Exploring the Work-life Balance Issue: From Legislation to Lived Experience

1. Exploring the Work-life Balance Issue: From Legislation to Lived Experience Louise Wattis Liverpool JMU

2. Combining Work and Family Life: Removing the Barriers to Women’s Progression • To assess the impact of UK‘family-friendly’ policy/workplace flexibility. • Awareness; availability; take-up; attitudes. • Potential to alleviate the ‘work-care’ conflict for women; alleviate the ‘childcare barrier’. • To investigate the ‘lived experience’ of work-life balance for women. • Explore the ways in which childcare persists as a barrier to employment progression.

3. Work-Life Balance/Work-Care Conflicts • Post-industrial labour markets • Growth in women’s employment • Crisis of care (Fraser, 1994) • Rise in ‘one and a half earner’ families • Women’s labour market inequality • Long hours cultures • Inadequate childcare provision

4. The European Context • 1992 Pregnant Worker Directive • 1996 Parental Leave Directive • 1992 Childcare Recommendations • 1997 Part-Time Work Directive • 2000 Resolution of the Council and the Ministers for Employment and Social Policy on Balanced Participation in Work and Family Life

5. 1998 European Commission Report, Reconciliation Between Work and Family Life in Europe. • Care and work reconciliation problematic • Reinforces traditional gender roles • Parental leave and care need development • Different models of family policy in the EU • Highly structured and legitimated – Nordic countries and France • Under resourced and lacking legitimation (Southern European, and Central and Eastern European countries. • Supportive rhetoric (UK, Ireland, Germany)

6. European Gender Cultural Models • The Male Breadwinner Model – UK and Germany. • The Dual Breadwinner/State Carer Model – Scandinavia, France. • The Dual Breadwinner/Dual Carer Model – The Netherlands. • The Dual Earner/Marketised Carer Model – UK and USA

7. UK Policy and Legislation post-1997 • National Childcare Strategy • Parental Leave • Time-off for Dependants • Work-life Balance Campaign – Changing Patterns in a Changing World (DfEE, 2000) • Employment Act (2001) • Flexible Working Request • Improved Manernity Rights • Paid Paternity Leave

8. Reveals low levels of take-up, awareness and availability. • At odds with the ‘market’ (Glass and Estes, 1997). • Improved employee performance (Dex and Smith, 2002). • Inconsistent availability of flexibility (Crompton et al. 2003). • Discrimination against pregnant women (EOC, 2004) Do not tackle the incidence of ‘crisis’ circumstances (e.g. illness and limited access to transport) which generate difficulties for combining caring and working, nor do they reflect how needs change over time as children grow and parents move in and out of the labour market. (McKie et al. 2002: 889)

9. Women, care and paid employment • The gendered nature of care • Part-time working • 69 per cent of mothers - children under 5; 62 per cent of mothers - children under 16 (WEU, 2004) • Women’s labour market inequality • Pay gap – 19 per cent (EOC, 2003) • Occupational segregation • Women’s care and work ‘choices’. • Women ‘choose’ work or care; part-time working demonstrates a low commitment to paid employment (Hakim, 1995, 1996).

10. The unpalatable truth is that a substantial proportion of women still accept the sexual division of labour which sees homemaking as women’s principal activity and income-earning as men’s principal activity in life. The acceptance of differentiated sex roles underlines fundamental differences between the work orientations, labour market behaviour and life goals of men and women. (Hakim, 1996: 179) Women’s employment behaviour is a reflection of the way in which women actively construct their work-life biographies in terms of their historically available opportunities and constraints. (Crompton and Harris, 1998: 119)

11. Themes From the Data • Preliminary findings from twelve qualitative interviews • All of the women worked flexibly; • awareness of legislation was low; • the impact flexible working practices was varied. • Overall no real reconciliation of dual roles was achieved – both practically and emotionally • Denial of the interconnectedness between work and family (Taylor, 2002). • The pervasiveness of gender roles.

12. I worked there every night until about eleven, twelve, and sometimes two, three o’clock in the morning. If I got home at 9pm, I would have considered it early… There is no way I could do it. There is no way I could do it with Maddy. The problem with that is, any company that I have experience with, what happens is that they would take all the big projects away that I would be doing because they would see that as compromising it. So yes they might allow it, but at the same time you would really feel it on a work level, on a professional level…I mean there is no way they are going to allow somebody, I can really see the person that negotiates for that suffering because of it. Marianne, 35, 1: 4 (lone parent)

13. The hours are pretty set as in the core is 9-5, Monday to Friday, and that’s the hours I need to be there. However, if I need to come in later or leave earlier because it’s no a strict 9-5, they are pretty flexible and it’s up to me to manage my own time. I have objectives I need to meet – myself and the team. If they’re met, that’s fine you can be as flexible as you need it to be, but then you pull out all the stops if you need to…. And you know thinking about it in terms of the flexibility I’ve got with work, just the fact that I can do the things that I want to do. If I didn’t have that flexibility, I would think about going part-time. Katrina 38, Credit Policy Manager (ft). 1: 9.

