How do you take time? Work–life balance policies versus neoliberal,social and cultural incentive mechanisms in Icelandic higher education

Abstract

It is suggested that the realization of work–life balance policies at the University of Iceland is compromised by an emphasis on neoliberal notions of growth and performance measurements in the form of new public management strategies. This is sustained by overt and covert incentive mechanisms, which in turn create a range of different gendered implications for academic staff. The results from semi-structured interviews suggest that while this tension field affects all academic staff, it is generally less favourable to women than to men. If women were granted time for the sake of family obligations, they risked a setback in their academic career due to decreased research activity. Women tended to view academic flexibility as an opportunity to engage in domestic responsibilities more so than men; and male interviewees tended to view the prioritization of family as a choice, while women tended to view it as a condition.

Keywords

Gender incentive mechanisms neoliberalism new public management work–life balance

Introduction

The new public management tradition, which has its ideological basis in a neoliberal focus on isolated individual emancipation in a free market system, stands in sharp contrast to policies on gender equality which are traditionally built on an understanding of inequality as being rooted in larger systems of power. We suspect that when two so vastly different policy-making discourses are supposed to drive forward the development of the modern university, this must not only create tension but also must necessarily favour one over the other due to their mutual incompatibilty. In the Icelandic context we find an example of this seemingly mutually exclusive tension field between the University of Iceland’s points-based evaluation system on the one hand, and its work–life balance policies on the other. The points-based evaluation system at the University of Iceland means that researchers are awarded points for their publications according the status and prestige of the journal in which they publish. These points, in turn, are then used to calculate when a researcher deserves promotion or a permanent position.

In this article we want to explore the gendered implications of the processes by which work–life balance policies function under conditions influenced by underlying incentive mechanisms for early-career academics at the University of Iceland. This is a midsized research university, founded in 1911, with a student body of 13,052 (34% men, 66% women) in 2014 and a total of 728 full-time equivalent staff (56% men, 44% women) (University of Iceland, 2015).

The realization of work–life balance policies at the University of Iceland is challenged by an emphasis on neoliberal notions of growth and performance measurements. This process, we would argue, is sustained by what one might call incentive mechanisms. In the context of this article, an incentive mechanism is regarded as a structural contraption that functions parallel to, or lies behind, an official policy or statement as part of an organization’s basic structure and creates contradictory yet inevitable outcomes. Incentive mechanisms can be overt and formal and/or based on neoliberal market governance (e.g. a points system), covert and informal (e.g. peer pressure), or based on broader cultural traditions or social practices (e.g. patriarchy). Throughout this paper we will discuss examples showing how some academics are incentivized by neoliberal, social and cultural means to spend less time with their families, to become ideal workers by accepting and participating in the long-hours culture of academia, to constantly publish, and to live up to the gendered expectations of society in their work lives. While all of these mechanisms may be discussed separately, it is important to note that they also intersect. As such, it is not possible, for example, to separate the broader gendered expectations of society from the way in which academic women in particular might find it more difficult to balance family life with the long-hours culture of academia.

While we focus on a single academic institution, we hope that this contribution might inspire broader and more in-depth musings about the role of policy in higher education more generally.

Neoliberalism and greedy institutions

Even though the neoliberalization of higher education is a topic that continues to generate public debate (e.g. Eagleton, 2015; Chomsky, 2014; Fish, 2009), a fairly large body of scholarly literature has long put to rest any doubt about its existence (e.g. Walsh, 2013; Ward, 2012; Ginsberg, 2011; Newfield, 2008; Torres and Schugurensky, 2002). As a political ideology, neoliberalism is popularly defined as ‘a philosophy in which the existence and operation of a market are valued in themselves … and where the operation of a market … is seen as an ethic in itself’ (Treanor, 2005). Following this logic, higher education is reduced to functioning in terms of economic production, part of which has been the implementation of new public management strategies. Amongst other things, these strategies emphasize performance-based policies, replacing notions of public interest with an emphasis on individual academics as rational self-interested economic agents (Olssen and Peters, 2010). This is part of a broader trend in global economic development towards an emphasis on international reputation and inclusion in formalized ranking systems. As such, following the new neoliberal tradition of encouraging market competitiveness in (former) public service institutions, international universities are now in a constant race to become the next Harvard or be included in the Times Higher Education Supplement (Feller, 2008), which has led universities to adopt formal and quantifiable performance measurement systems (Deem and Brehony, 2007; Priest et al., 2002; Deem, 2001).

