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European J. International Management, Vol. 2, No. 1, 2008 71

Copyright © 2008 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.

Work-life balance: working for whom?

Caroline J. Gatrell* Management Learning and Leadership, Lancaster University, Management School, UK E-mail: [email protected] *Corresponding author

Cary L. Cooper Management School, Lancaster University, UK E-mail: [email protected]

Abstract: Work-life balance policies are important in relation to employee stress levels. This paper examines work-life balance and �exibility through the dual lens of gender and the body. The paper observes how notions of ‘�exibility’ are applied di�erently to mothers and fathers. We observe how social expectations about professionally employed mothers and fathers, and work-life balance, are gendered. Men may thus be discouraged from working �exibly, 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; �exible working; mothers; fathers; the body; gender; policy.

Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Gatrell, C.J. and Cooper, C.L. (2008) ‘Work-life balance: working for whom?’, EuropeanJ. 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 papers and books, the Editor of the Blackwell Encyclopedia of Management (13 volumes), Editor of the Who’s Who in the Management Sciences and Founding Editor of the Journal of Organizational Behaviour. He was awarded the CBE by the Queen in 2001 for his contribution to organisational health.

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 Limitedwww.inderscience.com/ejim

72 C.J. Gatrell and C.L. Cooper

1 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


(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 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’


(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


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


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


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


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


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


“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


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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