Maintaining Work-life Balance of Women in Education

Today women of all ages and backgrounds are part of every aspect of higher education. They comprise the majority of undergraduate students and represents significant numbers of postgraduate students, faculty members, and educational administrators. Women are found in every discipline, even though historically reserved for men, such as engineering and medicine. Women in education sector are part of every type of institutions, including elite public and private colleges and research universities. Women are better represented among the faculty and leadership of the institutions. Similarly, women hold full professors positions, associate professors, assistant professors and also as dean of the institutions. Along with the work-related factors women faculty often remark on the greater responsibilities that women shoulder for family care, including care of both children and aging parents. Many reports pointing out those women face equal responsibilities of professional life and family life. Women’s contributions to the family and career highly depend on their managing capability of work-life balance.

Happiness can be presumed as a little separation as possible between the work and play. In the context, the expression "work-life balance" was first expressed in the 1970’s in the UK and 1980’s in the US (Burke Peter 1995). In India, the concept of work-life balance has first expressed in 1978 (Ragavan 1978). work-life conflict (Kahn et al., 1964), has defined as the role conflict as the “simultaneous occurrence of two or more sets of pressures such that compliance with one would make more difficult compliance with the other”. Greenhaus and Beutell (1985) based on the work of Kahn et al. (1964), defined work-family conflict as: “A form of inter-role conflict in which the role pressures from work and family domains are mutually incompatible in some respect. That is, participation in the work-family role is made more difficult by virtue of participation in the family -work role.”

The conflict between work and family has been found to be bi-directional and should be seen less as competing priorities than as complementary elements of full life. Indian constitution establishes enactment of laws to protect and promotes the interest of women to develop them and protect them from discriminations based on gender. For a longer period of time, the teaching profession is the most preferred one for women in India, especially in semi-urban and rural areas the teaching professions fulfill the employment opportunity of unemployed graduate women. Greenhaus and Beutell (1985) found the differential the sources of inter-role conflict associated with conflicting work and family roles. There are three sources of conflict namely. Time-based conflict, strain conflict, and behavior based conflict. Time-based conflicts occur when various role pressures complete for an individual time. Strain-based conflict occurs when stress symptoms created by one role make it difficult to comply with the pressures of another role or affect individual performance in a different role. Behavior-based conflict refers to patterns of behavior associated with one role that is incompatible with patterns of behavior linked with the different role.

Employees who perceived that their organization offered a supportive environment reported a lower level of depression, anxiety, concern for their health and work-personal life conflict. Dora Scholarios, Abigail Marks (2004) examined the impact of employer flexibility on work-life issues and negative spillover from work to non-work life on the attitudes of software developers. The result shows that the intrusion of work into private life for this group of workers still has a substantial impact on work-related attitudes. Work life boundary variables affect trust in the organization which played a mediation role in these variables related to job satisfaction and organizational commitment.

Employees in the software industry are relatively individualistic in orientation, unlikely to show attachment to a single organization mutual gain for employee and employer and accommodating approach to non-work commitments lead to improved organizational attachment. Mutually leads to the more positive perception of work-life balance and organizational commitment. Fisher (1994) found that academics experienced more problems in maintaining effective work-life balance than other professionals, as their profession incorporates a wide range of responsibilities with potentially challenging demands. Most academics surveys supported that their work produced a strain that made it difficult for them to fulfill their family and social obligations. Work and family role strain reduces worker’s productivity and increases turnover and absenteeism of the employees. More importantly, the majority of academics felt dissatisfaction with their institutions and complained that their institutes do little to help employees to achieve a fair balance between their work and family lives. Its is also found that Work-Family Conflict and Family Work Conflict is associated with negative outcomes including increased physical strain, job dissatisfaction, life dissatisfaction, burnout, emotional exhaustion, job tension, and intention-to-leave the teaching profession.

Alternatively, work-life balance practice has been set up to energize employees, both male and female, in altering their outstanding weight and family strains. Frye and Breaugh (2004) perceived a negative association between impression of the supportiveness of various leveled work-life practices and work-life conflict. Correspondingly, different examinations found that the usage of versatile working hours was connected with lower measurements of work-life conflicts. In addition, managerial support and organization’s work-life climate could moderate the correlation between work-life balance practices provision.

