Women Academics and Work–Life Balance: Gendered Discourses of Work and Care

This article examines how discourses of work–life balance are appropriated and used by women academics. Using data collected from semi-structured, single person interviews with 31 scholars at an Australian university, it identifies and explores four ways in which participants construct their relationship to work–life balance as: (1) a personal management task; (2) an impossible ideal; (3) detrimental to their careers; and (4) unmentionable at work. Findings reveal that female academics' ways of speaking about work–life balance respond to gendered attitudes about paid work and unpaid care that predominate in Australian socio-cultural life. By taking a discursive approach to analysing work–life balance, our research makes a unique contribution to the literature by drawing attention to the power of work–life balance discourses in shaping how women configure their attempts to create a work–life balance, and how it functions to position academic women as failing to manage this balance.