Life Satisfaction and Work–Life Balance: The Complexities of Gender Patterning

Abstract

Conventionally, issues connected to work–life balance have been thought to concern women more than men – not least through the promotion of a strongly gendered discourse about the imperative to become a ‘balanced woman’. In this article, however, we draw on interview data from both men and women (in Australia, occupying broadly middle-class social positions) to show the complexities of gender patterning. Specifically, we demonstrate that the cultural imaginary of a ‘balanced life’ as route to life satisfaction was shared equally by the men and women in our sample. Moreover, men were as likely as women to point to the arrival of children as a key ‘fateful moment’ for re-evaluating their own work–life balance. However, gender disparities were evident in both the nature of change that was effected to achieve ‘balance’ and the associated expectations of partners. The article contributes to the gendered theorisation of work–life balance as a cultural norm in contemporary society.

Introduction

Studies of life satisfaction have typically highlighted the importance of various contributing factors. These include being healthy and having secure employment (Headley and Muffels, 2017; Noda, 2020) and social connectedness (Ambrey et al., 2017), as well as certain personality traits (Ramia, 2021). A further crucial component is held to be work–life balance – that is, an individual’s ability to devote sufficient time to both work and personal or family life (e.g. Hildenbrand et al., 2024). This has been documented through studies of particular workplaces and working practices and also macro analyses of state policies. With respect to the latter, Noda’s (2020) analysis of data across OECD countries has shown how implementing work–life balance policies at the national level led to an improvement in life satisfaction for both men and women.

While extant literature provides important insights into how work–life balance is understood and has commonly been played out, there remain some notable absences – particularly in relation to the Australian context, which is the focus of this article. Indeed, despite some important research on family life in Australia (e.g. Craig and Churchill, 2021; Craig and Mullan, 2009), few studies have explored, explicitly, the extent to which work–life balance is important to Australians or, for those to whom it is important, the ways they go about trying to achieve it. Our research provides new knowledge in these areas by drawing on a longitudinal study of Australians who, over several annual waves of data collection, had reported a high level of satisfaction with life. Specifically, through analysis of their narratives, we argue that having achieved a good work–life balance was the most common way in which these individuals explained their high level of life satisfaction. We go on to contend that, in contrast to much of the extant literature, the importance of such ‘balance’ appeared as important to the men in our sample as to the women. Moreover, both men and women identified having children as a key ‘fateful moment’ for reassessing the balance in their lives. Nevertheless, gender disparities persisted– notably in the nature of changes made to achieve such ‘balance’, the temporalities of decision-making, and the ‘economies of gratitude’ that underpinned partner relationships.

We begin the article by outlining the conceptual underpinnings of our research, discussing some of the normative narratives of work–life balance, and the ways in which it can be considered an individualised, classed and gendered concept. We then outline the research methods we used – primarily a longitudinal survey and a series of qualitative interviews with a sub-sample of survey respondents. The subsequent sections of the article present our argument: namely, that while both men and women emphasised the importance of work–life balance as a route to life satisfaction, and as something that took on particular significance after the arrival of children, in other ways, commitments were strongly patterned by gender.

Conceptual underpinnings

Normative narratives of work–life balance

Within policy, across the Global North, the concept of ‘work–life balance’ is assumed to benefit both workers and employers through the widespread adoption of flexible working practices. It has become a dominant discourse and is typically framed as a means of resolving ‘the dilemmas of intertwining institutional and non-work times and spaces’ (Seddighi and Corneliussen, 2021: 2). Achieving a ‘good’ work–life balance is seen as benefitting the family – with respect to both couple relationships and child development (Cooklin et al., 2014). While nominally aimed at both men and women, it has often constituted a central plank of policies to improve working conditions for women, and thus increase women’s workforce participation (ibid.), and been presented as compatible with feminist goals, because of its emphasis on choice (Sørensen, 2017).

