In today’s world, women have been stepping up to find a place in the workplace and have created their own significant identity; a role in the workplace, a role in the community and a role for themselves. About 20-25 years earlier, women in the workplace was an out-of-box or rather odd thing. Even though women are working now, there are still many stereotypes and beliefs that expect women to manage households and take up the major responsibility in bringing up a child. Handling households and personal life alongside keeping up with deadlines from work is very difficult to cope up with and that is where work life balance is required.
Work life balance is about dividing one’s time and attention between work and home or personal. Work life balance plays a vital role in a woman’s life by ensuring their mental and physical health. It makes things organized and in result, increases the efficiency and work rate of women. It helps them to grow and evolve as a person which helps them not only in their personal life but also in their work life. It helps them to manage work and home responsibilities efficiently. It helps in the growth of companies as well. Women bring diversity and inclusion to the workplace and help in making better decisions.
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Work life balance is not only about managing the role of a worker and a mother successfully, it is also about not overburdening oneself with these roles and spending some quality time with oneself.
Causes
Work clashing with household amenities, such as dropping or picking up children from school and cooking food for the family, plays a crucial role in causing inconsistency in work life flow on a daily basis. Women find it difficult to continue their work life flow when stereotypes and gender role beliefs expect them to take care of the children or elderly. Especially when motherhood arrives, work life balance is disrupted when women have to take maternity leaves from work and are demoted in some cases once they are back.
Effects
Attaining work life balance and handling household, work and personal life at once overloads women with work and responsibilities that can lead to health issues such as heart strokes, stress, depression and anxiety. There is also disharmony in family life and lack of support from family members which can also contribute to these effects.
Health issues is a main factor in disrupting work life balance and could lessen the productivity of work. Due to the need for women to handle the responsibilities of work and home simultaneously, women face lower job commitment and less noteworthy roles at work.
Accenture, a consulting firm, conducted a study which found out that about 70% of women responders in India said that they believed that work life balance was the key to success whereas about 40% of men felt that. The study also found out that difficulty of balancing personal and work life is a key reason why women in India leave their jobs.
There is also the imposed belief on women about keeping their family as a first priority and not giving much prominence to their work life which leads women encountering role conflict. Women will not know what they should do, which role they should give more significance to: the role they desire or the role they are expected to do. They get distracted easily and undivided attention is given to work and home which is not good for a person’s mental health. They are discriminated and are not socially acceptable if they give more importance to their work. They start to feel the risk of developing their passion and building a successful career that earns more money. This deprives women’s capable contribution to the world. Also, companies are very spiteful in wages for women and there is a huge pay gap between salaries given to men and women which makes work even more discouraging.
Due to these overpowering gender role beliefs and stereotypes, women may turn down jobs and there will not be much female role models in the world to motivate and inspire other women. Women will not be able to realize their own potential and will encounter low self-esteem and demotivation. Work life balance is hard to achieve when societal beliefs play huge roles to discourage women.
National perspective
In India, the average number of hours that employees are working are 52 hours a week which leaves very less time for women to spend on other areas of life such as personal or home.
Sunita Cherian, vice president of human resources in Wipro, mentioned that her company plans to give flexibility to their workers in accordance to the different or life-changing phases of their life such as getting married or being pregnant. She also stated that her company realizes that the key reason women are dropping out of jobs are due to these changes dominating their life and women feel it would be much easier to quit. The company aims to convince women to stay in their jobs regardless of their temptation to drop out.
India needs more companies to give a similar kind of influence to their workers. A work environment shouldn’t have any implicit communication or workers stressing out over the burden of work given instead it should be interactive and workers should be given work life balance which would reduce the level of anxiety or stress in the workplace and would also be beneficial for the company.
India needs to realize the importance of work life balance in the workplace by building different office layouts and bringing in different ways and schemes in order to get work done.
Global perspective
“Rural women play a key role in supporting their households and communities in achieving food and nutrition security, generating income and improving rural livelihoods and overall well-being”, stated by UN Womenwatch Organization.
In 2015, the global average annual earnings for women were $11000, compared to men’s earnings of $21000. There are huge pay gaps between incomes of men and women which demotivates women to work. Empowering women in economy and closing gender gaps in the world of work are key to achieving the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.
Denmark is one of the top 10 countries with great work life balance and the average number of working hours of only 37.8 hours a week. They also offer 23 weeks of maternity and paternity leave to employees. This gives a lot of flexibility to workers to manage their home and personal lives. Work life balance strikes up the euphoria levels in a country. Denmark was ranked first in the World Happiness Report 2013 and 2016 and third in the year 2015 due to its freedom to workers of working limited hours.
Course of actions
Women should be given flexibility at work and home which will help them attain work life balance. Childcare facility and transport facility at the workplace will help working mothers by making it easier to take responsibility of their children. They could make sure that their home, their workplace and their children’s schools are near each other so they wouldn’t be wasting their time during the day travelling.
Sometimes, women fear that if they work longer, family members may feel neglected. In this case, women could keep in touch with their family through the internet. If they are at home and they get some work, they should avoid doing the work immediately. This would only make family members feel neglected and may disrupt personal relationships. Both parents should make a flexible schedule and discuss the roles they want to play beforehand with both in complete agreement. This would reduce conflicts in the family at a later stage and will not disrupt work life.
“We want them to strike a work-life balance and prioritise their emotional and physical well-being which will help them overcome challenges both professionally and personally. As part of the curriculum of our workshops, we also address how women should look at themselves as leaders,” said K. Muthulakshmi, a police constable in Chennai, India.
Women should become more emotionally intelligent which helps them prioritise their time between work and home. Women should make an organized schedule, which not only has time to finish household chores and demands from work but also has time to take care of oneself emotionally and physically.
The society should become a collectivist community believing in one cause; the right cause. People should change their mindsets about overloading women with both professional and personal responsibilities. Women shouldn’t let beliefs prevent them from being successful. Self-esteem and motivation are key factors in acquiring work life balance. The world needs more female role models to inspire other women to achieve work life balance. This would only happen if one starts the cycle and others continue.
Women also have the option of starting their own business so that they could be given flexibility and where lower wages and job commitment or burnout won’t be a problem.
Women who have been contributing majorly to the world must be recognized and their stories must be told in a way which invigorates other women to become vocal and esteemed enough to start their own stories.
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