Work Life Balance for Women
[Name of the Writer]
[Name of the Institution]

Table of Contents
Abstract iii
Introduction 2
Problems in Work Life Balance 4 Demographic Variables and Work Life Balance 4
Achieving the Balanced Life 6 Self Efficacy 6 Emotional Intelligence 7
Employer Efforts 7
Conclusion 10
References 11

Abstract

Work-life balance describes the practices at work place that create an equilibrium in demands of employees to maintain a healthy family life and work activities. The demands and pressure is a greater challenge for female workforce to balance work life activities. The conflicts in such situation also has significant impact in career advancements of women. Organisations also play their part by creating a healthy work place culture that reflects cornerns for needs of employees during work and after work. Organisations should periodically review their contemprorary work processes and practices. They should determine the inefficiencies and reasons of stress that negatively effect motivation and commitment of female employees. This research study aims to undertake the factors that can affect the career women work-life balance.
Work Life Balance for Women

Introduction

Work Life balance is a term that suggests the individuals how much control they have on the situations like when to work and how to work. It describes those practices that an individual aims to achieve equilibrium between family demands and work life (Robbins, 2005). Work life balance can also be termed as an achievement of fulfilled life from paid work in benefiting society, business and own’ interests. The term has emerged due to rise of conflicts in an individual’s life (Thriveni & Rama, 2012). In this assignment, different aspects of work life balance from a female’s perspective are studied. The changing environment and demands of the workplace have led to many issues of work life balance in an individual’s life. The role of women at work has enhanced. They are cooperating with men in every field irrespective of type of work (Jyothi & Jyothi, 2012). A report in 2008 presented the statistics of the female workforce in USA. 121 million women aged 16 or above are employed in the country. Among these 59% is labor workforce. The labor workforce of USA comprises of 46% females in which 75% are full time workers and remaining 25% work on a part time basis. Among female workforce, largest portion is working in management and professional areas. On a global level, the number of women senior managers in large corporations is low. In March 2009, fortune 500 published a report on women CEOs. 15 women CEOs are mentioned in the list. This low number of female professionals at a higher level shows that much progress is to be made worldwide in promoting women career (Hewleu & Luce, 2005). According to Freedman and Greenhaus, number of women has increased considerably, but the issues and challenges have also increased. Women face many problems in fulfilling job requirements due to different reasons. These issues are emotional as well as physical. Women are still considered as the primary responsible of home and family despite the fact that they are now working as much as men. In many conservative cultures, work is considered as secondary options to women. This perception is seen not only in men but also women define their primary role as a caretaker at home. They prefer to spend time on housework, children and family duties. Their duties also include taking care of elderly people in homes (Robbins, 2005). As the combination of personal family responsibilities as well as career orientation, women face family work conflicts. Greenhaus defines this conflict as an inter role clash due to pressure from two different domains. These domains have no mutual compatibility. Thus, women are stuck in a dilemma where meeting demands of a single domain is not enough and they have to meet demands of another domain too. Participation in one domain becomes more difficult if women participate in the other domain (Thriveni & Rama, 2012). Traditionally the role of women was confined to cooking, cleaning and raising children. They were looked upon as a care giver or as home keeper. But now the story is different. They have an influential role to play even outside the home. With the improved education and employment opportunities today, most homes became dual earners because of increase in expenses and necessities. The expansion of higher education has also enhanced (Bryant & Consantine, 2006).

Job prospects for women and there is a shift in the role models from stay-at-home mothers to successful professional women. Women achieved tremendous progress in every walk of life and made a mark where ever they are. But her role at home has not changed much. The wife still cooks, does household work, takes care of the family members and runs the house. With the increase in pressures at work place and essential demands at home, the work life balance is at stake (Hewleu & Luce, 2005).