Empirical work from various national contexts has demonstrated the strong cultural pull of achieving work–life balance. Writing with respect to the UK, Miller (2023) argues that many of the expectant mothers in her research were concerned about how they would combine work and motherhood after the birth of their children. She writes: ‘in this antenatal period cultural imaginings of being able to balance work and family care are evident’, contending that this ‘speaks to the success of discursive tropes which invoke “balancing” work and family life as a realistic component of maternal imaginings and women’s working lives’ (pp. 53-55). Adamson et al.’s (2023) research in Denmark also documents the cultural power of discourses associated with work–life balance. Indeed, they contend that such discourses constitute an important site of self-regulation for many individuals: ‘A pervasive emphasis of policy, research and popular culture discourses on the importance and necessity of striving for work-life balance . . . means that striving for work-life balance may no longer be a suggestion but an almost normative lifestyle regime’ (p. 633). In their analysis, the dominant trope of the ‘good’ employee who devotes themselves entirely to work had come to be replaced by the ‘well-balanced’ worker who experiences personal fulfilment at home as well as at work. A failure to achieve such a balance was understood, under these new conditions, as evidence of a poorly managed life and insufficient self-control. Adamson et al. (2023) conclude that, as a result of these pressures, work–life balance has become a ‘culturally constituted desire’ and a ‘moral imperative’, both of which feed into ongoing projects of self-formation. Moreover, rather than benefitting workers, it can be experienced as oppressive. Indeed, they argue,

Our analysis demonstrates how the persistence of the ideal worker norm alongside strong discursive pressure to chase an ever-evolving ideal of felicitous work-life balance may, indeed, turn this pursuit of balance from a process that benefits male and female executives to an end in itself, becoming ever more oppressive and generating feelings of guilt and discontent. (Adamson et al., 2023: 648)

An individualised, classed and gendered concept

The concept of work–life balance has been critiqued for privileging a highly individualised model of decision-making, and failing to take account of structural factors and how these pattern the choices that are available to individuals (Orgad, 2019; Sørensen, 2017; Wyn and Woodman, 2006). Such structures can include national and company maternity and paternity policies, childcare availability and affordability, and the gender pay gap (Miller, 2023). Moreover, individualised understandings of choice typically overlook inequalities between groups, related to their social characteristics (Seddighi and Corneliussen, 2021). Evans and Wyatt (2023), for example, show how social class can have considerable bearing on the extent to which individuals feel able to integrate the work and non-work parts of their lives. They argue that such integration is easier for those who have been ‘class static’, as they put it, than for those who have achieved social mobility – because of a potentially large disconnect between the spheres of work, on one hand, and home and leisure, on the other hand, in the case of the latter group. Differential access to financial and material resources can also have a clear impact on the ability to reduce working hours and/or work from home (Brooks and Hodkinson, 2020). Understandings of work–life balance, in the literature that focuses on it specifically, as well as studies that links it to life satisfaction, often foreground temporal aspects – from this perspective, ‘too much’ time spent in the labour market is problematised. However, as Warren (2015) has argued, such understandings can be seen as classed – privileging a middle-class agenda, and overlooking the perspectives of the working classes. She highlights, instead, the importance of economic security (as a particular understanding of work–life balance) to life satisfaction. Indeed, her analysis of large UK-based datasets indicates that what she calls economic-based work–life imbalance (e.g. precarity and the lack of paid employment) is associated with lower levels of life satisfaction than is temporal imbalance (when individuals are concerned that they are spending too much time at work, with little available to pursue leisure activities and/or care for family members).

The strongest critique of the individualised assumptions of work–life balance policies focuses on gender. Orgad’s analysis of policy and popular culture, as they pertain to work–life balance, shows that both commonly frame such balance as a women’s issue. Indeed, she asserts that in the 21st century, the ‘balanced woman’ has emerged as an important cultural trope representing the ‘renewed ideal feminine figure’:

She is situated squarely within the growing visibility of gender equality in public discourse and the development of fairer and more progressive policy and workplace practices. She acknowledges the falseness of the 1980s superwoman with the flying hair, who seemed to seamlessly combine a successful career with being a good mother. The 21st century balanced woman tells middle class women: I know how difficult it is negotiating work and home life; there are entrenched stereotypes and enduring perceptions about women’s domestic responsibilities; workplace policies still have a way to go to become truly family friendly; and care is undervalued in our society. It is possible to craft a happy equilibrium between work and family, and between the private and public aspects of oneself. (Orgad, 2019: 55–56)

In this way, Orgad contends, achieving ‘balance’ is presented as the goal that every woman – but not man – should strive to achieve. This psychological obligation requires women to repress the difficulties and challenges they face (at home and in the workplace), rather than identifying them as societal issues requiring public action (see also Sørensen, 2017).

Such gender inequalities have also been highlighted in research that has explored the day-to-day experiences of men and women in the home and workplace in relation to understandings of work–life balance. Miller’s (2023) study of new mothers has revealed how they carefully narrated their future intentions about combining work and childcare in terms of ‘balance’ (and grappled with often-conflicting expectations about both), in ways not observed among their male partners. She also notes that, by the time of her final interview with the mothers, 10 months after the birth of their children, ‘the language and cultural imaginings of being able to balance work and family life has mostly disappeared’ (p. 94). There are clear links here to the wider literature on parenting practices that has demonstrated that, despite some change (Brooks and Hodkinson, 2020; Dermott, 2008), women continue to carry out the majority of childcare within families, as well as be more likely to carry the associated ‘mental load’ (Dean et al., 2021).