This neoliberalist movement in higher education towards formalized performance-based success criteria has arguably helped turn modern universities into what Coser (1974) termed ‘greedy institutions’; that is, institutions which seek to gain the full and undivided attention of their workers by subtly preventing them from fulfilling familial obligations or engaging in social activities outside of their institutional role. Currie et al. (2000) explored the nature of universities as greedy institutions by exposing a top-down masculinist discourse that seeks to normalize high workloads and prime commitment to the university. So powerful and subtle is this discourse that institutions manage to bring about voluntary compliance in its members/workers (De Campo, 2013). Santos and Cabral-Cardosa (2008) argued that a transformation of universities into greedy institutions has taken place across the European continent, leading to intensification of work and – in their local Portuguese context – to the establishment of career programmes premised on men’s career paths.

Acker and Armenti (2004) explored this from a feminist perspective, showing that women academics develop a range of coping strategies in order to keep up with institutional demands, many of which include simply falling in line with these demands by working more and sleeping less. As such, the greedy university favours a ‘care-less worker’, that is, a person with little or no familial obligation, which, in our current social structure, should be taken to mean those who generally are male (Grummell et al., 2009). In contrast, mothers in academia find themselves positioned within the contradictory discourses of the ‘good mother’ and the ‘successful academic’ (Raddon, 2001), but even academic non-mothers are influenced by the social ideology of motherhood and are often expected to show extra levels of care or put in extra hours at work because they do not have children (Ramsay and Letherby, 2006).

The University of Iceland has not been immune to this development. In 2006 this particular university set the ‘long-term objective of becoming one of the 100 best universities in the world’ (University of Iceland, 2006). Given that the University of Iceland is based in a tiny island nation, the idea that it would, in just a few years, be counted among the likes of Harvard and Princeton might seem somewhat far-fetched or, in the words of Ársælsson, perhaps a sign of ‘delusions of grandeur’ (Ársælsson, 2011: 9). Nevertheless, the action plan for reaching this seemingly unattainable goal was set in motion. The process included, among other things, a plan to ‘Increase research activity and quality of research [and] increase [the] number of papers published in respected international peer-reviewed journals … by 100% by the year-end 2011’ (University of Iceland, 2006). When the policy was due for revision, in 2011, much of this rhetoric was toned down, perhaps partly due to widespread disbelief among academic staff about the prospects of the policy succeeding (Ársælsson, 2011). Nevertheless, the university continued to outline ‘specific goals on research and innovation’ (University of Iceland, 2006), which meant creating an assessment system for research in order to give greater weight to prestigious publications, adding to the already complicated Evaluation System for Public Universities (University of Iceland, 2013). Without going into very intricate details, this new system of assessment placed most of its emphasis on research, which meant that an employee’s chances of promotion or increased salary now relied almost entirely on them being able to produce large quantities of research suitable for international peer-reviewed journals.

Curiously, at the same time as the University of Iceland operates according to ambitious new public management strategies, part of its narrative also relies on an image of Iceland itself as a gender equality utopia, perhaps in no small part thanks to Iceland’s continuous Number 1 ranking on the Global Gender Gap Index (World Economic Forum, 2015). While it is certain that Iceland is no feminist paradise (Rudólfsdóttir, 2014), it is perhaps not surprising that the University of Iceland, as an international research university, would attempt to live up to this ambitious standard, especially so given Iceland’s sensational reputation in international media as the world’s foremost feminist stronghold (e.g. Iceland Monitor, 2015; Noman, 2015; O’Leary, 2014; Cochrane, 2011; Bindel, 2010). A cursory glance at its official policy does indeed reveal a university that ‘always wants to be at the forefront of gender equality’ (University of Iceland, 2011: 5). This is reflected in the university’s policies on work–life balance. While the university does not have a policy with the words ‘work–life balance’ in it per se, policies relating to the subject are nonetheless reflective of the university’s commitment to gender equality issues and can be found in the staff handbook, its Equal Rights Policy (University of Iceland, 2014) and in its Human Resource Policy (University of Iceland, 2004).

