Introduction
This chapter centres on women working in information and communication technology (ICT), a male-dominated profession that continues to imagine the ideal worker according to the male norm of having little or no childcare responsibility. There is a well-established assumption that Norway is a ‘world champion in gender equality’ (Selbervik and Østebø, 2013: 205). However, despite family-friendly policies in the country, women struggle to reconcile work and care responsibilities (Kitterød and Halrynjo, 2019). How do women who work in ICT in Norway’s gender egalitarian culture find the resources to negotiate the contradictory demands of work and family? In Norway, as elsewhere across the western world, most fields of ICT work are still male-dominated. Women make up only 25 per cent of those studying and working in ICT in Norway (Samordna opptak, 2018; Statistics Norway, 2018; Simonsen and Corneliussen, 2020). Despite the fact that digitalization is changing the landscape of ICT work and increasing the need for ICT expertise in general, women’s under-representation in ICT has remained persistent (EIGE, 2020).
Family-oriented national policies in Norway such as flexible and long parental leave and a generous childcare system aim to increase women’s participation in the workforce and to support their career development (Seierstad and Kirton, 2015). Although women make up 47 per cent of
A recent European study found that women in ICT experience more flexible working conditions and a smaller pay gap than in other fields, but they also work longer hours, and a lower proportion have childcare responsibilities compared to women in other occupations (EIGE, 2018). In addition, fewer women in ICT work part-time as compared to other occupations (Simonsen and Corneliussen, 2020). These features indicate a double pressure on women, as they try to care as well as fit into a male-dominated field and style of work that favours men as ideal workers (Acker, 1990; Watts, 2009; Singstad, 2011). The specific context of ICT work in Norway, recognized for its progressive welfare regime and a high degree of gender equality, highlights the need to investigate how women working in ICT find the resources to reconcile family and work responsibilities while pursuing their career.
This chapter is based on interviews with 22 women working full-time in ICT research, development and innovation in Norway. Our findings suggest that the boundary-less work culture of ICT makes family-oriented national policies less relevant, while private resources are central to women’s negotiation of the contradictory demands of work and care. We also found that the gendered patterns of work and family are being re-gendered, but without challenging work cultures that discriminate against women more than men (Padavic et al, 2019). Most importantly, our analysis reveals the need to take a critical view of the work-life balance discourse, as responsibility for creating this ‘balance’ tends to be given to the individual (Gregory and Milner, 2009). Taking such a critical view is important for policymakers’ understanding of the economic and social structures that enable or restrict women’s opportunities for careers in male-dominated fields such as ICT.
We begin with a literature review before presenting this study’s theoretical and methodological framework. Following on from that, the chapter turns to the analysis of the women’s accounts of the resources they use in reconciling work and family responsibilities. This will be discussed in terms of the shortcomings of public childcare and how family is able or unable to step in to cover these shortcomings.
The term ‘work-life balance’ has been defined as ‘the relationship between the institutional and cultural times and spaces of work and non-work in societies where income is predominantly generated and distributed through labour markets’ (Felstead et al, 2002: 56). It is a dominant discourse in policies seeking to increase women’s workforce participation and improve conditions for them to pursue careers (OECD, 2007). As scholars have argued, achieving a work-life balance needs different levels of support, namely national policies, workplace policies and private support (Abendroth and den Dulk, 2011).
Norway, along with other Nordic countries, is often seen as a frontrunner with regards to gender equality, especially in terms of family-friendly policies aimed at supporting the reconciliation between work and family life (Öun, 2012). Family-friendly policies have a long tradition in the Nordic countries. They are ‘part of the general social-democratic model of welfare emphasising economic growth, redistribution of wealth, social rights and social security’ (Björnberg, 2016: 508). Norway often scores high in the international indexes (Chzhen et al, 2019), especially for its flexible parental leave (Rudlende and Bryghaug, 2017), paternal quota leave (Gram, 2019) and the extension of kindergarten access to one-to-two-year-old children. These policies have been established to increase women’s participation in the workforce as well as to strengthen fathers’ roles and engagement in care responsibilities (Brandth and Kvande, 2005; Kitterød and Halrynjo, 2019).