This is particularly marked in Australia, where the dominant work–family arrangement in heterosexual households is that the male partner works full-time and the female partner part-time (Craig and Churchill, 2021; Stevens, 2015), and women typically limit their paid work, moving in and out of the workforce to balance the demands of work and family (Craig and Mullan, 2009). Indeed, women’s participation in the labour force is lower in Australia than in many comparable countries – particularly for those with children (Pennington and Stanford, 2020). While almost all Australian fathers work outside the home, only about half of mothers do, with a similar proportion of mothers (around half) not returning to work at all for more than 2 years after the birth of their first child (Pennington and Stanford, 2020). As a result, women in Australia tend to bear a very unequal share of childrearing responsibilities, and 80 per cent more unpaid work at home each week than men (Pennington and Stanford, 2020).

With respect to empirical research in the workplace, Adamson et al.’s (2023) study of workers occupying senior executive positions in Danish firms demonstrated how pressures to achieve work–life balance were experienced differently according to gender, with women more adversely affected. Adamson et al. show how the discourse of the ‘balanced working father’ was less prescriptive and more aspirational than the equivalent discourse for working mothers. Childcare was, for example, understood as a means of ‘enrichment’ and virtue for the working father, whereas for the working mother it was positioned as a moral obligation. These discourses fed through to the executives’ own understandings about work–life balance, with women feeling heightened pressure to achieve the ‘right’ balance. There was more at stake for them than for their male peers, ‘motivating them to put more effort into the continuous pursuit of balance’ (p. 647). Such assumptions are clearly related to wider social norms – such as the continuing pressure on mothers (rather than fathers) to ‘parent intensively’ (Hays, 1996) and ensure that their work does not impinge negatively on their children (Schmidt et al., 2022). Gendered workplace cultures also continue to structure such choices (Seddighi and Corneliussen, 2021). Commitments to work–life balance have, thus, in contrast, not become deeply ingrained in fathers, with few assuming that their employers will offer them flexible options for work (Miller, 2011; Twamley, 2024).

Research methods

In this article, we draw on an interview study of 22 young adult Australians. Participants were selected from a cohort of Australians in their mid-thirties who had been participating in a longitudinal research study – called Life Patterns – since they left school in 2005–2006. A total of 478 individuals participated in the research at the time of the latest survey.

The criterion for selecting interview participants was that they had to have reported a consistently high level of life satisfaction in five consecutive annual surveys, conducted between 2018 and 2022. Of the overall survey sample of 478 respondents, 55 met this criterion. All 55 were contacted by text messages (in April and May 2023) to see whether they would be prepared to take part in a follow-up interview. Interviews were then conducted with all those who volunteered and who were available in the period over which we were interviewing (a total of 22 individuals). In order to explore subjective life satisfaction, we asked them to reflect on the main factors they consider as reasons for their high level of life satisfaction.

The participants were aged 33–34 years when they were interviewed in April and May 2023. ¹ Seven were male and 15 were female, and all but one were born in Australia with Australian-born parents ² (data were not collected about race or ethnicity). Over half lived in Australia’s capital cities. One participant was not in a relationship at the time of data collection; all others were in a heterosexual relationship – 6 living with a partner, and 15 living with both partner and children (see Table 1). In terms of home ownership, 4 were owner occupiers and 14 were paying off mortgage. With respect to education and work, 10 participants had a university degree, 11 had a post-graduate degree, and 1 had completed another tertiary qualification as their highest qualification. Just over half the sample (12 of the 22) were employed full-time, with the rest working part-time and/or engaged in domestic work (and thus not in paid employment). The majority were working as qualified professionals, such as engineers, teachers, or medical and health workers, with only one employed in non-professional or non-managerial work working as a farm hand. (See Table 1 and Appendix 1 in Supplementary Information for demographic detail.)

Table 1.

Demographics of interviewees (N = 22).