Early-career academics

We were interested in exploring what the structural adherence to new public management principles does to the realization of these work–life balance policies for early-career academics. We suspected that this group might be particularly vulnerable to the demanding inner structure of the greedy institution that is the modern university because of the added burden of, for example, employment instability in this period (Fusulier et al., 2013). Among other examples, Fox and Stephan (2001) showed that both academic field and gender were strongly tied to the ways in which women and men in STEM fields predicted their career prospects vis-à-vis the reality of these careers. Moguérou (2004) has shown that among French PhD graduates married women are less likely to take up a postdoctoral position than men; and, in a US context, Wolfinger et al. (2009) showed that women PhD graduates were disproportionately likely to accept badly paid adjunct positions than were men. We hope to contribute to this growing body of literature by providing an insight into how early-career academics tackle work–life balance issues in particular.

Conceptualizing work–life balance

Work–life balance is itself a contested term. It has been suggested that it hints at a relationship between life and work that assumes the two aspects not to be integral to one another, and that the term places the responsibility for social change on individuals rather than on structural inequalities (Burke, 2004). While this might be true, and while alternative terms such as ‘work–personal life integration’ (Lewis, 2003) or ‘work–life harmony’ (McMillan, 2011) might more accurately reflect the conceptualization to which we adhere in our context, the fact of the matter is that no new alternative terminology has managed to gain widespread popularity in the literature. Therefore, as did Gregory and Milner (2011), we choose to retain ‘the original, long-standing, and easily-understood term’ (Gregory and Miller, 2011: 2) and provide our own conceptualization in the following.

The period of the last 20 years has seen an explosion of research into work–life balance issues, including a substantial array of different conceptualizations (Marks and MacDermid, 1996; Clark, 2000; Frone, 2003; Greenhaus et al., 2003; Grzywacz and Carlson, 2007; Kalliath and Brough, 2008; Brough and O’Driscoll, 2010). While all of these conceptualizations have each been the basis of valuable insight into work–life balance issues, they also have one other thing in common – that they are largely gender-blind. Indeed, as Emslie and Hunt (2009) correctly pointed out, ‘Many contemporary studies of work and home life either ignore gender or take it for granted’ (Emslie and Hunt, 2009, 152).

In fact, one might go so far as to say that these early concepts of work–life balance have neoliberal underpinnings, in that they respect individual priorities for spending more or less time at home or at work, thus making the individual solely responsible for their work–life situation rather than the existence of systemic and structural inequalities. We define work–life balance as those instances when organizational structures facilitate substantial time for involvement both at work and at home in a way that seeks to challenge existing gendered hierarchies in the organization and society more broadly. In this way we situate our own conceptualization of work–life balance within the framework of a larger paradigm shift in the literature that Moen (2015) terms the ‘institutional/organizational turn’ (e.g. Hobson, 2014; Milkman and Appelbaum, 2013; Williams and Dempsey, 2014) in which work–life balance issues are seen as ‘lodged not in individuals but rather in different … organizational policies and practices’ (Moen, 2015: 177). This opens up the possibility of a gendered analysis of contradictions between work–life balance policies and organizational practice at the University of Iceland.

Work–life balance specifically in academia is a notion that has been linked to occupational stress among UK academics (Tytherleigh et al., 2005; Kinman and Jones (2008), and something which in South Africa ‘contribute[s] significantly to [the] ill health of academics’ (Barkhuizen and Rothmann, 2008: 321). This has also been confirmed in Icelandic and Australian contexts, where work–life balance is further complicated by the reliance on e-technologies in academia (Heijstra and Rafnsdóttir, 2010; Currie and Eveline, 2011). While Doherty (2006) reported some success with an action research approach to improve work–life balance conditions for UK academics by involving an ‘organisation’s members in the various stages of problem diagnosis, planning and taking action’ (Doherty, 2006: 253), it was ultimately concluded that ‘a sustainable WLB [work–life balance] is hard to achieve [because] academics experience a long hours culture’ (Doherty, 2006: 254). While there might be many explanations as to why the culture of stress associated with extensive workloads continues to persist in academia, we would like to suggest that a solution is to be found not only in the implementation of work–life balance policy, but also in a critical inclination towards the incentive mechanisms that underpin higher education in general.

