Women’s work–life balance strategies in academia

ABSTRACT

Although work–life balance in academia is a widely represented topic in the academic discourse, there is still no structural solution to this phenomenon. The main aim of this article is to analyse how the intersection of gender, class and ethnicity effects and shapes the strategies of female academics of two ethnic groups at in two Serbian universities developed to rationalize and explain their actions and decisions on work–life balance. The qualitative research was based on twenty semi-structured interviews. The findings show that when explaining their attitudes and decisions women used certain rhetoric and life strategies. The intersectional analysis conveyed that there is a difference between the strategy’s women used in order to cope with family and career obligations when it comes to different ethnic backgrounds. There is a class difference as well, which is intersecting with gender and ethnicity, thereby resulting in a new inequality among women in academia. The challenge of finding work–life balance is great for women, who decide to deal with it on a micro level, in their own family and in their own way not questioning the organizational structures upon which work in the academic social context is based.

KEYWORDS:

• Women
• ethnicity
• class
• intersectionality
• work–life balance
• academia
• Serbia

Acknowledgement

The author would like to thank Professor Andrea Pető (Central European University, Budapest/Vienna) for her valuable methodological and analytical inputs. The author thanks the two anonymous reviewers, whose comments helped to improve the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The ENWISE Report assesses the conditions and status of female academics in the Central Europe and in the Baltic States, but in this paper, the focus was only on Eastern Europe.

2 Even though the research was conducted quite a few years ago, academic work-life balance is a continuous and yet to be solved problem, as there is much resemblance to the narratives presented in this paper with the ones in Acker & Armenti’s paper “Sleepless in academia” published in 2004.

3 The author of this paper spoke with the respondents in their mother tongues, since the author speaks both languages.

4 The Serbian population before the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s lived not only in Serbia, but also in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina (and other countries of the ex-Yugoslavia). This changed considerably after the war, with Serbs moving to Serbia.

5 The interviewees who were born in Sarajevo (Bosnia and Herzegovina) and Zagreb (Croatia) came to live in Novi Sad during the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s.

6 Now this is equivalent to a master’s thesis.

7 Caucus were the communist party’s regular meetings in the former Yugoslavia, which were obligatory to attend by the faculty staff members as well.

8 Domus Guest House in Budapest focuses mainly on hosting Domus Fellows and members of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. In addition, it offers discounted accommodation to the Hungarian scientific community living across the borders of Hungary.

9 The Faculty of Civil Engineering, Faculty of Economics and the Teachers Training Faculty in Hungarian language are located in Subotica but are part of the University of Novi Sad.

10 She was the first generation of the Bologna Process, when instead of the “old” doctorate, the new PhD system was introduced.

11 HFP11 had her first child at age 37, when she became an assistant professor at the faculty, three years after defending her PhD.

12 A town 110km south of Novi Sad in Serbia.

13 After the interview, SFP5 left her job at the University of Belgrade and now works in public administration in Novi Sad.

14 The “White Plague” is a colloquial expression for negative population growth, that is, when in a country the mortality rate is higher than the birth rate.

15 She had a different career before earning her PhD and building a career in academia, thus she was at the time of the interview an early career researcher.