Gender	Male	7
	Female	15
Geo-location in 2023	In a capital city	12
	In a regional city	6
	In a country town	2
	Rural, not in town	2
Highest level of education in 2023	Post-graduate degree	11
	University degree	10
	Other tertiary qualification	1
Living arrangement in 2023	Living on my own	1
	Living with my partner	6
	Living with my partner and child/children	15
Home ownership	Renting	5
	Paying off a mortgage	18
	Owner occupier	4
Relationship status	In a relationship (living together)	2
	Not in a relationship	1
	Married	19
Employment status in 2023	Working full time	12
	Working part time	8
	Home duties (not in paid employment)	5

We acknowledge that our Australian-born, well-educated and largely professionally-employed sample is not representative of the wider Australian population – where over 30% have parents born outside Australia (Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), 2024), 50% have a tertiary-level qualification (OECD, 2023) and 38% are engaged in professional or managerial employment (ABS, 2022). Nevertheless, we suggest that such a sample provides useful insights into the experiences and attitudes of those who may have more resources available to enable work–life balance than less privileged groups. Any struggles they experience may well be compounded for others.

Interviews were conducted virtually and, on average, lasted about an hour. They were digitally recorded and then transcribed in full. (See Appendix 2 in Supplementary Information for more details about the interview questions.) Thematic analysis was conducted in NVivo, using both deductive and inductive coding. We did not ask them any specific questions about work–life balance in the interviews. However, as we explain below, it was a key topic brought up spontaneously by the interviewees, and thus came to constitute an important part of our inductive coding and subsequent theorisation. The research received ethical approval from the University of Melbourne. To protect the identity of participants, pseudonyms are used throughout.

Work–life balance as a route to life satisfaction

Cross-national macro-level data suggest that there is a positive relationship between work–life balance (when understood as increasing the time people spend on leisure and personal care as opposed to work) and reported life satisfaction (Noda, 2020). Such associations have also been found in micro-level studies conducted, for example, in individual workplaces (e.g. Abendroth and Den Dulk, 2011). Nevertheless, work–life balance is clearly not the only contributing factor. Indeed, research has also highlighted the role played by both being in good health and having secure employment (Noda, 2020). In our research, however, it was notable that by far the most common explanation, given by our participants, of their reportedly high levels of life satisfaction, was work–life balance. This was mentioned by nearly all of our interviewees, either by making explicit reference to the concept or by emphasising the centrality to their lives of both work and aspects of life outside of work – most commonly family, but also friends and leisure pursuits.

It is notable that, despite the gendered nature of much of the discourse about work–life balance, and the strong pressures operating on women to achieve ‘balance’ outlined above (Miller, 2023; Orgad, 2019), in our sample, men and women were equally likely to foreground ‘balance’ in their narratives about life satisfaction. The following responses are illustrative of the responses of men in the sample, when they were asked about the reasons for their high level of life satisfaction:

I think it’s a balance of work, rest and play, in a nutshell . . . Humans are geared to have that balance. (Peter)

Well, I think we spend so much time at work, so being happy at work and your job is really important, which as I’ve just described, I am very satisfied with. And then having a family is really satisfying. I’ve got pretty good friends and a good friends network through sport and through high school still as well. And so I think I’ve got a good balance, which yeah, there’s always stuff to do. (David)

I think I’m very lucky that I met a lovely partner who I have a lovely son, so I think that’s a big part of it. And then, the other part is, I think I have a very good work life balance. (Mark)

When talking about the detail of this balance, women were rather more likely than men to place strong emphasis on partner relationships as a crucial aspect of their non-work lives, exemplified in Lara’s comment: ‘What’s my secret? I have a gorgeous husband!’. However, there were also men who similarly stressed the importance of the quality of their relationships with their partners (e.g. Max: ‘probably my wife, she’s a big part of that [why I am very satisfied with life]’), and women, such as Kira and Talia, who placed more emphasis on work than family.

Interestingly, although a large majority of the participants were parents and, at the time of the interview had relatively young children, the importance of work–life balance was also stressed by those without children. For example, Amy emphasised that a key aspect of her work–life balance (which she saw as the main reason for her high satisfaction with life) was ‘an incredibly supportive family and . . . a really close group of friends’.

The only factors that were mentioned in addition to work–life balance, in explaining high levels of life satisfaction, were secure housing and financial security, and such comments were very rare (presumably because of the generally-privileged nature of the sample). Jasmin was one of these exceptions, explaining the importance to her of the stability provided by secure housing:

I’m lucky enough to have found my partner who has made the decision early to buy the house that he did. So therefore, it’s put us in a reasonable position to just be able to live. We are not in any way well-to-do. We still have money struggles, but we don’t sort of buy into other people’s rubbish either.

