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Women in the middle: mothers’ experiences of transition to part-time and flexible work in professional and managerial occupations

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posted on 2023-06-09, 06:18 authored by Zoe Young
This study explores the limits and potential of flexible working through the lived experience of women in professional and managerial jobs who adjust their employment because of their motherhood. A qualitative, longitudinal research strategy using repeat narrative interviews follows 30 mothers through a year of their lives as they go part-time, job-share, flex their schedules, and work from home. They typify Hakim’s (2000; 2006) ‘adaptive’ category of women, which Lewis and Simpson (2017) argue exemplifies a new ‘postfeminist subject’ (p128): women required to perform well simultaneously in both work and domestic domains. Anchored theoretically in debates about the relative influence of structure and agency in determining women’s employment participation and outcomes. This thesis critiques choice in relation to employment and motherhood. It contributes new explanations why professional women ‘choose’ different types of flexible working arrangements and how the experience of ‘doing’ flexible work tallies with expectation. The study finds women’s transitions into part-time and flexible work arrangements rarely reflect their ideal preference of job, working hours, schedules or locations. The working arrangement women arrive at is a complex and pragmatic settlement of competing practical and ideological pulls, constraints and incentives. Maternal responsibilities endure, irrespective of women’s working hours. Choices are neither clear nor unfettered, and are fraught with anxiety. Five narratives reflect the diverse range of personal intentions behind women’s work-life choices made at particular biographical moments in specific social circumstances. The narratives reveal that moves into part-time and flexible work can be tactical, restorative, professionally expansive, are morally potent, socially informed and often a compromise. This study advances understanding of how women working flexibly experience work and are incorporated into organisations. Their lived experience is characterised by trial and error, work intensification, work-life integration, and frequent further adjustments. Most women expected, demanded, and benefited from very little practical involvement of their employers in developing effective job-designs for flexibility. Over time many felt fatigued by their responsibility to manage their arrangements invisibly, minimising inconvenience to others at work and at home. This has implications for flexible working policy and workplace practice. This thesis makes clear that solutions to gender troubles at home and at work are collective and involve politicising the family as well as the workplace in order to achieve genuine choice for women in the occupations they pursue and the success they achieve.

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File Version

  • Published version

Pages

197.0

Department affiliated with

  • Sociology and Criminology Theses

Qualification level

  • doctoral

Qualification name

  • phd

Language

  • eng

Institution

University of Sussex

Full text available

  • Yes

Legacy Posted Date

2017-05-16

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