are gendered. Menmay thus be discouraged from working
flexibly, while mothers who work long hours may be criticised. We argue
that the pressure to organise work-life balance, according to embodied and
gendered social norms, is a cause of stress to both fathers and mothers who are
employed at a managerial level.
Keywords: work-life balance; flexible working; mothers; fathers; the body;
gender; policy.
Reference to this paper should be madeas follows: Gatrell, C.J. and
Cooper, C.L. (2008) ‘Work-life balance: working for whom?’, European
J. International Management, Vol. 2, No. 1, pp.71–86.
Biographical notes: Caroline J. Gatrell is a Lecturer in the Department of
Management Learning and Leadership,Lancaster University Management
School. She writes on work practices and parenting, with a focus on the social
and gendered constraints faced by professionally employed mothers and
fathers. In particular, she focuse s on women’s labour by relating to
management practices questions around
the sociology of motherhood. Through
the concept of the maternal body, she seeks to understand the social pressures
experienced by employed mothers of very young children. She was joint
organiser of a conference on BIRTH in March 2007. Her publications include
Hard Labour: The Sociology of Parenthood (2005) Open University Press.
Cary L. Cooper is Distinguished Prof essor of Organisational Psychology and
Health and Pro Vice Chancellor at Lancaster University, England. He is the
author of numerous scholarly papersand books, the Editor of the Blackwell
Encyclopedia of Management (13 volumes), Editor of theWho’s Who in the
Management Sciencesand Founding Editor of the Journal of Organizational
Behaviour. He was awarded the CBE by the Queen in 2001 for his contribution
to organisational health.
Copyright © 2008 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.
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C.J. Gatrell and C.L. Cooper
Introduction
The purpose of this paper is to examine issues of work-life balance facing parents who
are raising young children, and who are employed in managerial and professional roles.
In this context we consider the relationship between gendered and embodied practices
regarding ‘flexibility’, and the implications that such practices have on stress among
working parents. We do this by exploring the relationship between male and female
bodies, and working practices. Attempting to understand notions of gender and work-life
balance through the lens of ‘the body’ is unusual because critiques of work-life balance
and gender are more commonly associated either with an interrogation of the language of
work-life balance, or with debates about the relationship between policy and practice
(e.g., Swan and Cooper, 2005). Furthermore, although investigations about the
relationship between the female body and women’s labour may be found within feminist,
or health research, discussions about women’s bodies in the context of work-life balance
debates are limited, and considerations of the male body in relation to work-life balance
are even more unusual.
For three reasons, we consider our examination of work-life balance, parenting, and
professional employment from the perspective both of women and men, and
the relationship between the gendered body and stress, to be timely and relevant to the
‘mainstream’ management debate. Firstly, as observed by Fleetwood (2007) and by
Lewis et al. (2007), while cultural interpretations of work-life balance differ, concerns
about work-life balance have, nevertheless, risen sharply up in international research and
policy agendas – yet the pressures facing working parents continue to increase. Secondly,
as Lewis et al. (2007) note, even in countries where women’s participation in paid work
has grown rapidly, work-life balance continues to be gendered. In their study of seven
countries (UK, Japan, South Africa, the Netherlands, Norway, India), Lewis et al.
(2007, p.364) conclude that despite decades of equal opportunities legislation in some
countries: “work-life balance is far from gender neutral – in all seven countries, women
retained a much closer tie with family care and domestic responsibilities linked to current
manifestations of the gender order”. Finally, Lewis et al. (2007) observe how earlier
debates about work-life balance often related only to mothers in management roles
(for example Skinner and Fritchie, 1998) and took less account of the extent to which
men might wish to: “change the allocation of their everyday activities by becoming more
involved with care and domestic roles” (Lewis et al., 2007, p.364). On this basis,
we suggest that further research on professionally employed mothers and fathers is
needed, because work-life balance policies which appear to be gender neutral are often
still closely bound up with underlying assumptions about the gendered and embodied
social roles that men and women are expected to play (Lewis et al., 2007) – there is no
sense that the work-life balance problem has been ‘solved’.
In our consideration of the pressures faced by professional, employed parents,
we acknowledge that the problems of work-life balance may differ, depending on the
social situation of the group under consideration. Thus, for those in single sex
relationships, for lone parents, for workers with no children and for those in low paid jobs
(Fleetwood, 2007), this paper will be less relevant than it is for professionally employed,
heterosexual parents. At the same time, however, we observe that married and
co-habiting men and women with families are the focus of social policies on work-life
balance, in OECD countries (Mayhew, 2006), the USA, Australia and Canada
(Fleetwood, 2007). For dual-earner heterosexual couples with children of pre-school age,
Work-life balance: working for whom?