Similarly, Mark was one of the few people who referred to the importance of having a good salary when explaining his high level of life satisfaction: ‘I think I get paid pretty well, [given] how much I have to work, and how onerous I feel work is’. It is interesting to note that Jasmin and Mark were unusual in the sample as a whole as occupying more liminal middle-class positions. In contrast to many of the research participants, Jasmin did not have a parent who had gone on to higher education (see Appendix 1 in Supplementary Information), while Mark was unusual in having parents employed in working-class jobs. In this way, we can see how class background may inflect understandings of life satisfaction, and the relative prominence given to work–life balance (Warren, 2015). In this respect, Maya’s reflections are insightful, acknowledging that she has the privilege of being able to focus on pursuing meaningful activity in her work because of her secure economic position:

I think for some people with less financial privilege than me – education, opportunity and so on, that’s not going to be about meaning – they don’t have that privilege – it’s going to be around, ‘What’s going to pay the bills and have the hours that means I can attend to my other duties?’ But for people with my merits – for people with my privilege, meaning can be very important, yeah.

As Maya recognises, within her narrative – and also within those of the majority of our other participants – is a particular middle-class understanding of work–life balance that is dominant, which foregrounds temporal understandings of balance rather than those associated with economic precarity (Warren, 2015).

Even for those from backgrounds where parents were educated to degree-level and had held middle-class jobs, ³ however, it appeared that work–life balance was not something that could be assumed, or that followed automatically from a particular kind of employment. Indeed, our participants – both men and women – often emphasised the conscious commitment and ‘work’ needed to achieve balance. This quotation from Ariel is illustrative:

My partner and I are really conscious of trying to have a good work-life balance – so ensuring when we’re home, we’re present. We’ll complain a little bit here and there about work, but we try and look for things that can improve the day . . . We make sure that we try and think about balancing everything out.

Other interviewees were even more explicit about the effort required to achieve balance. For example, Eva commented, ‘It [work-life balance] is definitely something that you work on, and you want to remove toxic things from your life and make sure you are in the right spot to be happy and healthy’. In this quotation, we see a strong degree of responsibilisation played out; not only does Eva believe that it is up to her (rather than her employer or the state, for example) to put in the necessary work to achieve a ‘good balance’, but that her happiness and health are both dependent on the actions she takes as an individual. In this way, she reflects the individualised assumptions that underpin the dominant cultural imaginary associated with ‘balance’, discussed above (Orgad, 2019; Sørensen, 2017).

Our data do not, of course, allow us any insight into whether the participants in our research did, objectively, have a ‘good balance’ between the different aspects of their lives – we did not, for example, ask them to keep diaries of how they apportioned their time between different activities. Nor do they enable us to make strong claims about whether participants were correct in attributing their high levels of life satisfaction to having achieved what they perceived to be a good (temporal) balance between different aspects of their lives. Nevertheless, they do enable us to point to the strength of the ‘good balance’ discourse across our sample, and identify that, in line with previous research (e.g. Wyn and Woodman, 2006), it is often understood in highly individualised terms, with individuals feeling considerable personal responsibility for achieving balance (and, concomitantly, a sense of personal achievement when balance is felt to have been achieved). In contrast to previous studies, however, our data also show that, within our sample, the imperative to achieve balance is experienced by both men and women and is seen by men, as much as women, as the root cause of life satisfaction.

Work–life balance and ‘fateful moments’

A common theme in the narratives of our participants was that they had not always considered work–life balance important, or even thought about it at all at an earlier stage in their lives. In this way, the ‘good balance’ discourse, discussed above, did not seem to have had purchase for many in their early adulthood (although we will discuss one notable exception below). Instead, it was something that they had come to as a result of a particular ‘fateful moment’ (Giddens, 1991) – that of having a child. Giddens describes a fateful moment as one that has ‘major implications not just for the circumstances of an individual’s future conduct, but for self-identity’, and which will likely ‘reshape the reflexive project of identity through the lifestyle consequences which ensue’ (p. 143). While not always using Giddens’ terminologies, various scholars have identified the birth of a child as a moment that can have a profound effect on individuals’ values, perspectives and behaviour. Shirani and Henwood (2011) discuss the ‘disruption’ of parenthood, when both present arrangements and ‘imagined futures’ are challenged, while Hodkinson and Brooks (2023) have identified ‘crossroads’ experienced by parents – decision points at which different possible directions forward may arise, ‘liable to prompt reflection, negotiation and, ultimately, either continuation or a change in direction’ (p. 39).