Despite these policies, the number of women who work part-time has remained high and is currently 37 per cent of employed women compared to 13 per cent of employed men (Statistics Norway, 2018). The statistics indicate a similar pattern observed across member states in the EU where on average one third of employed women work part-time (Eurostat, 2020). Although women’s high participation in the workforce in Norway at 68 per cent (Statistics Norway, 2018) indicates the success of these national policies, the national policies for childcare have had little impact on mothers’ career development (Halrynjo and Lyng, 2010; Johnsen and Løken, 2016). Studies suggest that fathers’ career preferences are prioritized over those of the mother while mothers take the main care responsibilities (Halrynjo and Lyng, 2010).
Work-life balance policies in workplaces often refer to flexible working conditions and the management of time and place of work (Fleetwood, 2007; Lewis et al, 2007), implying that this balance relies on individual choice (Gregory and Milner, 2009). Controversially, Hakim suggests that women and men tend to choose different career paths, with women being drawn towards jobs that ‘can be fitted around family life’ (2006: 285). Focussing on a vocabulary of choice in her discussion of women’s reconciliation of work and family life in Norwegian media, Sørensen (2017) identifies three
Pedersen and Egeland (2020) show that parents with flexible working hours who have to solve work-care conflicts during work hours catch up with their work in the late evenings or over weekends. Critical studies on work-life balance policies show that they make work-life balance issues appear to rely on individual choice while in actuality these issues are constrained by gender norms (Gregory and Milner, 2009) and thus do not challenge well-established structures such as gendered work cultures (Chung and Van der Lippe, 2018). In another study on women in high-commitment careers, Seierstad and Kirton (2015) found that flexible work conditions did not mean less work for the participants of their study; rather, it was a matter of adapting work to the family situation and vice versa. For mothers with flexible working hours, adapting their work to their family situation put more pressure on care responsibilities as these women are often the primary caregiver.
Research on working life in Norway has also shown that employees in some sectors such as ICT experience a greedy or boundary-less work culture where standard, full-time work is not enough (Brandth and Kvande, 2005; Nilsen and Skarsbø, 2009). In the male-dominated fields of ICT (Watts, 2009), where the need to continuously upskill is a precondition for a successful career (EIGE, 2018: 3), work cultures imagine the ‘ideal worker’ (Acker, 1990) as one who prioritizes work over care responsibilities (Williams, 2000), something men embody more than women (Singstad, 2011). As several studies have suggested, women in ICT work more than women in many other occupations (Watts, 2009; EIGE, 2018). Watts’ (2009) study of women in engineering within the UK construction industry shows that women working full-time adopt work styles that include long hours, as they perceive this as necessary for acceptance in the workplace. Flexible working conditions in boundary-less work cultures mean that the boundaries between work time and private time, workplace and private space become blurred and intensify the challenges of negotiating between work and family time, for women more so than for men (Zerwas, 2019).
Interestingly enough, the women in Seierstad and Kirton’s (2015: 401) study did not want more formal work–life balance policies, but rather a change of ‘workplace culture to one where both women’s and men’s domestic responsibilities were more fully acknowledged’. In a Finnish context, Heikkinen et al (2014: 32–6) investigated how women managers experience the support given by their male partners and identified four ways in which spousal support of women’s careers was constructed: harmoniously
The flexible work arrangement in ICT might appear as an advantage for women as the focus of work-life balance policies has been on employees’ autonomy and flexible working time and place. But women’s work arrangement also hides the potential double pressure as women have main care responsibilities as well as trying to fit into a style of work that favours men as ideal workers. The double pressure remains invisible as the responsibility of achieving a work-life balance is left to the individual, while the gendered work culture is left untouched.
Theoretical framework
Some scholars critique the concept of work-life balance because it implies that work and life are two separate spheres (Warhurst et al, 2008). Others have argued that ‘balance’ in work and life has become a neoliberal postfeminist discourse that has produced a new feminist subject of autonomous and freely choosing individuals, searching for a balance to deal with the conflicting demands of work and family (Rottenberg, 2018). Women’s investment in their sense of self has increasingly included mothering and the private space of life (Hays, 1996) as well as work (Rottenberg, 2018). Feminist technology studies have shown that across the western world cultures and stereotypes tend to associate men with ICT work more than women (Wajcman, 2004; Corneliussen, 2014). Watts’ (2009) study suggests that gender stereotypes in ICT work culture are largely accepted. In this context, the concept of negotiation refers to women’s attempts to overcome the competing demands and practices of work and family life while imagining a ‘balanced’ work-family life, that is, ‘having it all’.
