FINDING BALANCE
For working women, study finds flexible hours magnify sense of balance
Canadian women who have flexible work schedules are 75 per cent more likely to report a healthy balance between their professional and family lives than those who don’t, according to a new University of Manitoba study.
The findings come at a time when such high-profile companies as Best Buy and Yahoo are under fire for restricting, or altogether eliminating, flexible work arrangements — an approach the data suggest could have ill effects for everything from absenteeism to retention.
“This research shows that a bit of autonomy — a sense of being able to control your day, to a certain degree — leads to happier employees,” said study co-author Rachael Pettigrew. “And happier employees are less likely to leave the organization.”
In the study, which draws on Statistics Canada’s General Social Survey, people were asked whether they were satisfied, or not, with their worklife balance. The researchers examined the effect of different work arrangements on this satisfaction while controlling for possible confounding factors (family characteristics, income, education, etc.).
For instance, women with flexible schedules scored .75 above baseline — that is, all other things being equal, they were that much more likely to report a positive balance — while for men it was just .11, a score that wasn’t statistically significant.
Study co-author Karen Duncan suggests this is because women remain primary caregivers in most households, and are thus tasked with the most juggling: Although 82 per cent of Canadian women are represented in the labour force — just nine percentage points less than men — they average 4.3 hours of unpaid work per day, compared with men’s 2.7.
“The majority of (twoparent) families now are dualearner, yet our society is still structured on the assumption that we all have somebody at home taking care of everything,” said Duncan, associate professor of family social sciences. “So for women, it’s not surprising that flexibility is the key.”
For men, shift work and selfemployment were the biggest roadblocks: They decreased the odds of reported work-life satisfaction by almost half (45 per cent and 48 per cent, respectively).
Love of one’s work, however, proved highly important to both genders: Women who enjoyed their jobs were more than eight times likelier to per- ceive their lives as balanced, while men who enjoyed their jobs were six times more likely to think so.
“We tend not to compartmentalize our thinking about our lives. If things are going well at work, that’s going to affect how we see other aspects of our life,” explained Duncan.
Edmonton’s Liza Sunley, mother to a 10-year-old, says it’s indeed a circular relationship: Her job’s flexible hours help her navigate her family life, and her strong grasp on her family life allows her to better focus while she’s at work.
“I feel like I haven’t left my career behind, but that I’m still contributing to our family,” said Sunley, an injury prevention consultant. “I can do both jobs better.”
Vancouver’s Audrey Brashich, who has a four-yearold and a six-year-old, says her career as an author wouldn’t be possible were it not for being able to set her own hours.
“No matter how many articles I’d read on work-life balance and how challenging it can be, it all sort of fell on deaf ears until I had children,” said Brashich, whose husband doesn’t get home until eight or nine at night.
“If we hired someone to do all of (my domestic work) during the day, we certainly wouldn’t expect her to then go be a professional writer at night. And yet, that’s what I expect of myself.”