73
the difficulties of managing parenting and employment may be sharply circumscribed,
which is perhaps why this group are the focus of so many studies on parental
employment, work-life balance and family practices (Thair and Risdon, 1999;
Worrall and Cooper, 1999; Dienhart, 1998; Padavic and Reskin, 2000; Gatrell, 2005).
It would appear that the topic of work-life balance and professionally employed parents
is, and remains, central to current debate. This paper, therefore, attempts to move forward
the debate on an issue which continues to be of concern to scholars, policy makers and
employers.
2
Work-life balance and notions of ‘flexibility’
Why does work-life balance matter to policy makers, and why might it matter to
employers? The concept of ‘work-life balance’ developed initially as a result of
government policies “aimed specifically at addressing the pressures attendant in
combining work with family life”, where both parents were employed (Swan and Cooper,
2005, p.8). As Lewis and Cooper (2005, p.10) observe, work-life balance policies are
associated with offering employees the chance to work flexibly, and notions of flexible
working were “originally considered within equal opportunities programmes”, with a
particular focus on working mothers. Lewis and Cooper (2005) explain how ‘flexible’
working practices may, theoretically, be interpreted by employers in a variety of ways.
These could include the rearrangement of working times to suit individual needs,
job-shares, or the undertaking at home of tasks which would previously have been
associated with day-time, bodily presence, in the office. In practice, however, most
employers interpret ‘flexibility’ in terms of giving some employees the opportunity to
reduce working hours by working part time or ‘fractionally’ (as a percentage, or a
‘fraction’ of a whole time equivalent) and few offer any other type of flexible working
(Swan and Cooper, 2005; Lewis and Cooper, 2005). Thus, the range of available
‘flexible’ options from which employees might choose, in order to enhance work-life
balance, is narrow. Furthermore, as we shall discuss below, opportunities to work
‘part-time’ are often more readily available to mothers than they are to fathers.
As we shall demonstrate, however, while rights to part-time or flexible working may be
more easily claimed by mothers than by fathers, part-time work is, concurrently,
associated with a reduction in mothers’ career status, and with discrimination at work
(Williams, 1999).
Perhaps employers’ narrow interpretation of flexibility is due, in part, to the
possibility that the whole idea of work-life balance poses a problem for employers.
Fleetwood (2007) suggests that, in neo-liberal market economies such as the UK and the
USA, any policy which is developed to improve the situation for workers is likely to
achieve only limited success. This is because, in a market-driven economy, employers
will usually seek to find ways of re-shaping ‘worker friendly’ polices to employer
advantage – quite possibly at the expense of those staff for whom the policies were
originally intended. Fleetwood argues that, because negative flexible working practices
are ‘employee unfriendly’ and/or ‘family unfriendly’ they tend not to be the kind of
practices that enable home-work integration but act, instead, as constraints. This accords
with Blair-Loy’s (2003) suggestion that some employers may regard ‘flexibility’ as an
opportunity for cost-saving. Thus, part-time salaries may be paid to workers
(often mothers) with full-time responsibilities. At the same time, full-time workers
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C.J. Gatrell and C.L. Cooper
(often fathers) are expected to be ‘flexible’, meaning they are required to work additional,
atypical hours for little or no extra pay. Thus, the notion of ‘flexibility’, in relation to
employed mothers and fathers, may be interpreted by employers as both justification for
placing working mothers on the ‘mummy track’ (Blair-Loy, 2003), and as an opportunity
for intensifying fathers’ workload (Swan and Cooper, 2005).
3
Work-life balance and stress
While it has been asserted that employers may orientate notions of flexibility to their own
advantage, however, there are also reasons why employers and policy makers might
consider work-life balance to be an important policy measure. Quantitative measurements
of the benefits, to employers, of flexible working policies which rely on unpaid labour
contributed by working mothers are limited (though qualitative and psychological;
studies suggest that mothers working part-time in professional roles are often highly
productive and underpaid, Blair-Loy, 2003; Davidson and Cooper, 1992). However, the
costs to employers of having a workforce with poor work-life balance are
well-documented.
By the mid 1990s, health research had demonstrated a well-substantiated link
between poor work-life balance and stress. In 1997, a clear relationship was identified
between parenting, employment, and sharply rising stress-levels (Cartwright and
Cooper, 1997). Among working parents, especially those employed in managerial and
professional roles, long hours and work intensification have been shown to be putting
pressure on relationships with partners and children, thus triggering stress-related illness
and stress inducing behaviours. Stress appeared to intensify in relation to the number of
hours worked by parents who were physically and emotionally torn between the demands
of family and paid work (Swan and Cooper, 2005; Cartwright and Cooper, 1997;
Worrall and Cooper, 1999). In a UK survey conducted by Working Families (Swan and
Cooper, 2005), 49% of parents expressed a desire to work fewer hours – a figure which
rose to 57% among parents who worked over 45 hours per week, many of whom are
likely to be in managerial roles (Worrall and Cooper, 1999). Over 35% of working
parents felt stressed, a figure which reached almost 45% among parents who worked over
45 hours each week. Working parents acknowledged that the pressures of combining
parenting and employment induced unhealthy life-styles and parents blamed lack of time
with families (caused by long hours at work) for unhealthy behaviours, including poor
diet, lack of exercise, smoking, increased alcohol intake, irritability and inability to sleep.