Problems in Work Life Balance

Waite and Gallagher mentioned that the transformation of marriage and family life has created tensions in dual career couples. The responsibilities of marital and family life are now considered as a personal choice of an individual. This has made work family life more vulnerable. At the cultural level, gender role ideologies have changed drastically. These traditional values changes are constantly being challenged by the society. In such situation, role efficacy and emotional intelligence of women plays a crucial role (Gordon & Berry, 2006). Many professional women decide to step off their career at some point of time in life due to reasons of children upbringing and care of elderly parents. These factors aggravate the situation for females due to organizational issues like long work hours or unsatisfying work. According to a study by Carolyn and Sylvia, 37% highly qualified professional women state the decision to step off the career as voluntary. Rate of a similar situation in case of women with children is 43%. Personal health issues are also identified as the factor contributing in decision with rate of 9% (Bryant & Consantine, 2006).

Demographic Variables and Work Life Balance

Demographic variables such as age, income, experience, marital status influence the women employees in their work life balance. Various studies were conducted in this direction to determine the impact of demographic variables on work-life balance of women employees. Changes in the workplace and in employee demographics in the past few decades have led to an increased concern for understanding the boundary and the interaction between employee work and non-work lives. Work-life balance captured management’s attention in the 1980s, more due to the growing number of women with dependent children entering the workforce. As per the study concluded that women with dependent children are finding it more difficult to balance their life than those who do not have dependent children (Thriveni & Rama, 2012). Hamilton and Gordon focused on understanding the issues in lives of unmarried women arising due to conflict of work life balance. Studies have revealed that work life imbalance also affects such women. The level of effect is similar to the level on married working women. The researchers have identified the significant factors that act as stress creators on working women lives. These are education gaps, earnings ratio, specialized experience; spouse stress and excessive work load. Maclnnes has evaluated in his research the importance of work life balance policies that offer reduced working hours. These policies are of special interest to female workforce who has family obligations like younger children or aging parents. Dash comparative analysis of the work life balance scores of different demographic profiles could not suggest that there were statistically significant differences in the perception of work-life balance across different demographic groups (Thriveni & Rama, 2012). Based on the analysis it is concluded there is a significant relationship between demographic variables and work life balance of women employees. The relationship between demographic variables and work-life balance of employees will be an influential input in designing appropriate policies for employees to address work –life balance issues. Work-life balance initiatives designed to help employees balance their work and personal lives are not only an option, but also a necessity for many employers today.

Achieving the Balanced Life

Major problems as identified by Freedman and Greenhaus are the lack of emotional intelligence and role participation. Hence problems do not arise only due to differences in values, social relationships and work family requirements (Shankar & Bhatnagar, 2010). Many organizations now strongly believe on the evidences on employees' emotions relationship with their performance. Emotions at work place can be positive or negative. Positive emotions are favorable for attainment of organizational goals while negative emotions can be hindrance for organizations. Emotions seem to have significant influence on performance of employee as it can affect the task employee is currently working on. It also affects the efforts of employees towards completion of the task. In other words, what employee feels at the workplace and how he expresses and analyses the emotions affects the overall performance (Hochchild, 1997).

Self Efficacy

Self efficacy can be defined as the belief of an individual on herself. This belief helps the individual in achieving designated performance levels. Self efficacy helps in developing confidence on ones abilities by self organization of personal resources and deployment of response strategy in addressing job related issues. It is the process of integration of a person and a role in fulfilling the needs of individual through which individual is in turn able to contribute to the organization. Studies have shown that the effectiveness of a person's role in an organization depends significantly on the person’s potential effectiveness and the organizational climate and culture. Thus, role efficacy is psychological factor underlying role effectiveness (Shankar & Bhatnagar, 2010).