The function of policy

While it would be fairly simple to measure work–life balance policies at the University of Iceland against the reality of new public management programmes, this, however, is not how policy-making works. While a policy might be defined as a deliberate set of basic values, principles and guidelines containing detail to a greater or lesser extent, formulated by the governing body of an organization, a policy hardly ever reflects the current reality of the organization; neither is it supposed to fulfil this role. Rather, it is useful to think of a policy as a plan or a vision for what an organization aspires to be. In this way, policies and policy-making are arguably important parts of any organization’s self-envisioning process. But even though perfect implementation is unattainable (Hogwood and Gunn, 1997), a good policy should, in the hands of the right people, at least stand a fighting chance of being implemented to a somewhat satisfactory degree. It is, however, no secret that some policies might, for one reason or the other, be ‘ill adapted to the real world’ (Hill, 1997: 3). A policy may fail to engage people’s moral purpose, their sense of capacity building and understanding of the change process (Fullan, 2006), or it may fall victim to a range of different resistance strategies (Malen, 2006), including those difficult situations when administrators and stakeholders ‘view [a policy] program, or their specific contributions to it, as contrary to their interests’ (Weimer and Vining, 1992: 329) or when local line managers go against policy directives in an effort to secure desired knowledge production outcomes.

Methodology

In order to explore the relationship between policy and practice at the University of Iceland, we relied upon selected university polices in addition to the outcomes of semi-structured interviews collected for the GARCIA project, a project supported by the European Union 7th Framework Programme which plans to map and analyse the gender dimension at different organizational levels in seven European institutions of higher education (see http://garciaproject.eu/ for details of the project).

Data collection

Our research focuses on an analysis of policies related to work–life balance at the University of Iceland, and the staff handbook. While official policies were found via the university website, the staff handbook was in our physical possession. We also collected qualitative data using an interviewing process with 20 current and 12 former academic employees at the university, with a focus on early-career academics. The first listed author (TB Smidt) carried out the interviews and will be referred to as the ‘researcher’ hereafter. The decision to interview both current and former employees was motivated by the prospect of juxtaposing those ‘outside the system’ with those still working within it.

Participants representing the group of current academic employees were found via a search on the University of Iceland website. E-mail invitations were sent to potential participants and interviews were conducted with those who agreed to participate. Because the University of Iceland does not keep records of employee departures, former academic employees were found via word of mouth; they received the same e-mail as the first group of participants. Semi-structured interviews based on a structured interview guide were carried out with all participants. The guide posed questions relating to individual trajectory, organization of work, wellbeing, work–life balance, career development and perspectives on the future. Interviews were mainly conducted in English: four were conducted in Icelandic and these have been translated into English for the purpose of this present article. Of the 20 current academic employees, 11 were from the School of Social Sciences (eight women, three men) and nine were from the School of Engineering and Natural Sciences (five women, four men). Of the 12 former academic employees, five were employed at the School of Social Sciences (two women, three men), and seven were from the School of Engineering and Natural Sciences (five women, two men). Participants were not sampled particularly because they had families; but, interestingly, it was the case that 27 of 32 participants were parents. Of these, 16 were women and 11 were men. In 2014 in Iceland, the average birth rate was 79 per 1000 population and the average age for first-time parents in 2015 was 27 for women and 30 for men (Statistics Iceland, 2014).

Data analysis

Official university policies as well as the staff handbook were subjected to a content analysis so that all categories relating to work–life balance were mapped out. These were then subjected to a discourse analysis aimed at distilling their content to five main principles that were then measured against our interview data. All our interviews were transcribed and uploaded to Atlas.ti coding software. Our first cycle of coding was open-ended and consisted of encoding the most prevalent categories, in order to gain the necessary overview that would lead to further questions about the data (Coffey and Atkinson, 1996). After the first cycle of coding, a pattern began to emerge, and so our process of axial coding (the second cycle) consisted of connecting categories according to conditions, context and consequences in an effort to gain an in-depth understanding. Finally, we selected core categories and systematically compared and related them to one another in order to confirm or disconfirm different categorical relationships (Strauss and Corbin, 1990; Saldana, 2009). Given that the University of Iceland is a very tightly woven research community, we have made strenuous efforts to ensure the anonymity of participants; and, accordingly, throughout our analysis of interviews participants are referred to by pseudonym, gender and broad academic affiliation only. In those cases when a string of experiences elaborated by one participant might have revealed their identity, a different pseudonym was used.

Results

The UI staff handbook mentions the possibility for employees (not just academics) to work flexible hours, insofar as they deliver a 40-hour working week, and that coffee (etc) breaks (set at 15–20 minutes per day) can be skipped in favour of fulfilling these working hours within a shorter time period. The University of Iceland Human Resource Policy (University of Iceland, 2004) has a clause entitled ‘Working hours and family responsibilities’ in which it is emphasized that the university is strongly opposed to the notion of excessive workloads, and wants to ensure that employees have enough time to rest. We have distilled below all relevant information on work–life balance from the staff handbook and the human resource policy into five main principles.