The cost, to employers, of workplace stress, is heavy, and rising. In the UK, in 2004,
the CIPD estimated that workplace stress accounted for the single biggest source of
long-term absence, and in total it has been calculated that work-related stress absences in
the UK are equivalent to around £3.7 billion per annum (Swan and Cooper, 2005, p.10).
In the USA in the 1980s, stress-related absences from work equated to between 1% and
3% of GNP (Cooper et al., 1986) a cost which has risen to between 5% and 10% of GNP
per annum (around $55 billion for alcohol related problems, $27billion for drug abuse
and $22billion for mental ill health). Not surprisingly, in the light of this information,
Swan and Cooper (2005) and Worrall and Cooper (1999) observe that the best way of
reducing sickness levels among working parents in managerial and professional roles
would be to reduce working hours and to offer men and women more opportunities to
work flexibly. Thus, from the late 1990s to date, government policies aimed at improving
Work-life balance: working for whom?
75
work-life balance have also, been increasingly targeted at addressing the heavy costs to
society of stress-related health problems.
Logically, one might assume that the heavy costs of stress-related illness among
parents would provide an incentive for employers to offer greater opportunities for
flexible working. Nevertheless, for many fathers and mothers who are combining
parenting with paid work, ‘flexibility’ is failing in its role as a social support system.
Instead, particularly for full-time employees, the notion of ‘flexibility’ has become
equivalent to an extension of working hours, with bodily presence being almost
pre-requisite for promotion to executive levels. Mothers and fathers who wish to scale the
career ladder are now expected to be physically present in the workplace, well over and
above contracted hours, as a matter of course, and employed parents who work flexibly
(usually mothers), pay penalties in terms of career progression. For those who work
full-time (often fathers) employers’ interpretation of ‘flexible’ often signifies bodily
‘availability’ – and full-time workers may be expected to retain a continual disembodied
link with the workplace when they are not physically present.
4
The gendered body as a conceptual framework for understanding
work-life balance
Analyses of gender are important in relation to work-life balance as a means of
understanding differences in the treatment of men and women at work. Important work
on power, gender and work-life balance has already been produced by Truman (1996),
Blair-Loy (2003) and Kerfoot and Knights (1996). However, neither the notion of
‘gender’ in isolation, nor ideas about gender and power, can entirely explain the reasons
why so few men work flexibly (Mayhew, 2006), nor can these debates fully clarify why
women who are working less than full-time in professional roles should be so
disadvantaged in terms of pay and promotion (as argued by Birnie et al., 2005; Blair-Loy
2003). In this context, we suggest that an understanding of the gendered approaches
adopted by employers towards the work-life balance of working fathers and mothers may
be enhanced through an analysis of gender, the body and paid work. Morgan et al. (2005)
have already established a precedent for the idea that “all work is gendered, and all work
is embodied” and have argued that notions of the body are present in existing research on
gender, employment and family – even if the body was not explicitly in the foreground in
these discussions, especially in relation to men’s work. Longhurst (2001) also identifies
the importance of the body in understanding gender and work, and she notes how
descriptions of ‘flexibility’, especially in relation to the bodies of male managers, are
unlikely to imply part-time employment, but are more likely to involve physical and
mental strength: the ability to be seen working long hours at a desk but, concurrently, to
maintain levels of bodily fitness through exercising at the gym, while also appearing
to control personal stress levels. Citing the example of male bankers in New Zealand,
Longhurst (2001, p.121) observes how the bodies of male managers are often regarded by
employers as ‘firm’, and in control, which is presumably advantageous when it comes to
promotion. However, Longhurst also contends that when “representations of flexibility
are being ‘lived’ at the level of the material body … it is only possible to flex [the body]
to a specific point of tension, beyond which it breaks … and it becomes evident that
‘stress’ is a concern.” Longhurst suggests that ideas about the female ‘flexible body’
serve to disadvantage women in different ways, because women’s ‘flexible working’
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(while it may be associated in one sense with motherhood and part-time working) is also
interpreted as compliance and fluidity, qualities which are often associated with women
but which are rarely seen as compatible with leadership roles. In the next section,
drawing upon the work of writers on the body – but also upon the work of Talcott
Parsons, who describes male and female social roles in terms which are both gendered
and embodied – we examine work-life balance and parenting, first from the perspective
of fathers, and then from mothers’ viewpoint.
