Resumen de Women academics and work-life balance: Gendered discourses of work and care
This article examines how discourses of work-life balance are appropriated and used by women academics. Using data collected from semi-structured, single person interviews with 31 scholars at an Australian university, it identifies and explores four ways in which participants construct their relationship to work-life balance as: (1) a personal management task; (2) an impossible ideal; (3) detrimental to their careers; and (4) unmentionable at work. Findings reveal that female academics' ways of speaking about work-life balance respond to gendered attitudes about paid work and unpaid care that predominate in Australian socio-cultural life. By taking a discursive approach to analysing work-life balance, our research makes a unique contribution to the literature by drawing attention to the power of work-life balance discourses in shaping how women configure their attempts to create a work-life balance, and how it functions to position academic women as failing to manage this balance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