The university endeavours to provide the conditions employees need to coordinate their professional and familial obligations.

Employees shall be offered the chance of a temporary time commitment reduction if familial obligation demands it.

This shall not affect their professional advancement.

Employees shall be offered flexible working hours if familial obligation demands it.

The university encourages fathers to make use of the opportunities to coordinate professional and familial obligation.

In what follows we will begin our analysis of the gendered implications that follow the general non-implementation of work–life balance policy arising as a result of neoliberal incentive mechanisms. We will do so while continuously referring back to these five principles.

The ideal academic and gendered guilt

The first principle might be interpreted as the university’s overall vision: it wishes to establish conditions, or an atmosphere, which will help employees obtain a satisfactory work–life balance. If we juxtapose this sentiment with our interviewee experiences, the policy is already at odds with the university’s fundamental structure, because the atmosphere at the university, as described by research participants, is a far cry from that which it seeks to promote. For example, on a day-to-day basis, Baldur, a former SSH adjunct, stated that, ‘you always sort of get the nagging feeling that if you’re taking time with your family, that you are neglecting work’. Baldur’s experience indicates a work environment in which employees are made to feel guilty for being with their families rather than a ‘work environment, which enables [you] to coordinate … work with family life’ (University of Iceland, 2014). Nanna, a STEM post-doctoral member of staff, pointed out how implausible it was to live up to the – now normalized – academic working hours:

I have a [small child] and before I had him I was working very long hours and every weekend … But now I try to be here at around 8 [am] and pick him up at — around 3 or 3.30 [pm]… so of course we can’t work as much.

Nanna was accustomed to putting in a much more extensive workload and thus likely to produce more research, increasing the likelihood of advancing her career. However, with the arrival of children, this became more difficult to achieve. Magnús, another STEM post-doc, emphasized further the impact family responsibilities have on the academic’s ability to deliver a long workday:

If you have a family here, then you’re not going to be working 10 hour days, or you’re less likely to, but if you have nothing in particular … you might as well stay here a little longer and you might as well come here on the weekends rather than staying home and do nothing.

Certainly, it is unfair to assume, as Magnús does, that academics without children stay home and do nothing. However, the underlying assumption he makes here is that people with families are not able to fulfil the workload expected of an academic. Moreover, in reflecting on pressure from work, Ósk – another STEM post-doc – pointed out that,

My workday is from 8 to 5. I work 100% those 9 hours per day. [Eyes wide open, visibly angry] There is not room for 100% more. Then I don’t have a life! Is that the kind of person you want to hire?

Tragically, the answer to Ósk’s question might be ‘yes’. There seems to be an expectation that an academic without family puts in a significant amount of work that goes beyond the specifications of a standard full-time contract. As such, workplaces may be constructed in such a way as to favour engagement in paid work as the primary responsibility of ideal workers (Kelly et al., 2010) who have to show engagement and devotion to their jobs (Blair-Loy and Wharton, 2002). While ideal workers are not necessarily male and do not necessarily embody a masculine ethos (Tienari et al., 2002), they inhabit traits of commitment and presence at the job rather than at home with their families (Cooper, 2000; Gambles et al., 2006). The same appears to be true for how priorities of work–life balance are constructed at the University of Iceland, where one informal incentive mechanism is the likelihood of faster academic advancement and thus more prestige and higher salary if one does not have a family. In this way, the notion of the ideal academic, which arguably can be said to enhance the effect of neoliberalization in higher education, stands in stark contrast to the very idea of having a work–life balance policy in the first place.

It is important to note that academics experience incentive mechanisms differently. For example, with regard to spending less time with one’s family, women appeared to be visibly more affected than men, in that women experienced a clear double bind in which incentive mechanisms pulled at them both from home and from work.

When Baldur explained the ‘nagging feeling’ he gets when spending time with his family (see above), he is expressing the sense of guilt that sometimes follows the notion of the ideal academic, someone constantly working towards meeting deadlines, living up to teaching responsibilities and producing a large quantity of research. Among our interviewees, however, Baldur was an exception. When notions of guilt in relation to balancing work and family life emerged as a theme in our interviews, this was experienced mostly by academic women.