5
The embodied nature of fatherhood and employment
Kerfoot and Knights (1996) have suggested that ‘masculinity’ in the context of paid work
could be described as a performance – with men under continual pressure to maintain
the ‘masculine’ identities associated with paid employment, thus requiring men to give
the impression of being ‘in control’ of their emotions, health and bodily functions.
Concepts of the masculine body are closely wrapped up in assumptions about fatherhood
and full time work and notions of the ‘ideal’ male body (Longhurst, 2001; Puwar, 2004).
In relation to fatherhood, ‘ideal’ male bodily performance is associated with the ability to
adapt to long-hours-cultures and a display of willingness to sacrifice family time in
favour of physical presence at the office, a phenomenon which Collinson and Collinson
(2004) describe as ‘presenteeism’ This interpretation accords with Connell’s (1995, p.54)
description of masculinity as a bodily social performance of physical fitness and
endurance, which must be maintained if notions of male identity are to be preserved.
Connell observes how men’s
“pattern of body … use … embeds definite social relations … of gender which
are both realised and symbolised in bodily performance … At the same time,
bodily performances are called into existence by these structures. The
constitution of masculinity through bodily performance means that gender is
vulnerable when the [bodily] performance cannot be sustained.”
In our view, the roots of this association between the paternal body, performance and
employment, especially in countries with what Mayhew (2006) describes as a
‘familialistic’ regime such as UK, Germany, the Netherlands and the USA, stem from the
concept of the ‘nuclear’, heterosexual, two parent family which was popularised by
Talcott Parsons in the post-war years. During the 1950s (Parsons and Bales, 1956)
through to the early 1970s (Parsons, 1971), Parsons located masculinity in the context of
the embodied roles of paternity, marriage and employment. Men, as described by
Parsons, were expected to be heterosexual and virile, but to maintain only limited bodily
presence in the domestic setting and, having fathered a child, to play a very minimal part
in physically nurturing the baby. In relation to paternity, embodied masculine identity
was described by Parsons entirely in the context of profession, earned income and
notions of ‘leadership’ in the external community (Parsons and Bales, 1956, p.13).
Thus, masculine bodies, once men had fathered children, were associated with the power
and the external responsibility of full-time breadwinning, not with the home, or with the
daily care of the bodies of small children. The adult male body was expected to be
physically “anchored in the occupational world, in his job, and through it, by his status
giving and income earning functions for the family” (Parsons and Bales, 1956,
pp.14, 15). According to Parsons, fathers were “expected to be a good provider, to be able
Work-life balance: working for whom?
77
to secure for [their family] a good position in the community” (Parsons and Bales, 1956,
p.163), original emphasis.
It would be easy to dismiss the work of Talcott Parsons as both inaccurate at the time
he wrote, and irrelevant today. As Bernardes (1997) has pointed out, the situation of
many households in America in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s was different from the
comfortable image by created Parsons’ description of ‘The American family’ as
“predominantly and … increasingly an urban middle-class family … a remarkably
uniform, basic type of family – the nuclear family”. Bernardes (1997, p.5) observes how
Parsons’ claim seems extraordinary in the context of: “a society with widespread poverty,
a large range of ethnic minorities and a large working class. Nevertheless, while Parsons”
descriptions of American family life may have been idealised, his work was
(and, we argue, still is), highly influential in relation to social attitudes and the work-life
balance agenda. This was because Parsons’ descriptions of family life fitted in perfectly
with post-war British and American employment policy which, until the mid 1960s, was
committed to the notion of full male employment and which “established the ideal of a
job for all (male) workers and which came to be a taken-for-granted aspect of social and
economic life” (Morris, 1990, p.10). The ‘Parsonian’ image of masculinity, which is
embodied in heterosexuality, paternity and paid work, is still influential today, and
scholars such as Hakim (1996, p.179) continue to claim acceptance of “the sexual
division of labour which sees … income earning as men’s principal activity in life.
This acceptance of differentiated sex roles underlines fundamental differences between
the work orientations of men and women”.
In keeping with the Parsonian image of ideal and embodied fatherhood, full-time
employment continues to be associated with virility and with masculinity. Thus, the small
number of men who do downshift paid work so as to spend time their children may find
themselves the target of criticism and mockery, especially in the UK and the USA.
Hochschild (1997) in her study of dual earner couples in USA, has found that, even in
late modernity, a ‘good’ family man appears still to be regarded as one whose main focus
is paid work. Hochschild observes how fathers who interpret ‘family man’ as a parent
who spends weekdays with his children (as opposed to being bodily absent from home,
while ‘out’ at work, often find their “masculinity called into question”. On this basis,
Hochschild (1997) and Gatrell (2005) have found that even where supposedly gender
neutral work-life-balance policies exist, professionally and managerially employed
fathers in UK and USA are discouraged, by employers, from seeking ‘flexible’ part-time
work.
