Tipping the Scales: Talking About Women in Science and Work-Life Balance

1. Institute of Sociology of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic Tipping the Scales: Talking About Women in Science and Work-Life Balance James Moir, University of Abertay Dundee Science Policies Meet Reality: Gender, Women and Youth in Science in Central and Eastern Europe 1-2 December, Prague, Czech Republic

2. Introduction • How is WLB essentialized for women in science as a ‘problem’ to be overcome in terms of working towards and achieving an optimum balance?

3. Previous Research • Wennerås & Wold (1997) Study of research funding by the Swedish Medical Research Council. • Research awards: women had to be over twice as productive as their male counterparts to be as successful in securing financial support.

4. European Union set up a 'Women and Science' sector to gather statistics and create a network for women in these fields with the aim of monitoring and improving matters. • In parallel with this there has been wider set of initiatives concerning work-life balance.

5. Voydanoff (2005) notes the complexity of balancing work and family demands. • Balancing translates into understanding the demands of both settings, the resources of both settings, the specific abilities of the individual parent or partner, and the fit between these aspects.

6. U.S. study Etzkowitz et al. (1994) Women are expected to follow a "male model" of academic success involving a total time commitment to scientific work and competitive relations with peers. • Two types of responses by women scientists to this:(1) those who follow the male model and expect other women to do so; and (2) those who attempt to delineate an alternative model, allowing for a balance between work and private spheres.

7. Problems with Equal Opportunities • Equal opportunities initiatives fail to get to the root of gender inequality and tackle the ways in which women have to fit the mould of male working patterns. • They do not address the gendered nature of current organizational practices and how women feel that they have little choice but to adopt such work practices (Liff and Cameron, 1997; Cockburn, 1991; Maier, 2000).

8. The argument that we are all individuals and are all have different circumstances effectively ensures that the pervasive male models of work are left unchallenged in the background. • In doing so a focus on diversity via gender-neutral discourse can actually absolve political and organizational responsibilities for tackling equal treatment and equal opportunity for women at work.

9. Discourse Analytic Studies Wetherell, Stiven & Potter (1987 • Supporting equal opportunities in principle positioned the speaker as liberal and fair-minded. • Talking about (external) practical employment issues (e.g. maternity cover, childcare, emotional unsuitability to stressful working environments) served to undermine this without any personal negative attribution to the speaker.

10. Smithson & Stokoe (2005) • A ‘gender-blind’ approach to talk about such issues through terms such as ‘flexibility’, ‘flexible working’ and ‘work–life balance’ were used to occlude inequality for women. • Exclusion of talk about men or fathers in managers’ accounts, and the construction of a ‘generic she’ or ‘generic female parent’ implicitly assumes that the mother, and not the father, is responsible for childcare.

11. A three-part ‘discursive sandwich’ embeds any talk of gender as problem within an overall gender-neutral account as follows:   Suggest gender is not an issue Describe a gender problem or inequality Conclude that gender is not an issue

12. Nentwich (2006) • Equal opportunity officers dealing with gender issues/introduction of equality legislation. • Arguing for sameness when talking about the vision for the future and differences when talking about what gender is or today’s problems is an ideological dilemma of everyday talk about gender.

13. Some Issues for Women in Science Principle versus Practice. • Discrepancy between the rhetoric of work-life balance and the contradictory and fluid rhetoric of everyday talk about women’s place in the world of work. • Assumes that the potential ‘audience’ for such family-friendly policy initiatives need to be informed about them to take them up.

14. Positive attitudes may be espoused but the discursive construction of these is set in opposition to ‘realities’ of the world of scientific work. • The former tends to be by definition abstract at the level of ‘thinking’ about these matters in principle whilst the latter is more local and bound up with actions and activities that constitute science.

15. Science is presented as pre-existing in a certain manner outlying any issue of equality for women and that this ‘reality’ needs to be communicated and ‘understood’ as such. • It also set up a possible contrast in terms of having such attitudes and opinions but being unable to act upon them due to the very nature of scientific practice (e.g. lab work) or the economic constraints of scientific funding.

16. 2. Scientist as “He”, Work-life Balance as “She” • Normative persona of the scientist as male and the deviation from this being female. • It is women who are positioned as the target of work-life balance policies and not men. • This does not pose a problem for men in science: they show support for such a position safe in the knowledge that it does not impact on them to nearly the same extent as women.

17. Engrained views on women as being responsible for childcare restricts their geographical mobility unlike men and in the world of academic science. • Etzkowitz et al. (1994) points out the net effect of this is that it leads to a pool of women scientists working in industry and lower down the academic ladder. • This maintains a role model of top scientists as male, given their assumed work-life balance ‘needs’.

18. 3. Personal Choice and Professional Role • The scientist role is cast according to the cannons of scientific practice. This creates a dichotomy between personal life and professional life and the notion that this tension requires some resolution. • The solution to this is offered in terms of a discourse of individual personal choice. • However this again ignores the extent to which professional role is often contractual and normatively presented as a given whilst personal life is not subject to the same legal-rational (Weber, 1978) authority.

19. This kind of gender-blind rhetoric may at first seem liberal and reasonable but can in fact serve to work against women. • It also presents the role of professional scientists as virtually immutable given that science is taken to be the very male model of the rational pursuit of object scientific knowledge that requires dedication to long hours of laboratory work.

20. Women are stereotypically portrayed as being more emotional than men, and in particular with regard to defining themselves and finding more contentment in terms of family life and having children. • As Wetherell et al. (1987) noted this is often rooted in a discourse of “maternal urges” and the notion that women derive a sense of emotional well-being from having children. • All of this adds up to the notion that women are less well suited to the rationalist nature required for a sustained career in science but that it is their personal choice tip the scales in favour of the ‘life’ side of the work-life balance equation.

21. 4. Same versus Different • Nentwich (2006) convincingly shows how people can switch between the ‘same-difference’ ends of the explanatory dualism when it comes to talking about equal opportunities in employment and the position of women. • Perhaps a playful point: in quantum physics indeterminacy has been embraced as a theoretical model.

22. Yet it may well be that those who work within this scientific field make use of indeterminate ‘same-‘difference explanations in accounting for why there are so few women working in this area and lack of any prospect for change. • The more serious point behind this is that discourse analytic work has drawn attention to the way in which this kind of explanation is ideological in that discourse is not fixed in terms of recurrent patterns of content and style.

23. Conclusions • We need to move away from a focus on personal work-life balance choices and decisions towards an understanding of how such matters become naturalised for women in science rather than men. • The normative scientist as “he” will remain in place and will not be changed through this discourse unless we are able to move beyond notions of work-life balance as personal concern.

24. We need to re-calibrate the work-life balance scales by first recognising the ways in which the normative male model of scientific work practice is held in place. • It is not that work-life balance is the problematic issue for women in science but rather the very ground upon which the scales stand: the scientist as “he” that is taken as the unquestioned foundation.