Among our participants, Kylie talked about how her priorities had changed significantly on the birth of her child and how, as she had moved through different stages of life, there had been significant change in the sources from which she derived satisfaction:

The satisfaction I need from my job is a lot less. I get a lot more satisfaction in life from my family and friends at this stage of life.

She went on to explain that, having had children, she had become more assertive about making sure that work met, rather than compromised, her own needs: ‘having had kids, I learned to put my foot down and kind of set the standard for what I would be able to do as well’. A similar degree of change, prompted by having had a child, was discussed by Aria. She explained that her own values had become clearer (‘And that’s really come to light in the last year, having a small child’), which had provided her with a new perspective on balancing work and other parts of her live.

Men also talked in quite similar terms about how having a child represented a key time for re-evaluating decisions and making change. Mark, for example, talked about how he had changed offices at work to enable him and his family to move house and him to be able to spend more time with his wife and son. Similarly, Nil had also moved job and house to help facilitate family life: ‘And then . . . my wife and I made the decision that we wanted to live a bit closer to family and with an idea of starting a family, so we packed up things in Canberra and moved to Melbourne’. For Peter, having a child meant that he, perhaps in a similar way to Kylie, mentioned above, had become better at prioritising parts of his life outside work:

I think you’ve just got to, yeah, set boundaries for yourself. Being able to say no to things, I mean, you get . . . No matter who you are or what industry you’re in, you get a lot of opportunities that arise and put in front of you and I believe you’ve got to put your family first and you’ve got to be as happy as you can be with day-to-day things. And so, yeah, having that balance just goes back to that, I guess.

This emphasis, by both men and women in the sample, about the birth of a child acting as a fateful moment with respect to views about the balance between work and other parts of life contrasts quite significantly with the extant literature, which has tended to emphasise that such moments are experienced much more commonly by women rather than men. Twamley (2024), for example, shows how many of the women in her research underwent a shift in their understandings of motherhood following the birth of their child, influenced by powerful discourses about the primacy of motherhood. She thus contends that her data demonstrate how ‘it is becoming and living as a mother and the exposure to ideals of motherhood that can shape women’s experience of motherhood, as much as previously received ideas of motherhood’ (p. 192, italics in original). The men in her study typically did not experience such a change in their views of either fatherhood or the relationship between work and non-work life noting that, for them, there was rarely a clear dichotomy between being a ‘good carer’ and a ‘good provider’.

Nevertheless, despite the similarity in the narratives of the men and women in the current research about the arrival of a child acting as a ‘fateful moment’ that prompted change in relation to work–life balance, both the temporality of decision-making and the nature of the change enacted were differentiated along gender lines. In relation to the first, the women were much more likely than the men to have made adjustments to their work–life balance, or at least planned adjustments, at a relatively early point in their family life. Often the ‘fateful moment’ was thus not the point at which a child was born but, rather, when the child was planned or anticipated. Kira, for example, when asked about combining work and family life commented, ‘It’s actually something I’m grappling with because I’m due to have a baby in a month’. In two cases, women had chosen particular jobs as they believed they would facilitate a better work–life balance. Aria stated that she had ‘purposely chosen a career where I can have a balance’, while Talia explained that she had chosen to work in the public sector because of her long-standing knowledge that maternity rights would be better there:

I knew for a long time that I wanted to have children, and I knew from mum working in the public service that employment conditions in terms of maternity leave and then personal sick leave, continuation of employment after your maternity leave, that kind of thing, was favourable to people who want to have a family.

In contrast, among the men in the sample, there was little evidence of any early adjustment of work patterns prior to having children; where changes were made, these were typically after children had already arrived (for example, in the case of Mark moving house and Peter prioritising life outside work, discussed above).

In relation to the nature of the change enacted, many of the women had moved or planned to move to part-time work once they had had children. The following quotations are illustrative:

I’m only choosing to work one day a week right now, because I want to focus on my family. (Maya)

To be honest, my priority at the moment is my family life and I don’t think I would’ve changed for that. What I’ve got now is flexible around my family, I’ve been able to take maternity leaves. There’s a lot of silver linings in how my work has kind of evolved . . . my contracted hours are 32 or four days a week . . . I don’t have to go back up to my full contracted hours until my littlest starts primary school. So I’ll go back up to my full contracted hours and I’ll be able to split it across my days. I don’t ever see myself working more than four days a week because of school drop-offs and pickups . . . (Lara)