The notion of paternity thus remains embodied in productive labour, and fathers are
expected to perform the bodily duties of fathering at a distance, investing their physical
presence in their paid work. Although, therefore, opportunities to work ‘flexibly’ are
theoretically available to both women and men, flexible working policies, especially
at the professional and managerial levels are, in practice, often accessible only by
mothers with children, and are not available to fathers. Fathers rarely have the option of
working flexibly in the sense of working part-time, but are usually expected to maintain a
physical presence at work for longer than their contracted hours (Collinson and
Collinson, 2004). Furthermore, fathers working at senior levels, who do attempt to work
‘flexibly’ by opting for part-time status, may face resistance from colleagues and
employers who can neither understand nor accept the paternal desire to reduce working
hours so as to improve work-life balance (Hochschild, 1997). Dienhart (1998, p.23),
in her study of fatherhood and work, observes how: “Despite women’s massive entry into
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the labour force, social discourse about the good provider role for men [is] deeply
entrenched”. The embodied notion of fathers as wage-earners, rather than child-carers,
combined with employers’ interpretation of paternal ‘flexibility’ as increased worker
availability, means that professionally employed fathers generally “have lower
expectations of family-friendly working practices being available to them personally, and
are less likely to take advantage of those that are in place” (Donnellan, 2003, p.34).
Fathers are, thus, socially obliged to take on the ‘main breadwinner’ role, and this is
likely to “bring with it the attendant pressure of keeping and improving their job, often
through long hours and other family unfriendly working practices” (Swan and Cooper,
2005, p.5). Perhaps unsurprisingly, therefore, it is still the case, in Germany, the
Netherlands and the UK (Mayhew, 2006) that in the majority of dual earner couples,
while some mothers may work part time, full-time employment remains the ‘norm’ for
men. Even in countries where mothers are likely to work full-time, this is unlikely to
mean a consequent reduction in fathers’ hours at work. Thus, most fathers work full-time
regardless of mothers’ working arrangements and, significantly, when children are of
pre-school age, while mothers are likely to reduce their hours of paid work, “fathers
tend to have higher employment rates and work long hours than other men”
(Mayhew, 2006, p.46).
It has been argued that this is the case even in Nordic countries espousing family
friendly approaches, where work-life balance policies specifically include paternal
entitlements (Morgan et al., 2005; Lewis and Cooper, 2005). This is because there remain
“‘greedy’ organisations which make it difficult [for fathers] to take up paternity
entitlements in practice” (Lewis and Cooper, 2005, p.11). Morgan et al. (2005),
Brandth and Kvande (2002) and Lammi-Taskula (2006) all observe how, in Nordic
countries, while fathers may take two weeks paternity leave (‘Daddy Days’) immediately
following the birth of new babies, and while some fathers will also take the state funded
‘fathers quota’ of four weeks paid parental leave during babies’ first year, only a limited
number of fathers opt to take any leave beyond the ‘fathers’ quota’, especially if they are
in managerial positions. Brandth and Kvande (2002) in their study of the use of paternal
leave in Norway observe that while most male workers in non-management roles use
paternity leave, only 47% of Norwegian fathers in senior management roles take
advantage of the state funded paternity leave to which they are entitled. Furthermore,
around 90% of fathers working at middle or senior management levels do not opt for any
further parental leave beyond the ‘daddy’ and ‘quota’ days. Thus, leave-taking among
fathers in Nordic countries drops in accordance with seniority at work, and appears,
for managers, to be limited to the first year of children’s lives, after which fathers return
to ‘normal’ full-time work schedules. Lammi-Taskula (2006), in her analysis of parental
leave-taking among Nordic men observes how:
“the policiticising of parenthood to promote fathercare does not necessarily
produce changes in the division of paid and unpaid work in everyday life
(p.79) … [thus] policies promoting fathercare are more significant on the
symbolic level of gender relations than on the level of actual division of labour
between mothers and fathers.” (Lammi-Taskula, 2006, p.95)
In this context, Morgan et al. (2005) provide the example of one Norwegian father who
had enjoyed being at home on paternity leave following the birth of his new baby,
but who found that, on his return to work he was expected to be present for long hours
and electronically available at all times. Such poor levels of work-home integration
Work-life balance: working for whom?
79
are, as we reported at the start of this paper, likely to lead to stress, and
stress-related behaviours and outcomes, such as depression, exhaustion, poor diet
and over-consumption of alcohol. This is due not only to the long hours worked in the
office by fathers in managerial roles (Worrall and Cooper, 1999), but also because men
are likely to conflate work-stress with worries about partners and children, and the
impact of poor work-life balance on relationships contributes to raised stress levels
(Bolger et al., 1989).
