Gender, caring, part time employment and work/life balance

This paper examines the influence of demographic and organisational factors on the ability of employees to balance work and personal life responsibilities. Specifically, the paper addresses if gender, childcare, eldercare and part time work impacts levels of perceived work/life balance of office based employees. A mixed method quantitative and qualitative approach was employed to investigate the research objectives. Survey data was collected from 710 employees in six divisions of a large Australian organisation followed by a series of semi-structured focus group interviews. Contrary to previous research the results indicate that male employees had greater difficulties balancing work and non-work responsibilities than their female counterparts. However, the results indicate that the presence of children living at home (childcare responsibilities) contributed to lower levels of work/life balance for both male and female employees. Part time work generally had a positive impact on employees. As with all cross-sections [...]