14. On average I work 45, 50 hours. Sometimes more depending on a deadline and usually over the whole month you try and pan it out so you don’t do more than 50 hours in a week. And that’s flexible? Completely. I work from home. Today I’ve come in simply to meet with with some person and you. I didn’t have to be here today. Tomorrow I do, I’ve got meetings scheduled, but if I couldn’t make the meetings I can dial in on teleconference. I plan my own week. But that is just as a consultant, in my previous role I had to, I covered the office. Aileen, 41, Service Management Consultant (ft). 2: 3; 5.

15. Because I have done the right thing by my children. And working the hours I do, I pick them up after school, they don’t know what I do during the day, so that’s fine. When I worked full-time and somebody else picked them up, the nanny picked them up, they managed, they coped, and they were fine. I quite enjoyed it cos I would get home and the tea would have been cooked and the children were sorted out and I didn’t have to wash out the lunch boxes. But I think I missed some of their issues. Jane 47, HR Manager (pt). 2: 10; 7. I am not going anywhere. Because I have been discussing with my career manager today and they said ‘what are your aspirations?’ And I said ‘I haven’t got any’. It suits me quite happily to do my part-time hours. I like the job I am doing, it fits in well with my home life, and I think that I have a good work-life balance to be honest. Lily, 34, Computer Programmer, IT support (pt). 2: 3; 4.

16. When I didn’t work on a Friday they’d still ring me up and ask questions that I think could have waited and I think they make you have a certain amount of guilt because you are not there. And then we have a juggle. I have him Mondays, a friend of mine picks him up two days, the other two days I pick him up at lunchtime. I don’t even have a lunch but I get out, and go and take him to a friend, Claire, I drop him over in the car park at work and she takes him home to play in the afternoon. Wendy, 40, Assistant Analyst (pt). 2: 7: 3. I wish we could both work less hours. It’s very tiring. Sometimes you just feel like it’s one lifelong struggle and you only sit down to say hello to each other on a Saturday night because we’re alternating. In the week you don’t get that much time. Aileen 41. 2: 5; 3.

17. ` You see when I leave work my heart is in my mouth, until I have got Teddy in my hands. I’m in the car and I’m driving and I am looking at the clock and I am thinking am I prepared for you know, and if I get stuck in a traffic jam, I thinking what’s going on, what’s going on, what time is it? My heart is in my mouth for like 25 minutes. Lisa 33, Engineer (ft). 1: 2. Lone parent. We do always feel we are sort of juggling the next six months. You know sort of constantly the arrangements just to sort of cope… But there are times you know when it falls apart. Like in a couple of weeks time I am running a workshop in Chester, which is like a three hour drive, all day. And my husband is away on a training course. And I am thinking how are we going to work that one out? It’s hard. So it’s constant juggling. Renee 50, Business Analyst (pt). 2: 11; 13.

18. Well to be perfectly honest with you, sometimes I feel like I’m sort of short-changing her you know. And well it’s the same with everything, sometimes I feel I do bits of everything…Bits of my job and bits of being a mum and then sort of trying to fit in being a wife at the end of it…I mean she says sometimes when she’s tired you know ‘oh mummy I wish you were there to take me to school every day and then I feel awful. Katrina, 38. 1: 9. Like the other day one of my sons got up early and he said ‘will you get my yoghurt mummy, daddy always gets it?’ And I was ‘I shouldn’t be going to work’. So sometimes there is that awful feeling that I should be at home. Lily, 34. 2: 3: 4. I feel guilty about the kids when I am at work and I feel guilty about my work when I am home Genevieve, 47. 3: 12; 8; 5.

19. I enjoy the job I am doing in the sense you’ve got to be doing you like to do. Because I would much rather be at home looking after my little girl than sending her off for someone else to look after. And I think there is a lot of guilt around it as well – you do feel guilty going to work. I leave late in the morning, my partner takes my daughter to my sister-in-law’s, and some mornings she has little tears in her eyes as I’m waving her off and I think ‘Oh God, I have to go to work and leave you’. And I know she’s when she gets there, but it’s just that you do feel guilty. Have I had a child to give her away to somebody else and get them to look after them? Judith, 38, 1: 2

20. I think they do have family-friendly policies but I also think that they’d rather … if I was late I’d probably say it was because my washing machine had broken down for example, rather than my daughter wouldn’t put her tights on. You know that sort of thing, because I personally feel sometimes and you know my boss is lovely but it’s just that sort of personal detail that intrudes into the work environment that really sometimes they are not too interested in really. Speaking quite frankly, it’s probably not that interesting or understandable unless you’re a parent. Katrina, 38. 1: 9. I think you need a huge amount of strength to carve out the boundaries between work and home, and to get both things working quite well. Because there is a lot of tension. Genevieve, 47, 3: 12; 8; 5

21. Reconciling paid work and family life’ means more than the increasing opportunities at work agenda, it instead implies a redistribution of work and status between women and men, that is changing the gender contract. (Duncan, 2002: 307) The attempt to differentiate work from life in public policy making threatens to establish a false dichotomy between the two that obfuscates our attitude to the changing world of paid employment. We need to demystify what we are talking about if we hope to establish a sensible and realistic public policy agenda that can reconcile the conflicting pressures of the workplace and the home. (Taylor, 2002: 7)