Women’s work: A question of work-life choice and responsibility
1. Purpose
This research investigates how the challenge that women face with balancing their life and work
differs from men. We do so by measuring the identity salience of women’s subject positions and how
a multiply constructed woman subject with family responsibilities is conflicted by her different work
subject. The ideal of work-life balance (WLB) developed with the increase in working hours (Skinner
et al., 2012) and with greater female workforce participation (Thévenon, 2009). Research into how
women work (Charlesworth and MacDonald, 2014), and particularly how they approach WLB
(Skinner et al., 2014) continues to identify imbalances between men and women. WLB remains an
unattained goal for many, but presents particular problems for women (Emslie and Hunt, 2009).
How WLB is observed is influenced both by organizational practices and the attitudes and
behaviours of employees (Powell and Greenhaus, 2010). We propose that the choice of career
orientation by women, whose work and life roles conflict, can determine these attitudes and
behaviours. Such research is important because career-oriented women are likely to struggle with
WLB (Singh et al., 2006) and often choose more demanding occupations (Crompton and Lyonette,
2011; Ruderman et al., 2002). These tendencies can be explained by identity salience (Lobel and
Clair, 1992), which describes the value that individuals place on different life roles (Greer and Egan,
2012). Individuals seek careers that fit with their most salient identities (Stryker, 1968), and may even
pro-actively enact careers that fit with salient work identities (Strauss et al., 2012). Therefore, identity
salience can support or oppose WLB, depending on an individual’s strongest identity, whether it be
family or work related (Kirschenbaum and Merl, 1987). Individuals with salient career identities work
harder and are more likely to impress than those with salient family identities (Lobel and Clair, 1992).
This research also examines how the multiple roles of work and family can be explained from a
depletion or enrichment perspective (Rothbard, 2001), which may induce negative or positive
emotional responses. Depletion causes the “spillover” between work and family life (Edwards and
Rothbard, 2000; Hanson et al., 2006).
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2. Methodology
Our data — used originally for research into long working hours — are drawn from interviews
with 18 female and 19 male public and financial sector middle managers and professionals. The
corpus contains 148,580 words: 64,812 from women and 83,768 from men.
We use an inductive analytical approach by using broader discursive interpretation of the text
used by participants to describe their work. This involves ensuring that the meaning potential in this
text is realised within the organizational context of its use. To do this, we combine Leximancer’s
computer-assisted analysis with our own manual coding in an alternating process whereby commonly
occurring terms are found, sorted, and recoded according to their semantic value. In this case, six
iterations of the process were sufficient to determine that discursive commonalities and relationships
emerged from Leximancer’s original automatically select concepts (McKenna and Waddell, 2007) as
useful sociolinguistic patterns.
With our focus on women’s work, we used the terms mentioned more frequently by women:
choice, responsibility, family, and resistance. However, only the first two were statistically significant
enough to show a high degree of consistency with our theoretical perspectives. Therefore, how
women differ from men in choice and responsibility became our means of measuring what women’s
work means within organizational discourse.
3. Findings
We find that women generally show less responsibility to work than men but more responsibility
to family. We discover though that women tend to lead “disjointed lives”, particularly those who
display low choice but high responsibility. These women were often stressed, highlighting the
relentlessness of their lives. They had high-profile careers, but still had home responsibility with
“spill-over” thus occurring both ways.
Men tend not to indicate that they feel stressed about their home lives, and therefore maintain a
balance that is congruent with their identity salience position. Men speak about what they need
primarily in the context of work as normative to life. In contrast, women see their working life as a
deontic choice between responsibility to family at home and team at work. The differences in how
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men and women deal with different “life-stages” also emerges because women show concern about
the presence or absence of children, their age, and parental caregiving responsibilities.
4. Implications
Women tended to display stronger family identities, while men tend to have stronger or equal
work identities. Therefore, our discourse analysis of men’s and women’s subject positions reveals a
significant problem with organizations expecting different professional outcomes from women and
men without accounting for their gender differences. The questions remains: can organizations gain
the full advantage of female workforce participation without attending to their unfeasible identity
salience and the institutionalised lack of choice to self-determine?
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