6
Mothers, embodiment, work-life balance and ‘flexibility’
Between 1956 and the early 1970s the ‘Parsonian’ description of the heterosexual,
female, reproductive body presented an image of women confined to the domestic setting
for the purpose of child bearing, and nurturing children. This provided an authoritative
and enduring blueprint for what the social role of the female body ‘ought’ to be (Parsons
and Bales, 1956; Parsons, 1971). As we have observed, this image was very convenient
to policy makers, who sought to encourage the gendered division of labour in the
post-war years (Morris, 1990). It is well known how the women’s rights movement,
during the 1960s and 1970s, resisted the ‘Parsonian’ notion that having a female body
should automatically imply responsibility for unpaid domestic labour. Challenges were
thus made, by feminist scholars, to the conventional belief that women’s fertility, and
their potential for motherhood, should justify their exclusion from educational and/or
employment opportunities. Writers such as Adrienne Rich and Anne Oakley celebrated
women’s ‘powers of reproduction’ (Rich, 1977, p.50) but contested the notion that
“women can’t have professional jobs and babies at the same time – only one or the other”
(Oakley, 1981, p.3).
From the mid 1970s, in many industrialised nations such as Britain, America and in
Nordic countries, equal opportunities legislation was enacted and refined, making it
theoretically illegal for employers to discriminate against women on grounds of their
reproductive status. Clearly, the legislation has had some effect, as it is certainly true that
there are more women managers now than there were between 1960 and 1980.
However, the numbers of very senior women in public sector and professional arenas
remains very limited. Perhaps this is because, even although it is 50 years since Parsons
wrote about the embodied and familial role of motherhood, the Parsonian discourse
which located the maternal body role firmly within the home remains a powerful
influence. Social expectations often continue to confine women’s bodies to the domestic
sphere, and to associate ‘proper’ mothering with “the sexual division of labour which
sees homemaking as women’s principal activity … in life” (Hakim, 1996, p.179).
In this context, Arber and Ginn (1995) have asserted that, despite women’s gains in the
labour market, women are still disadvantaged in comparison with men because women’s
bodily social role as child-bearer remains inextricably linked with the expectation that
women should undertake the physical labour of childcare and housework. Thus, while
mothers’ career prospects have improved (especially in the case of professionally and
managerially employed women qualified to degree level or over), their progress in the
labour market is nevertheless constrained.
This argument is borne out by the figures relating to women in top management roles.
In the USA, for example, the Glass Ceiling Commission (established in 1995 to bring
down the barriers preventing women from reaching the top of the corporate ladder) has
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estimated that women account for 46.5% of America’s workforce but for less then 8% of
its top managers (The Economist 2005). This figure has altered very little since 1995
when the commission was set up. In the UK, over a 5-year period, the total number of
female executive directors of FTSE 100 companies has fluctuated between 11 and
17 – but there are just over 400 male executive directors’ (The Economist, 2005).
(Ironically, those women who do achieve very senior status at work are at risk of
stress-related ill health due to feelings of isolation and loneliness (Fielden and
Cooper, 2001).
Lewis (2006) has observed that women’s career progress is likely to be blocked
because motherhood and seniority are seen as incompatible, especially if women are
working ‘flexibly’, or part-time. In keeping with the conventional paternal and maternal
roles described by Talcott Parsons, contemporary scholars such as Puwar (2004) and
Desmarais and Alksnis (2005) have observed how healthy, able bodied men continue to
personify the ‘ideal’ bodily norm in professional settings. In contrast, women with
children who enter managerial and professional roles find it hard to blend in physically
because their female bodies render them ‘marked’ … women’s bodies are highly visible
and are [therefore] a liability’ (Puwar, 2004, pp.148, 149). Puwar (2004) contends that
professional women with small children are unwelcome in professional workplace
settings and are expected to conceal embodied activities (such as breastfeeding)
connected with maternity and to ‘erase any differences’ so as to try and fit in with male
‘norms’. Concerns such as Puwar’s are substantiated by the negative statements of some
leading figures in the business world. International advertising executive Neil French, for
example, has explicitly located employed mothers in a bodily context, suggesting that
women’s potential for reproduction and breastfeeding should preclude them from senior
employment. French is alleged to have stated that women should not be appointed to
senior roles because they might: “wimp out, go home and suckle something … women
don’t make it to the top because they don’t deserve to – they’re crap” (quoted in
Hopkins, 2005, p.43). Following this alleged statement, French confirmed his view that
women should not be appointed to executive roles because such posts “require 100%
commitment”. Focusing on employed women’s reproductive capacity, French added:
“People who have babies to look after can’t do that” (Hopkins, 2005, p.43). It has already
been established that mothers who combine child-rearing with paid work are at risk from
work-related stress due to the dual pressures of managing paid work and domestic
responsibilities (Davidson and Cooper, 1992). However, the problems associated with
managing multiple roles in discouraging social environments have also been shown to
have serious and detrimental impact on mothers’ stress levels (Bolger et al., 1989;
Davidson and Cooper, 1992; Fielden and Cooper, 2001) and attitudes such as those cited
above can only serve to exacerbate this problem.