In Norway this negotiation includes an established idea of the dual-earner household (Melby and Carlsson Wetterberg, 2009; Singstad, 2011), though men as the main earner are still the norm (Elingsæter, 2006). Work practices create expectations favouring men (Acker, 1990) as the ‘ideal worker’ who prioritizes work over care responsibilities (Williams, 2000). Despite policies aimed at increasing men’s participation in care responsibilities (Kitterød and Rønsen, 2012), the combination of the dual-earner household and this ‘ideal worker’ has created a pattern of a ‘two-track parenthood’: one track for mothers often taking long parental leave and part-time work, and another for men regardless of whether or not they have children (Ellingsæter, 2006; Bø et al, 2008). Focussing on how full-time working women with care responsibilities reconcile work and family, we look closer at how the negotiation of work and care responsibility in relation to a two-track parenthood model results in a ‘re-doing’ of gender norms (West and
Methodology
Interviews with women working in ICT
The data presented here are part of a larger dataset of 28 interviews we conducted in 2017–18. We recruited women working in ICT in the western region of Norway through organizations working with regional innovation, ICT development, research and funding agencies, as well as public and private companies. The 22 interviews analyzed were all with women who had childcare responsibilities. Fourteen of these women were born in Norway and eight women had immigrated to Norway due to work or higher education. The women were aged between 37 and 59. They had between one and four children. Some women also have children from several relationships. Thus, our participants represented a variety of heterosexual family constellations.
The selection criteria for the participants included: having at least a Bachelor degree, and diversity in terms of women working in the fields of ICT in different sectors and industries, as we recognize that digitalization is changing the landscape of ICT work. One interviewee had a Bachelor degree, seven had PhDs, and the rest had Master’s degrees. Nine had degrees in ICT. These women worked in different fields of ICT, in management, design, programming, research, and implementation of new technology. Thirteen interviewees acquired ICT competence by combining an ICT education within a non-technical education, or training and upskilling combined with a non-technical profession. The latter women worked with ICT in a non-tech profession in positions including management, design, programming and implementation of new technology.
Our interviews lasted around one hour and followed an interview guide with a professional-life history structure, with questions about family, education, occupational history, career drivers, barriers and work-family arrangements.
The fieldwork gained ethical approval from the Norwegian Centre for Research Data and we followed their rules for data security. The informants were invited to participate voluntarily. In order to make the research process transparent for the informants, we told them about the project’s aim before the interviews. The informants gave informed written consent to use the interview data in subsequent publications. The interview data were transcribed verbatim and anonymized.
Our initial analytical encounter with the empirical material was through a grounded theory-inspired process, reading and coding the interviews while writing analytic texts, or ‘memos’ to further our analysis. Since this is part of a larger project, this was a rather open-ended process in which the coding resulted in the building of relevant categories. These categories were explored and developed around labels we identified in the analysis such as work, leisure and family. Key labels for this chapter were family, enablers, barriers, opting out and work-life balance.
Analysis
‘Establishing a family, managing that, you could call it a barrier, but it was also a choice. It was completely voluntary’. (Gunn, late 30s)
The women in our study mentioned family both as a great support and as a barrier to their career though they described it as a conscious choice, as Gunn, one of the women in study, did in the aforementioned quote. Dual-earner parents experience time constraints in negotiating family and work duties. This is a result of specific working life structures and family policy schemes, and norms and values related to childcare and operating in the workplace (Hayes, 1996; Pedersen and Egeland, 2020). This is even more strongly experienced by women working in greedy work cultures (Hakim, 2006; Padavic et al, 2019) and male-dominated fields (Singstad, 2011). The relation between work and family entered the interviews most notably when we asked about barriers and drivers for career development. In this section we discuss how the women found resources to negotiate the conundrum of work and life when public childcare was not enough. This will be discussed in terms of how family was able or unable to step in and cover for these shortcomings.
