WORK LIFE BALANCE CHALLENGES FOR WOMEN IN DEMANDING PROFESSIONS

Authored By : JAIN DIVYA LALIT 

ABSTRACT

Working women's roles have shifted across the world as a result of changing economic and social situations. As a result, professional women are under immense pressure to establish a career as substantial as their male counterparts while maintaining active involvement in home life. Working women are feeling the effects of growing job pressure, leaving them with less time for themselves. In today's society, the idea of "work-life balance" is regarded as one of the most important problems influencing organisational performance. Work-life balance, however, is viewed differently in different societies. A female employee has more difficulty balancing work and life than a male employee; this study focuses on women working in various areas. According to the study, the main reasons why female employees struggle to maintain a work-life balance are long working hours, job rigidity, work overload, responsibilities related to child care, discrimination and bias at work, a lack of supervisory support, a dominant managerial style, and a scarcity of family support.

 

INTRODUCTION 

Working women have to maintain a balance between job and family life. Men were previously believed to be breadwinners and women were thought to be housewives, but that has all changed.Work and family responsibilities are shared equally by men and women. Women must plan their careers carefully in order to manage work and family life. Work-life balance refers to practises that aim to strike a balance between the demands of an employee's personal and professional lives. Work obligations and pressures make it tough to find time to balance work and life activities. Women who take on work-life balancing problems contribute to women's success. A good work-family balance includes working women setting priorities, being aware of their current working situation and environment, keeping up with the latest technology, planning their schedule so that they have enough time to spend with their families, monitoring their own performance, and improving areas where necessary. Work-Life Integration Work-family balance is the art of properly managing both the work and family domains. Work-family balance implies that work should not interfere with other vital aspects of people's life, such as quality time with their families, leisure time or recreational activities, personal growth, and so on. Balancing these two jobs equally will not result in work-life balance, nor will allocating an equal amount of hours to each position result in work-family balance. The balance that is acceptable now may be improper tomorrow. The perfect balance in a person's life may alter depending on the stage of life, for example, before marriage, after marriage, with children, while starting a profession, or after retirement. To summarise, there is no one-size-fits-all solution or picture-perfect work-life balance. Furthermore, both men and women have experienced increased job pressure in recent decades. Work-related problems have resulted in excessive stress and tension among employees. As a result, work pressures dominate family life, resulting in work-family imbalance. 

In order to be successful in both the roles, women try to organise and balance their work and family domains, for which a great deal of adjustment and accommodation is required. Work-family issues have been a major concern among academics during the last two decades as a result of substantial changes in the labour force, such as the entry of an increasing number of women into the labour market and the prevalence of dual-earner and single-parent households.

ISSUES RELATED TO FAMILY

Studies have also pointed to social conditioning beginning in childhood as being responsible for women's secondary status in Indian society, making it difficult for them to break the norms of traditional roles despite being educated or earning significantly. Second, the prevalence of male attitudes known as male chauvinism is also responsible for women's secondary standing. Furthermore, patriarchal families that prioritised men's interests were viewed as having a significant impact on women's access to educational and job opportunities. Changes in the form and roles of the family in India have resulted in changes in marriage systems, inheritance, and succession practises, according to studies. In Indian society, gender inequality and occupational segregation are still pervasive. Despite notable advancements in education and career, women's successes remain significantly inferior, and they are observed in the bottom tiers of the employment hierarchy. Furthermore, women are frequently paid less for the same tasks as males. These variables point to the persistence of gendered household roles, which eventually reinforces the sexual division of labour.

Another research in India gathered the perspectives of women in dual-earner households on work-life balance characteristics and the sort of assistance they needed from their employers. According to the findings of the study, policies developed by organisations to support flexible work arrangements had a favourable link with work-life balance as viewed by working women. Time flexibility was cited by female employees as one of the most essential considerations in managing work and family life. Factors such as the ability to interrupt office work to attend to family matters and then return to work, the ability to partially work from home, the ability to make a convenient work schedule arrangement, the ability to avail leave when needed, child-care provisions as well as elder-care facilities, and so on influenced their perception.

The majority of respondents stated that they expected their organisations to help them and allow them to attend courses or training programmes to improve their knowledge and abilities. The survey also indicated that receiving organisational assistance is critical in both discovering career possibilities and establishing a good work-life balance. Respondents answered that they would prefer spend more time completing family duties than satisfying job expectations, indicating that women place a higher value on their home life. Respondents, on the other hand, stated that they would work just as hard to balance job and family life.

In the case of married and unmarried females, there was a considerable difference in inter-role distance (i.e. conflict between organisational and familial duties, with specific reference to dual career families). Inter-role conflict was predicted to be reduced when at least one family member stayed at home to care for the family. Married women were more likely to encounter role expectation conflicts than unmarried women because they reacted to a larger number of significant people (i.e. competing expectations and demands from diverse role senders). Married women reported more stress as a result of role overload, meaning that too much is expected from roles they can handle. Furthermore, the most powerful stressor discovered is resource insufficiency, which refers to the lack of resources necessary for improved job performance.

WORK-RELATED PROBLEMS 

Women all around the world confront challenges and impediments in order to get to top levels in executive roles. According to the International Labour Organization's 2001 report titled "Breaking Through the Glass Ceiling: Women in Management," women in the United States had made more progress than women in other countries, despite holding only a small percentage of executive positions. Some of the themes addressed in the research were the changing roles of women in business and government in over 70 countries, ways to increase possibilities for women by emphasising the barriers they experience in their professional growth, and promoting gender equality.

