Pocock finds WoLFi out of WhAcK…
posted Monday, July 27th, 2009 at 2:07 pm
I have been following researcher Barbara Pocock’s work-life balance studies over the last 3 years with great interest. The latest study about to released shows some disturbing trends for women trying to juggle paid and unpaid work: Highlights include-
- work-life balance for many (particularly women) remains elusive
- Pocock questions whether ‘balance’ is the right word – personally I prefer WoLFi (work life family interconnectivity)
- only one in five employees feels brave enough to ask for greater flexibility at work
- And despite the growing popularity of arrangements including inclusive or equally shared parenting this finding:
If we control for differences in working hours, men’s work-life interference has not changed over the past three years, while women’s has worsened considerably…
Most interesting to me is that working less paid hours doesn’t necessarily mean more time to balance life. Pocock has found that part-time employed mothers are almost as ‘out of whack’ as their full-time counterparts – a trend that has worsened over the last 3 years. Why?
Everyone thinks that those two free days means you can run a house without help. So women tend not to purchase substitutes for their own time – they are much less likely to use a cleaner.
So is part-time work for mothers the solution to WoLFi woes? Or are there better/alternative solutions out there? Why are things getting worse and not better for working mothers?
Is not using a cleaner correlated with income? I mean, do people in part time work not use cleaners for financial reasons or do they not do it because if the don’t work full time they don’t feel they “deserve” that sort of help?
Personally, we use a cleaner and we probably really only work part time. It took a lot of stress and what amounts to a tantrum from me to make that decision. And it was partly made because I decided it made more sense to use a cleaner than put the kids in more day care, but it is pretty easy to still feel like it is an unjustified luxury.
Ariane said this on July 27th, 2009 at 3:40 pm