Indeed, a shift to part-time work was women’s most common response to the ‘fateful moment’ outlined above. Men, however, were much less likely to have reduced their hours of paid work. Instead, they commonly described a variety of other responses including changing jobs to reduce their commuting time, switching to a more flexible pattern of work, and stopping working very long hours. Cedric, for example, had worked extremely long hours prior to having children, but explained that he had cut these down considerably because ‘I want to see my kids, I want to spend time with them’. For Peter, the main change had been that he consciously ‘switched off’ from work when he was at home with his family, to give them his full attention. Nil also reported a change to his attitude to work but, in this case, it was making sure that his work was meaningful:

There’s nothing worse than you come home, and you think, ‘Oh, that was a waste of my time’, because it’s a huge imposition being away from the two daughters and my wife. But, yeah, you want to make sure that what you’re doing, you’re getting a sense of fulfilment and enjoyment out of it, and it is meaningful. I think that’s a big part about what you want to do, giving up all that time throughout your day and feeling like you’re achieving too.

While this particular change may have benefitted Nil personally, it is hard to see how it offered wider benefit to his family. These data suggest that work–life balance is understood differently by mothers and fathers – at least when it comes to making changes to one’s own life and practices and that, for many men, work continues to be valorised over other aspects of life. (Here, there are resonances with research conducted over 40 years ago, that showed that job satisfaction was more strongly associated with life satisfaction for men than for women; Rice et al., 1980.)

In these data we can see played out themes that have been widely discussed in the extant literature. Women remain much more likely than men to shift to part-time work after the birth of a child. Indeed, as Craig and Churchill (2021) have argued, the dominant work–family arrangement in Australian households is that the man works full-time and the woman part-time. Such norms are replicated in other parts of the world. For example, Sørensen has shown how, within the Norwegian media, the ‘part-time worker mother’ tends to be valorised above mothers who work full-time; for women, this is constructed as the ideal type of ‘balance’. Men, in contrast, are not expected to reduce their paid hours of work or to take other steps that might compromise their ‘provider’ role (Miller, 2011, 2023). Thus, while the research participants had a shared sense of the importance of work–life balance, often attributing this to the arrival of a child, gender differences were brought into sharp relief when they spoke about how work–life balance was to be achieved and the timeframes associated with such activities.

Work–life balance and partner support

Gender differences were also evident in the ways in which participants discussed their relationships with their partners. Support from partners was often mentioned when interviewees were explaining how they had achieved what they deemed to be a suitable ‘balance’ between work and the rest of life. However, this was commented on primarily by women. The following excerpts are typical:

I’ve had a really great transition [back to work]. I’m working and my husband’s off with the baby, and I’ve got a really supportive team. (Aria)

I’m lucky that my husband, he works a normal job and he has applied to be a primary carer, so he might get six months off [after the baby is born], including his annual leave. (Kira)

I’ve got a lovely husband that has supported me all the way through and I’ve always wanted to be a mum and I am now a mum to two beautiful boys. (Lara)

One man, Max, also talked about the support he received from his partner – although this was framed in terms of an equal partnership, with them both working flexibly. Indeed, after the birth of his son, he and his wife had both shifted to part-time work, each working 7 or 8 days across a fortnight, instead of the usual 10. Max was very much an exception, though. Indeed, partner support was rarely mentioned by most of the other men in the sample, suggesting that it was assumed, taken-for granted, and not worthy of comment. In the rare instances where women’s support was mentioned, it was framed in rather different ways from when the women were talking about the support they received from their male partners. For example, Jack explained that his wife was on maternity leave and was planning to stay at home to look after their child when this ended. However, he went on to say that ‘If we’re struggling, she can go back to work and we can work out what that looks like’. Thus, he was recognising – not the day-to-day support she was offering currently in terms of childcare and other labour within the home – but her potential economic contribution if she returned to work in the future. A second example is from Peter. In his case, the support he identified from his partner appeared to be about not requiring too much of him, and allowing him to pursue a career (in farming) that was less well paid and secure than his previous job, but gave him a greater sense of satisfaction: ‘[Partner] is really supportive of what I’m doing. She’s never pushed me to go back to teaching full-time’.

In her research on family practices in the UK, Miller (2023) has argued that husbands, wives and partners are often described as key sources of support, even in cases where childcare and other forms of domestic labour are not shared equally. Our Australian data show that while this was commonly the case for men (who were frequently described as key sources of support by their female partners), it was less so for women. In this way, the responses are more similar to those discussed by Twamley (2024): she found that, among her sample of new parents, the hands-on childcare provided by fathers was appreciated by mothers, but such care by mothers was typically not remarked upon by fathers. Such patterns can be explained in terms of Hochschild’s (2003) ‘economy of gratitude’. Hochschild contends that

Crucial to a healthy economy of gratitude is a common interpretation of reality, such that what feels like a gift to one person feels like a gift to another. A common interpretation of reality in turn relies on a shared template of prior expectation, itself often born of shared history. (p. 105)

The narratives of our participants would suggest that, despite a common commitment to work–life balance and a common view of it as driving their high levels of life satisfaction, their ‘templates of prior expectations’ remained, to some extent at least, differentiated by gender.