The shortcomings of public childcare
The national work-life balance policies in Norway such as flexible parental leave, paternal quota leave and day nurseries for all children over one year old, are intended to regulate the conflicting demands of care and work experienced by women. Women in our study often took family-friendly policies for granted, and rarely talked about childcare services. When childcare services were mentioned, it was in relation to how the women arranged their working hours to leave and pick up children. As one of the participants put it: “Because I’m commuting, it is my husband who picks up and delivers in school and kindergarten every day” (Stine, 30s).
‘I could not have attended a Master’s degree or other courses I have taken, if it had not been for the support of my family and my husband. When I started the Master’s degree in another city which was quite far away, the children were living at home at that time. If you have children, you need to have support and to know that it is okay that you are leaving and staying away from them for a week.’ (Ruth, late 40s)
Since childcare services do not cover the needs of these women, the women had to find other solutions to deal with their childcare issues. Some described the work-life balance as a situation in which they took on less care responsibilities for family and children. This narrative challenged the two-track parenthood model where the mother is supposed to take the main responsibility. Like Sørensen’s (2017) ‘failing (career) mothers’, these women probably risked being perceived as prioritizing their career and failing at motherhood. However, in their (non-judgemental) narratives (different from the judgemental tendency in the media discourses Sørensen analyzed), women described how they were dependent on other support. As one of our participants said: “If it had been only me, it would not have worked out” (Laila, 40s).
‘Fortunately I had a man that used to do at least as much I used to do at home.’ (Mari, 40s)
‘My husband was very good at staying home. He has helped out there, and he is still the one making dinner at home. He has taken that over
more and more, and now I don’t even know what we’re having for dinner.’ (Ellen, 50s)
Among our interviewees, there were also examples of dual-career couples who both had greedy careers. In these cases, support from other close relatives was needed to help supplement the care for family and children, such as the women’s parents: “My husband also has a demanding job. He is travelling and away a lot as well, and then we have my mother and father. … My father, he is still working, but he is working from home. He is looking after them [the children] a lot” (Laila, 40s).
The aforementioned examples involve two generations of dual-career couples and a grandfather solving work-life challenges, thanks to work arrangements that make him available for the children. However, this example is different from Pedersen and Egeland’s study (2020) showing how grandparents contribute by helping to unburden families’ everyday lives in relation to care, as here the grandparents contributed by making an intensive work culture possible.
Among our interviewees, aside from one case of a male partner who became a stay-at-home dad to support his wife’s career, it was not the women’s flexible working practices that helped, but something different: their partners had stable work positions with flexible and predictable hours and little or no work-related travel. Ellen, one participant, described her partner’s work pattern as follows: “My husband has not changed his job much. He has not had jobs where he had to travel. If he also had a job where he had to travel a lot, things would have been much more difficult. He was always at home” (Ellen, 50s).
For our participants, it was not only the partners with flexible working hours who dropped off and picked up children from school that solved work and care conflicts, it was also the husbands who did not travel much and were available out of office hours, and the fathers who took extra leave. The women interviewed here identified their partners’ flexible working hours as a support, so long as the work remained within and did not exceed either standard work times or a standard number of hours. Here men take on conventionally feminine roles of child- and other domestic care, thereby re-gendering care work and their role in the household. This happened only when the male partners had flexible and predictable working hours and used this to take on more care responsibilities at home.
Not having support in the private sphere
As many as two thirds of the women in our study mentioned family as a barrier to their career though they described this as a conscious choice. This narrative fits well with the dominant two-track model. Family could
Although this narrative is reminiscent of the ‘good mother’ or home-centred woman narratives (Hakim, 2006; Sørensen, 2017) where the woman is often portrayed as a part-time worker and traceable in national statistics, these women were holding full-time positions in ICT but nonetheless spoke of prioritizing family over work and feeling that they were opting out: “I turn down travelling because I am away so much already. So, I avoided most of the travelling I could have done” (Karen, 40s).
