257–78. equality diversity and inclusion at work

41 3. Cultural conl icts and commonalities: researching work– life balance for women university staf in the UK and Japan Diana Woodward INTRODUCTION Two events of considerable personal signii cance will happen towards the end of this year, 2008, in which I am writing this piece. One of them is my imminent retirement from university employment. My working life, and much of my social life, has been spent in the world of higher education since escaping from the constraints of rural life at the age of 17 to go away to university. The other major event will be the demise of the Through the Glass Ceiling Network of women in higher education management, an organisation with which I have been closely involved since its formation. Now, in its 18th year, the network will simultaneously come of age and become defunct. In its early years it provided peer support and access to expert knowledge for the i rst generation of women to reach university management positions in any number. At the time of its formation in 1990 very few women had ever headed a large UK higher education institution, and many of the i rst few female Deans and heads of department appointed felt isolated and in need of peer support Glasner, 2005. However, in recent times the organisation has struggled to recruit and retain enough members to warrant employing professional administrators. Given the intensii cation of managerial roles in higher education, even committed members have been i nding it ever harder to make the time to participate in its events, and also to get them funded as staf development. Some poten- tial members undoubtedly now see it as self-indulgent or even irrelevant to meet as a women-only group, rejecting its ‘soft feminism’ ethos. Perhaps they have a point. In quantitative terms it is no longer as unusual to i nd women heading universities and colleges, or occupying senior manage- ment posts, as it was in Autumn 1987 when a woman colleague and I war- ranted a half-page photograph in the Times Higher Education Supplement 42 Equality, diversity and inclusion at work the UK’s weekly higher education newspaper when we were appointed two of the i ve faculty Deans at our institution. However, whether the still rather modest numerical shift in the gender balance of university senior management has brought a commensurate change in organisational cul- tures and corporate values is less clear. The i nal research project of my academic career, on which this chapter is based, is a qualitative study of work–life balance based on interviews with women employed in UK and Japanese universities as department heads, academics or senior administrators. It has provided an opportunity for me to rel ect on my 40-year association with higher education, observ- ing the changing place of women staf and students in the academy, assess- ing the impact of their growing representation, and raising questions about promoting workplace equality and the future for work–life balance. My enduring research interest, since my doctorate, has been in the status and experiences of women in tertiary education, in employment and leisure. Recent publications include a co-edited collection for Through the Glass Ceiling of senior women academics’ life stories David and Woodward, 1998 and a research-based guide to managing equal opportunities in higher education Woodward and Ross, 2000. Having completed the UK-based project Woodward, 2007, where my informants and I largely shared a similar world, I wanted to extend it by comparing the experiences of the women heads of department in UK universities with those of women in an apparently similar work situ- ation, but in a very dif erent cultural setting. The obvious comparison was with women in management posts in Japanese universities and col- leges. The nature and demands of these roles were likely to be broadly similar between the two countries. However, as a sociologist I expected to i nd that women’s employment situation in Japan would be very dif- ferent, as would gender relations within households, because of its notori- ously workaholic and gender-segregated culture Mouer and Kawanishi, 2005. Like some other contributors to this volume, my research has often provided an opportunity to explore how others were coping with the same pressures that daily faced me. My preferred research method for small projects such as these is the unstructured interview, where informants ‘tell you their stories’ concerning a series of related topics. They are conducted woman-to-woman, rather than in the hierarchical expert-to-non-expert manner, with an implicit feminist-inspired assumption of shared experi- ences Oakley,1981; Maynard and Purvis, 1994; Few et al., 2003. The challenge, for the Japanese part of my study, lay in trying to establish the extent of our shared experiences and the dif erences between my inform- ants’ worlds and my own. I wanted to understand how they integrated the Researching work–life balance for women university staf : UK and Japan 43 various parts of their lives and their levels of satisfaction with whatever work–life balance they had established. The substantive results of the Japanese part of this study will be pub- lished later. This chapter will explore the challenges of doing cross-cultural qualitative research