Conclusion

By exploring the narratives of those who, over several years, had reported a high level of life satisfaction, this article has teased out their understandings of what had contributed to such contentment. As we have argued above, work–life balance was thought by the majority of those we interviewed to be the most important contributing factor. In contrast to much of the extant literature in this area (e.g. Adamson et al., 2023), we have shown how the cultural pull of the ‘balanced life’ – in our sample at least – was evident among men almost as much as among women. Moreover, the men we interviewed, like the women, believed that work–life balance was both important and something that had to be worked at. The ‘responsibilisation of balance’ thus seems to have been taken up by individuals irrespective of gender; it is not only the prerogative of the ‘renewed ideal feminine figure’ (Orgad, 2019). Similarly, we have shown how, in narrating their stories of ‘working towards’ work–life balance, both men and women identified the arrival of a child as a key ‘fateful moment’ (Giddens, 1991) for reassessing priorities and making change to achieve balance. Again, this stands in contrast to some of the extant literature that has argued that such reassessments are carried out largely by women and rarely by men (Miller, 2023; Orgad, 2019).

Our article has also pointed, however, to some of the complexities in these gender positionings. While both men and women foregrounded work–life balance in their explanations of their high levels of life satisfaction, gender differences were evident in both the nature of changes that participants had implemented to achieve balance (with men less likely to have relinquished full-time employment), and the temporalities of their decision-making in this area (with women much more likely to have considered the impact of children on work–life balance at an earlier point in their lives). While we do not have the longitudinal data required to identify when such differences in perspective first emerged, previous research has indicated that young women in their 20s, despite attaining highly in their education, are commonly making the ‘choice’ to invest time in relationships, caring and reproductive labour, because the ‘time economy’ of workplaces remains highly gendered (Wyn et al., 2017).

We have shown how narratives about partner support in the context of achieving work–life balance were also highly gendered, with men and women seemingly occupying different positions in the ‘economy of gratitude’ (Hochschild, 2003). It is interesting to note, however, that very few of our respondents reflected on gender differences within their family – with respect to support offered and/or decisions about work–life balance taken. This reflects some of the individualised assumptions about responsibility for achieving balance discussed in the extant literature (e.g. Orgad, 2019; Sørensen, 2017; Wyn and Woodman, 2006), but extends this analysis by showing how this can play out with respect to relationships within the family, as well as with the state.

Our analysis does not address the important questions about work–life balance and its relationship to life satisfaction associated with more precarious employment situations (Warren, 2015), which have been brought into sharp relief by the increasing number of Australians who have experienced precarity in their working lives (O’Keeffe, 2024). Nevertheless, it does raise several issues that have a bearing on the theoretical advancement of work–life balance and policy formation. Given the expressed desire of both men and women to combine work and family life in a ‘balanced’ way, and yet the significant gender disparities in shouldering the responsibility to achieve work–life balance (in terms of expectations of partners and actual practices), this article highlights the significance of gender in considering work–life balance against the current cultural norm of self-responsibilisation. A gendered theorisation of work–life balance can inform policies and social benefits which are sensitive to gender inequality in work–life balance representations and experiences, and support work–life balance by considering the diversity of its significance and modalities across individuals, families and workplaces.

Supplemental Material

sj-docx-2-sro-10.1177_13607804241284807 – Supplemental material for Life Satisfaction and Work–Life Balance: The Complexities of Gender Patterning

Supplemental material, sj-docx-2-sro-10.1177_13607804241284807 for Life Satisfaction and Work–Life Balance: The Complexities of Gender Patterning by Rachel Brooks, Jun Fu and Quentin Maire in Sociological Research Online

Supplemental Material

sj-xlsx-1-sro-10.1177_13607804241284807 – Supplemental material for Life Satisfaction and Work–Life Balance: The Complexities of Gender Patterning

Supplemental material, sj-xlsx-1-sro-10.1177_13607804241284807 for Life Satisfaction and Work–Life Balance: The Complexities of Gender Patterning by Rachel Brooks, Jun Fu and Quentin Maire in Sociological Research Online