Emotional Intelligence

It is the sum of emotional as well as social competences of an individual to cope with environmental and social pressure forces. Emotional intelligence is developed overtime and can be increased significantly by a different sort of training programs (Shankar & Bhatnagar, 2010). Goleman described emotional intelligence as the capacity of individual to monitor her own feelings and of others too. She should be able to discriminate between various types of emotions and then implement her actions using the information she gathered. Thus, it includes the capacity to perceive and compare emotions, understand the situation that caused such emotions and then handle the problems. Emotional intelligence measures the ability, capacity and skill. It is a self perception of ability of identification, assessment, management and control of feelings (Shankar & Bhatnagar, 2010).

Employer Efforts

In the current environment, women workforce is perceived to deviate from organizational commitment due to challenging factors like life conflict, turnover intentions, stress and absenteeism. Despite having suitable prerequisite qualifications and experience, the organizational culture tends to undermine their performance by ignoring the tensions between personal role and work role (Shankar & Bhatnagar, 2010). Landsman has presented his work on the role of employers in providing optimal facilities for women to balance work and personal life. On-site child care or referral to such services can improve women turnover as well as absenteeism. When encouraged by employers through these efforts, women develop more willingness to work even extra hours. Employers can offer take home dinners and family friendly packages to women in order to minimize stress of a career oriented woman. Family friendly practices include flextime or extended parental leaves (Hochchild, 1997). In recent times, flexible work hours, job sharing roles, telecommunicating, work from home, better leaves provision are also seem to be practiced by many employers. All these measure can help a female in achieving work life balance by reducing conflicts (Jyothi & Jyothi, 2012). Apart from the above mentioned offerings, employers should promote a supportive culture that increases employee’s utilization of work life benefits. Employers can extend the benefit of leaves beyond predefined number depending on the need. This is very valuable to encourage females in continuing their careers despite dual responsibilities. Female employees frequently find that taking more leaves results in fewer promotions. Despite supportive corporate culture, female employees also find that they are offered fewer promotions due to late sitting environment of the organization. Such environment undervalues their performance if they utilize work life programs to give more time to their families. The measures that an employer can take include the following.
Job safety in case of an unforeseen event
Rewards for commitment and distinction • Job promotion • Flexible working hours • Training and development • Shared job • Horizontal communication • Involvement and bargaining • Relating motivation and leadership • Pay increase according to economy • Childcare benefit • Occupational therapy • Career Counseling of Women (Hayman, 2005).

Women who face constant difficulty in achieving balance in personal life and work can approach the counseling services. The strategies of therapies provided by such services greatly help women in promoting their role in both domains (Gordon & Berry, 2006). They are more aware of their capabilities to make optimal choices according to their roles in occupational, familial and social structures. The professional counselors are knowledgeable about gender effects on human development, and they can apply this knowledge in career counseling in the right direction. Through effective counseling, women can learn that career choice is completely open process. They can continue to work irrespective of gender or cultural differences. Counselors are also knowledgeable about the support services that women require to achieve balance in life. They can assist women in accessing community resources according to need of women. Counselors can also act as a catalyst for community initiatives to develop such support services if they see a significant gap (Hewleu & Luce, 2005). Counselors can also play a vital role in enhancing social, biological and psychological influences on females in general and in career development. They are able to continuously update their knowledge acquired through different situations. Career counseling helps in assessing the impact of different decisions like vocational and family roles, training in nontraditional occupations, dealing with culturally different people and female offenders. Through proper counseling, female can learn that the difficulties in her life are situational and cultural (Cieri, et.al, 2005).

Conclusion

Today we see women working in almost all types of professions demonstrating that there is no gender difference in work. In fact, many organizations say that women are playing a main role in uplifting the organization. This is a positive development that women are making their presence felt in different walks of life. On the other hand, for every woman there is one more background to manage. That is home and personal life (Hochchild, 1997). Today with increasing demands at work place, the interface between work life and personal life assumed significance which demands more attention. Different factors affect work –life balance and one set of factors could be demographic variables. Others can be self efficacy and emotional intelligence (Jyothi & Jyothi, 2012). Employers need to take corrective measures in order to increase motivation of women workforce. They should design better flexible programs offering policies regarding family benefits.

References

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