into equality and diversity, based on this UKJapan project. It concludes with an assessment of the scope to improve work–life balance for women and men in university employment in both countries through governments’ and employers’ policies and practices. WOMEN’S EMPLOYMENT IN THE UK AND JAPAN Although women’s labour force participation rates, especially mothers’, have increased in both the UK and Japan since the Second World War, there are substantial dif erences between the two countries. Looking i rst at the UK, the labour market has been transformed in the past 20 years, with a dramatic increase in the proportion of women in paid employment, especially the mothers of young children Taylor, 2002; Houston, 2005. By 2001, 72 per cent of women of working age were gainfully employed, including 57 per cent of the mothers with children aged under i ve Dench et al., 2002. Due to the relatively weak statutory regulation of employ- ment in the UK, British women have the second-highest rate of part-time employment in Europe after the Netherlands, whereas UK full-time workers especially men have the second-longest average weekly working hours Crompton and Lyonette, 2006; Walby, 2007. This pattern is no accident, nor is it unaf ected by gender. If one partner works long hours, someone else in the household has to take responsibility for providing domestic labour, or to manage the purchase of these services. This may also restrict their own working hours. However, part-time work in the UK is disproportionately low paid and low skilled, exacerbating labour market inequalities and undermining national productivity. For all sorts of reasons which appear rational or ‘natural’ within households, such as men’s typically higher remuneration, gender segregation in the workplace and social norms about childcare, men are more likely than women to subscribe to the ‘long working hours’ culture and to prioritise their own career development. Historically there has been scant state provision for working mothers and carers in the UK, but the election of the ‘New Labour’ government in 1997 made family policy an important part of the political agenda. Its objective of reducing child poverty has been pursued through ef orts to increase parental employment rates, and providing allowances for child- care costs and cash benei ts to low-paid parents Crompton and Lyonette, 44 Equality, diversity and inclusion at work 2006. Recent legislation has extended parents’ employment rights, but often these merely provide the right to request l exible working arrange- ments as opposed to a legal entitlement and the provision for paid parental leave remains meagre in comparison with Scandinavia Gallie, 2003. However, there are signs that growing numbers of employers are responding to the spirit of family-friendly legislation by of ering more l ex- ible working patterns and parental leave Hayward et al., 2007. Workers’ age at retirement is expected to rise as a result of recent age- discrimination legislation and the upward adjustment of women’s age of receiving a state pension from 60 to 65 years by 2020. As Walby points out 2007, this will increase women’s labour force participation and also help alleviate female poverty in old age due to inadequate occupational pensions resulting from interrupted careers, part-time employment and low pay. This legislation is part of a raft of new laws, government policies and quasi-governmental organisations established over the 30 years since the Sex Discrimination Act in 1976 to promote social equality and diversity. However, according to the Equal Opportunities Commission 2007, progress is ‘painfully slow’ with women still ‘woefully under-represented’ in national and local government, in company boardrooms and in senior posts within the law, the media, the civil service and the military. Ethnic minority women, according to the report, are still largely invisible in public life, and the pay gap between British men and women workers is one of the highest in Europe. The report blames the male-dominated culture of busi- ness and the professions for resisting l exible working practices, making it dii cult for women to combine motherhood with the development of their career. Another recent survey found that progress towards gender equality in the division of domestic labour was stalling, even where both partners worked, possibly as a result of fathers’ career ambitions and long working hours Crompton et al., 2005. Although the rhetoric of equality may not have been matched by achievements in the 30 years since the UK Equal Pay legislation of the 1970s, in Japan even public rhetoric is largely unrepentantly hostile to gender equality McNicol, 2006. Historically Japanese society espoused, until the American Occupation after the Second World War, strongly held notions of i lial duty with little regard for individual human rights, let alone women’s rights or gender equality Usui et al., 2003. Women only gained full political rights after the war. However, the dominant political party’s policies and companies’ employment practices remained i rmly rooted in the ideology of ‘good wife, wise mother’, coni ning women to a secondary role in the labour market. A tightly organised cross-institutional male elite, coupled with a societal reluctance to criticise authority, hindered women’s