Several studies on IT professionals in India have been undertaken in recent years. According to one study, there is a direct proportionate link between work-life balance and working hours. The data found that women who worked longer hours were more likely to suffer conflict than female employees who worked for a shorter amount of hours. Thus, there was a significant difference in the work-life conflict between women who worked eight hours per day and women who worked ten hours per day.

Work-Family Conflict: Work-life balance is the preservation of a balance between duties at work and responsibilities at home. Work and family have become more antagonistic realms, both hungry of energy and time and accountable for work-family conflict. The "cultural contradictions of motherhood" exacerbate these conflicts, as women are increasingly encouraged to seek self-fulfillment in demanding careers; they also face increased pressures to sacrifice themselves for their children by providing "intensive parenting," or highly involved childrearing and development. Other issues that employed women encounter include obtaining enough, affordable access to child and geriatric care.

Family-job Conflict: A sort of inter-role conflict in which family and job obligations are incompatible, is family-work conflict (FWC). Family-work conflict is more likely to have a negative impact on the home domain, leading to poorer life satisfaction and more internal conflict within the family unit. However, family-work conflict is linked to views about the job or workplace. Family-work conflict arises from an individual attempting to fulfil an excess of competing expectations from the several realms in which women operate.

Work-Family Balance: Atypical professions might be an alternative to standard employment. Part-time employment, for example, has been suggested as a technique of balancing work and family life. It is worth mentioning, however, that many employees do not choose to work part-time. Part-time workers, as previously reported, are more likely to be women, but more investigation suggests that they do not work part-time on purpose. Atypical job might represent another piece in the family organisation puzzle for parents attempting to combine family life and professional life. The search for day-care in a situation where the number of available spots is severely limited is extremely difficult, and it is one of the main worries of parents who face this every day.

Lack of Time: The difficulty of integrating work and family life leads to a greater level of stress, which is associated, among other things, to a sense of not having enough time. This is especially true for parents and single moms between the ages of 25 and 44 who work full-time. Work Stress: Work-related stress, the stress of raising children, the stressors associated with ageing parents -- any of these scenarios might cause relatively high levels of stress. When women are juggling numerous responsibilities, many of which have high expectations, they experience high levels of stress, which can lead to health problems, missed work, and a lessened capacity to take on more. Women are natural multitaskers who enfold activities inside tasks.

The following are the most typical reasons of female workplace stress: 

· Unreasonable performance expectations

· Absence of interpersonal connection between the employer and the workers

· Employees' interpersonal interactions are lacking. 

· The concern about losing one's employment 

· Working hours that are excessive  

· Spending time with family has decreased..  

· It is more difficult to reconcile work and family commitments.  

· Inferior to their male colleagues 

· Considering women's work to be inferior

Employees' family-related concerns include complaints and issues linked to their duties as parents, spouses, and other positions in the family such as daughter/son or daughter/son-in-law, among other things. Parenting issues: The difficulties they experience as parents in maintaining a work-life balance. In the current study, some of the most common challenges faced by employees are getting children ready for school before work, leaving and picking up kids who attend school, and not being able to be patient after work to listen to "stories" that their children want to share with them about their school, teachers, and friends. Some parents note that balancing is difficult when they need to meet with their children's instructors or cater to academic demands.

Marital problems: They struggle to maintain a work-life balance as a partner, whether they are a husband or a wife. Spending time with and providing time to one's partner becomes critical. The few prevalent difficulties were that a few men reported their working spouses not being pleased no matter how much they contributed in the family. Many employees said that their spouse's schedule, such as the inter-country calls they make at night, makes it difficult for them to have dinner together and spend quality time together. Many employees stated that it was either they or their.

Dual Responsibility: The biggest issues for working spouses stem from working women's dual obligations of housework and office job. Even if women's employment is allowed, the majority of her in-laws and spouses have not accepted the new living pattern. They are unwilling to share home tasks or responsibility for children. These are still believed to be solely the spouses' responsibilities.

ORGANISATIONAL ROLE IN WORK-LIFE ISSUES

Organisations throughout cultures are known to apply different work-life balancing practises that are good in decreasing work-life difficulties while also allowing employees to be more productive at work and in performing diverse tasks. Organisations are under growing pressure to develop various types of practises that will aid employees in fulfilling their personal and professional obligations. Organisations have implemented a number of work-life balance initiatives to help employees efficiently balance their work and family responsibilities. These policies include flexible working hours, part-time work, job-sharing, compressed work weeks, telecommuting, parental leave, and on-site child-care facilities.

Organisations, on the other hand, are likely to have their own motivations for implementing diverse work-life practises. First, to improve female employees' work-life balance practises and capacity utilisation; second, to keep employees motivated and performing well; third, to make the organisation more appealing to employees; and finally, to have a better corporate social responsibility (Lazar et al, 2010). Job satisfaction, organisational commitment, turnover intention, and job stress are all factors that influence employees' attitudes and perceptions when work-life balance practises are implemented. However, these elements have an impact on work performance, absence costs, customer happiness, and organisational productivity.

RECOMENDATIONS

Policies and legislation cannot improve the situation or alleviate the problems faced by women at work and at home; people's attitudes and levels of acceptability must be addressed. Women must be self-confident and aware of their rights in order to tackle and overcome these problems successfully. Allowing women to work outside the house in many areas not only demonstrates that our culture treats men and women equally, but it also demonstrates that workplace difficulties caused by gender discrimination can be readily controlled and remedied. We shall be able to claim proudly that women and men are treated equally in society when we are able to provide a better and more favourable workplace for female employees. There are various laws and policies in place to secure women's safety at work, but owing to a lack of knowledge and adequate execution, none of them are effective in protecting women from harassment, gender prejudice, and gender inequity in the workplace and at home.

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