6.1 Mothers, full-time employment and work-life balance
Given the social expectation that the embodied responsibility for bearing children brings
with it the responsibility for child-rearing (a role which is not, as we have observed,
associated with the embodiment of fatherhood), it is perhaps unsurprising to learn that,
for the mothers of very young children who work full time, the path to senior
management can be difficult. Women managers with no children may be censured for
failing to perform their embodied femininity in accordance with social expectations
(Davidson and Cooper, 1992). However, women with children who also work full-time in
Work-life balance: working for whom?
81
demanding, professional roles often experience role stress due not only to the
“multiple demands inherent in running a career and a home and a family” (Davidson and
Cooper, 1992, p.82) but due to the criticism they receive from colleagues for, apparently,
failing to maintain a socially acceptable level of embodied maternal presence with
children. Davidson and Cooper (1992, p.137) report how mothers with young children
who work full-time receive expressions of ‘disgust’ when others learn that they are
combining motherhood with full-time employment. The role stress experienced by
mothers who are in full-time work is often exacerbated because such women are accused
of being uncommitted to their professional employment (Desmarais and Alksnis, 2005;
Hopkins, 2005). This may be especially problematic if their child-care responsibilities
mean that they cannot offer to employers the ‘flexibility’ of being bodily available to
work additional, atypical and unsocial hours, but are able to be present at work only
during ‘office hours’ (Singh and Vinnicombe, 2004; Lewis, 2006). Thus, employers
might expect mothers who work full-time to be ‘flexible’ in relation to putting in long
hours at the office, but might concurrently block their career progress either because they
cannot accept that women can combine mothering with a high work orientation
(Desmarais and Alksnis, 2005; Fielden and Cooper, 2002). Thus, a professional and/or
managerially employed mother who works full-time may find herself constructed
simultaneously as a ‘nominal’ mother, who is failing to perform her maternal role
appropriately, and also as an uncommitted, unambitious employee (Moorhead, 2004,
p.10) – when, in fact, she may be deeply committed both to her children and to her paid
work (Gatrell, 2005).
Employed mothers are already vulnerable to stress-related illnesses because of the
total hours spent in combined domestic and economic labour (Fielden and Cooper, 2001;
Swan and Cooper, 2005) and such negative attitudes make their situation even more
stressful. Desmarais and Alksnis (2005, p.459) assert that employed mothers experience
role stress because they are “defined as an imperfect worker, and an unsuitable mother,
or both” … [mothers] are accused of “violating the normative assumptions of the role of
women … simply by choosing to be employed” (Desmarais and Alksnis, 2005, p.459).
Stress related illness among professionally employed mothers who work full-time has
thus been attributed, in part, to the conflicting pressures of role incongruity (Eagly and
Karau, 2002; Davidson and Cooper, 1992), in which mothers’ apparent ‘violation’ of
social expectations exposes them to criticism, which, in turn, affects women’s own
self-evaluation, this leading them to feel inadequate (and stressed) as both mothers and
employees (Desmarais and Alksnis, 2005).
6.2 Mothers, ‘flexibility’ and part-time work
What of women who seek to enhance work-life balance by combining professional and
managerial roles with ‘flexible’, in the sense of ‘part-time’, working? In an attempt to
address the difficulties of combining motherhood with career, a proportion of
professionally employed women arrange to work part-time, often as a ‘fraction’ of a
whole time equivalent while children are young (Birnie et al., 2005). Lewis and Cooper
(2005) have suggested that, where organisations do offer the possibility of part-time
work, this is often instigated as a short-term solution due to problems regarding the
recruitment and retention of female staff. However, organisations offering part-time work
do little to acknowledge, or to accommodate mothers’ long term career ambitions.
This short-termism can
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C.J. Gatrell and C.L. Cooper
“detract from the need to look more deeply at actual working practices and
inherent assumptions that sustain counterproductive behaviours and values,
such as the over-valuing of visible time at the workplace.” (Lewis and Cooper,
2005, p.10)
We have already observed Singh and Vinnicombe’s (2004) assertion that the
commitment of mothers to their paid work is questioned by employers. However, this is a
particular problem for mothers who are employed part-time, or fractionally (Birnie et al.,
2005; Blair-Loy, 2003). This is because the “normative basis for working arrangements”
(Hopfl and Hornby Atkinson, 2000, p.137) is based on the conventional, masculine and
Parsonian notion of bodily presence at work for extended periods, in a cultural context
which includes ‘presenteeism’ (Collinson and Collinson, 2004; Lewis and Cooper, 1999).
The ‘erasing of differences’ in order to fit in with others at work (Puwar, 2004) is
difficult for mothers who work part-time, because these women cannot sustain the same
level of embodied presence in the workplace as male managers. Through their
child-related bodily absences from the office, mothers working part-time, or
‘fractionally’, are marked out from the ‘ideal’ – and continuously present – male worker.