‘The fact that I have chosen to have four children means that I cannot just take any job. That has to do with priorities. It was wanted and conscious. I could have chosen or prioritized differently.’ (Bente, 40s)
‘Every time you have a child … I’ve never been promoted or gotten a pay raise when I’ve been on [maternity] leave. … So, you stagnate a bit. (Lise, 30s)
‘If you ask what barriers there are for me to be working more, then that [family] is it. If I had made other priorities, I could have been a professor. If you want to climb, you have to work more than one hundred per cent. I refrain from many things because I have a family and want to be with them, and that prevents me from climbing in the system.’ (Karen, 40s)
These women’s version of work-life ‘balance’ disguises the cost of prioritizing family over career-driving activities, costs that have notable and long-term
Discussion
While work-life balance policies take for granted that flexibility at work implies working less during office hours in order to spend time with family, the women in our study that spoke about this mostly described working more, with longer days, working odd hours and more travelling. Flexibility in greedy work cultures is not just a simple adjustment of work time and place. Rather, flexibility institutes working more than full-time as the norm. This conflicts with family responsibilities even if women do not ‘prioritize’ family. In contrast to literature suggesting that the discourse of work-life balance contributes to women’s self-investment in both career and mothering (Rottenberg, 2018), the women in our study described a work pattern that indicates work invading private space and where ensuring a work-life balance was an individual responsibility (Gregory and Milner, 2009), relying on resources from the private sphere.
The co-production of work and family – evident in our interviewees’ claims of prioritizing family while engaged in full-time work – indicates that working ‘only’ full-time was seen as limiting one’s career development. This resonates with research showing that women in ICT feel the need to adopt a work style and long working hours that are said to be associated with men (Watts, 2009). It also indicates a greedy work culture with intense achievement targets and expectations of constant availability (Brandth and Kvande, 2005).
The work-life balance discourse’s focus on time management and choice seems too narrow to precisely capture women’s negotiation between work and family. As Biese and Choroszewicz (2019) point out, the issue of opting out has often been associated with women who leave the work force altogether. However, our participants’ feeling of having to ‘opt out’ indicates that success in their work environments requires more than full-time commitment.
Hakim suggests that part-time working mothers are in danger of losing the competition with full-time workers due to the momentum of knowledge and experience full-time workers obtain (2006). However, Hakim’s dividing line between part-time and full-time work is too optimistic for women working
Despite two-track parenthood being the main gender norm that is meant to help create a work-life balance in Norway (Ellingsæter, 2006), with equally shared parenting as the ideal (Pedersen and Egeland, 2020), in reality only private support enables the continuation of a two-track parenthood model. Here gender norms of care are re-done when men take more responsibility for children and family along the lines of the traditional female role. Not only the stay-at-home dad, but also partners with more flexible and predictable work hours were key to solving the work-life time squeeze and giving priority to women’s careers. This might indicate changes in how couples negotiate and find arrangements for work and family, allowing women to develop a career. However, the re-gendering of two-track parenthood does not challenge the greedy work style that Padavic et al (2019) identify as the main obstacle to gender equality in working life, especially in ICT work.
Conclusion
Norway is often seen as having one of the world’s most family-friendly policies (Seierstad and Kirton, 2015). Our study illustrates that even in Norway, the available public childcare and work-life balance solutions are not sufficient to support women in greedy work cultures such as ICT. From a work-life balance policy perspective, using flexible working conditions as a way to keep women in paid work has been a success. Our findings support a growing acceptance of women developing their careers (Metz-Goeckel, 2018). However, most women experience that they are required to work analogous to men’s career development to achieve a career. Our study suggests an urgent need to reorient work-life discussions more towards career-life policies and solutions that acknowledge the challenges of greedy work styles.
As flexible working conditions are more often used by women working in ICT than in other occupations (EIGE, 2018), we need to look beyond the discourse of flexible working hours to truly understand what women’s claims of prioritizing family in a greedy work culture really entail. Our informants’ voices were united in describing how their career development required private support. Indeed, a male partner’s predictable and less greedy work pattern, not work-life balance policies targeting women, was the main factor enabling women to combine work and family responsibilities in ICT research, development and innovation. The future of flexible working conditions that can function in favour of women’s careers in the fields of ICT depend on changes in attitudes towards traditional gender patterns of work-family arrangements. This study’s participants suggest that this is in
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