Luce and Murray (1998) found that new requirements at academic jobs have brought an increased workload. Professional lives characterized by more and more challenges, frequently changing the assignment, work and time schedules, job insecurity and frequent relocations are some of the factors which cause work life strain. Most of the faculty new to the campus report that they feel isolated, and they are often besieged due to unclear expectations and heavy workloads. Anderson D.M, Morgan B.L and Wilson J.B (2002) University employees’ reports higher dissatisfaction with work-family conflicts than corporate employees, which leads to stress and cause harm to the physiological well-being of the employees. This affects the job performance negatively, whenever the conflicts arise between work life and personal life among university employees, it also affects the quality of higher education. Cinamon & Rich (2005) in his study entitled work-family conflict among female teachers finds various occupational-related demands among teachers have been found to increase conflict between work and family. Employment hours have been consistently and positively associated with WFC However, research by found that stressors specific to teaching (i.e., class size, number of students with special needs, teachers’ investment in student misbehavior and teachers’ investment in relationships with student’s parents) explained more variance in WFC than did generic work stressors such as the number of hours worked. They found that greater investment in students’ misbehavior and in students’ parents increased their WFC.

Gunter et al. (2005) explained several characteristics of the teaching profession make the conflict between work and family among teachers an important issue to study. Some unique characteristics of the teaching profession may contribute to teacher stress. Excessive workload and role overload are commonly reported as a source of stress among teachers working hour for female doctors. This study concludes the home domain aspect has influenced not only female but also the male specialist in the preference of their career focus. Wesley and Muthuswamy (2005) in a study of teachers in an engineering college at Coimbatore in India, found that work to the family conflict was more prevalent than family to work conflict, thus indicating that permeability of work into the family was more than the permeability of family into work. The main objective of the study is to analyze the work-life conflict of women faculty and to know about the organizational support to overcome this issue. The limitation is time and area confined. In this study, the descriptive research design is applied. Both primary and secondary data are used as sources of data for this proposed study.

The questionnaire is an instrument used to collect the primary data. Tiruvannamalai, Villupuram and Vellore Districts are the study area and women faculties of higher educational institutions in the above-mentioned districts are sample unit of the study. The sample size was 500 and Stratified Random sampling technique is adopted for this study. The results show that the women faculties are always experiencing that emotionally drained when they get home from work, their personal demands interfering with their work and family life interfering with their work, while they are also often experiencing that their commitment to their job inhibiting their leisure activities and difficulty in coping with conflicting demands between work life and home life. Besides, they are frequently experiencing that work having a positive impact upon my home life and getting home from work and feeling unable to switch off and relax and they are also sometimes experiencing that they have enough time for themselves and wishing they had more time to do things with the family.

The F- the value of 4.154 is significant at one percent level indicating that there is a significant difference between the marital status of the women faculties in Higher Educational Institutions and work-life conflict. Hence, the alternate hypothesis of there is no significant difference between marital status and work-life conflict. It is apparent that about 48.40 percent of women faculties face the strain-based conflict followed by time-based conflict (29.80 percent) and behavior based conflict (21.80 percent). It reveals that the most of women faculties face the strain-based conflict. The results show that about 43.80 percent of women faculties experience the work-life conflict weekly followed by monthly (33.00 percent), daily (15.60 percent) and yearly (7.60 percent). It is inferred that the majority of women faculties experience the work-life conflict weekly.

To conclude, work-life balance is a state of equilibrium in which the demand of both professional and personal life is equal. The concern over work-life balance is gradually becoming a common talk. Especially for women employee. Each role having different set of demands and when such role demands overlap, multiple problems are faced. In reality life and work over-lap and interact. In designing the work life policies, employer should think that the commitment of employees can make the difference between those companies which compete at the marketplace and those which cannot. A balanced life for women is one where they spread their energy and effort between key areas of importance.

Additionally it is mportant to have a supportive family to help the women to build their careers in a leadership role, as the balance of work-life along with the responsibilities of the home is difficult without their cooperation. I comprehend that the family should understand women’s limitations and always encourage them to do the best in their leadership roles