Furthermore, maternal concerns with the bodily needs of small children are regarded as
incompatible with paid work at a senior level (Lewis, 2006; Gatrell, 2007). Mothers are,
therefore, expected to accept limited career opportunities in return for the ‘privilege’
of maintaining a professional or management role part-time (Blair-Loy, 2003).
Blair-Loy (2003) has found that for highly qualified, professional women who are
contracted to work less than full-time, there is likely to be a forfeit to pay in terms of
earnings and promotion prospects. Thus, the notion ‘flexibility’, when utilised by
mothers, is linked to limited career and development opportunities. The perception of
mothers as less work-orientated than fathers is a serious source of stress for women with
a high work orientation (Davidson and Cooper, 1992) and if mothers feel they are
experiencing discrimination due to their part-time status, this will heighten mothers’
stress levels (Gatrell and Cooper, 2006). Interestingly, although it assumed that mothers
in Nordic countries are helped to combine motherhood with work, this may not always be
easy in practice for women managers. Kvande and Rasmussen (1995) have found that
in Norway, large and bureaucratic organisations may espouse family friendly working on
paper, but may at managerial level still cleave to hidden, but gendered, practices and
procedures for promotion which hinder mothers’ career progress.
7
Summary and discussion
As Irwin (1999, p.44) observes, an ‘adequate theorisation’ of family practices in the
context of parenting and employment requires an acknowledgement of the strength of
social conventions in relation to mothering and fathering, this reflecting the “continued
importance of social ties, not their displacement”. Thus, in familialistic regimes such as
the UK and the USA, social ideas about the roles of fathers and mothers – especially in
middle class households where men have the ability to earn high incomes – remain
embodied, and firmly fixed in the past. And even in countries such as Norway, where
social engineering aims to equalise opportunities for mothers and fathers, research has
suggested that social ideas about the nurturing of small children remain deeply embedded
within the context of the gendered body. Thus, notions of women’s work still focus on
Work-life balance: working for whom?
83
childbearing and rearing (even if combined with paid work), and notions of masculinity,
especially at managerial level, remain centred on full-time paternal employment.
In this paper we have suggested that notions of work-life balance and ‘flexibility’ are
gendered, and embodied. We have observed that policies offering ‘flexible’ working at
professional and managerial levels are often limited to the notion of part-time,
or ‘fractional’ work. In this context we have argued that mothers may be more able to
access opportunities to work flexibly than fathers, but that mothers’ embodied absences
from the workplace may lead to restricted career progress, a situation which is highly
stressful for work-oriented women.
For mothers and fathers working full-time, employers’ interpretation of ‘flexibility’
tends to mean a requirement for ‘presenteeism’. ‘Flexibility’ may, thus, require men and
women to extend their physical presence in the workplace well beyond ‘office hours’.
For mothers who confine themselves to working contracted ‘office’ hours, career
progress will be constrained because they are regarded as being inflexible and
uncommitted to their paid work. However, mothers who do spend long hours at work
may experience extreme role stress due to the social expectation that mothers should be
physically present with, and responsible for, the bodily and emotional needs of very small
children, this leading to the accusation that such women are performing both motherhood
and their professional roles inadequately. The embodied concept of fatherhood remains
firmly embedded in the idea of economic provision, and physical presence at the
workplace. When associated with fatherhood, ‘flexibility’ often means bodily availability
at the office over and above ‘office hours’. Fathers who seek to reduce their commitment
to paid employment in order to care for their own small children are unlikely to receive
encouragement to work flexibly, even if they are feeling stressed, and are, thus, seeking a
better work-life balance.
The experiences of employed fathers and mothers is at odds with research which
shows that men and women in professional and managerial roles seek to spend more time
with families, especially when children are young, and find it stressful if this is hard to
achieve. The link between long-hours-cultures, stress and unhealthy behaviours such as
poor diet and increased alcohol consumption has been proven conclusively.
Although governments have been pro-active in developing legislation to facilitate flexible
and part-time working for parents with small children, more needs to be done to
encourage parents, and to shift outdated and unhelpful social attitudes about the
embodied roles of parents. If better work-life balance is to be achieved (and presumably,
concurrently, an associated reduction in stress-related illness and unhealthy behaviours),
legislation needs to be tougher, and opportunities for flexible working – without the
attendant detriment to career progress – should be available to both mothers and fathers.
Most importantly, improved policy and legislation need to be supported by changes in
attitude. The continued gendered and embodied, association of motherhood with
childcaring, flexibility and limited career opportunities; and the association of fatherhood
with employment and long hours away from the domestic setting, must be tackled if
work-life balance for working parents is to be improved, and the stress overload
of employed mothers and fathers addressed.
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C.J. Gatrell and C.L. Cooper
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