Speaking of the pressure to be constantly publishing, Bára, an SSH assistant professor, expressed it thus: ‘If you are constantly working, how do you take care of yourself and your family? How do you take time? … I find it difficult always feeling guilty because I could always do more’. In Bára’s case, guilt in relation to one’s family arose from pressure from work; but this guilt may also be linked directly to lack of family contact, as in the case of Aðalbjörg, an SSH assistant professor, who said that even though she had ‘very good support from home’, she still had her ‘own conscience to deal with in terms of not spending time with my children, but you know … you can always do better and [I have] to stop beating myself up for not being everywhere for everybody all the time’. Whereas Bára expressed her guilt as stemming from work (‘you can always do more research’), Aðalbjörg’s guilt stemmed from her own troubled conscience in relation to her family (‘you can always do better’). This conversation also brought into question what it means to have adequate support from home in relation to work.

While it is entirely possible to have a family that backs you up in your attempts to advance your career, as was the case with Aðalbjörg, this does not soothe your own troubled conscience. In this way, incentive mechanisms are also embodied in broader cultural/social expectations about who we are and what we ought to do. In relation to work–life balance, these expectations are gendered. In fact, despite substantial gains in the realm of gender equality, it would seem that Walby’s statement that ‘a woman today considering employment decisions will be constrained by her domestic circumstances’ (Walby, 1990: 56) remains largely true. In addition, as others have shown, guilt is linked to perceptions of feminine gender roles (Benetti-McQuoid and Bursik, 2005), especially in the interplay between work and family, where it becomes an integral feature of everyday life (Elvin-Nowak, 1999). Steinunn, an SSH adjunct, confirmed this notion when she explained that young women in her department ‘have this bad conscience … The guilt is always present … [they] have to be at work and have a career, but to do that [they] need to give up something at home and then the guilt becomes more’.

Moreover, Dagbjört, an SSH assistant professor said that while it ‘…doesn’t reflect really well on me, I didn’t even take maternity leave because of work and because of financial circumstances … I’ve gotten a lot of comments from society – people really feel that women should take maternity leave.’ Seen in context, this is yet another example of how guilt is gendered in relation to work–life balance, and how this guilt is created by cultural/social incentive mechanisms. In this case, even though Dagbjört ended up choosing not to take maternity leave, there was clear social pressure on her to do so; that is, despite the prospect of not having to deal with how society all too often judges those women who do not choose family over everything else, and in choosing to go against the grain, she received ‘a lot of comments from society’.

No considerations

We now turn to the second principle regarding the ability of employees to have the opportunity of a temporary reduction in work-time commitment if familial obligations demanded it. Nanna recalls a conflict she had with a local line manager when she was pregnant:

I was having a lot of work load and was not coping, and I kind of broke down and I was saying that I was having too much work and it was not taken seriously I think, but then soon after that I got health problems and I think then he realized the seriousness of this and he’s been very nice after that.

It is very striking to observe how, when a pregnant woman had a breakdown, the default reaction was to not take her seriously until she started experiencing health problems. Insofar as we consider a pregnancy part of familial obligation, it is clear that in this case Nanna was not able to obtain a reduction in work-time commitment, and so her personal experience directly contradicts the second principle. Again, it is important to emphasize that a policy is a vision or a guiding light, not a reassurance of how day-to-day reality is supposed to play out. To say that Nanna’s experience contradicts official policy is not to say that the policy is inadequate. However, there was a reason for the organization to keep Nanna at work – so that she could continue to turn out research – and there was informal pressure on Nanna to emulate the ideal academic as described above. Ultimately, Nanna took a break from work, acting on the promise of official policy because her superior came to his senses. Dísa was not so lucky:

The university had no mechanism to say ‘OK, you gotta look after yourself a bit now’. It is not enough that your son is in the hospital, no, I got whipped into full teaching responsibilities. Total lack of sleep and just no considerations. This is a workplace that does not treat its employees decently. Everyone burns out one time or another, because everyone has some kind of irregularities in life.

The university did not have the necessary ‘mechanism’ to let Dísa go and take care of her son, who was sick and in hospital. One would think that a work–life balance policy would constitute such a mechanism. However, Dísa was new at the job and, like so many other early-career academics, her teaching responsibilities were extensive, and in her absence there might have been no one to take over her duties. This is another example in which policy is rendered futile by an already-existing mechanism.

Career advancement

The policy principle which promises the possibility of a reduction in work-time commitment is followed by an interesting premise, namely the third principle which states that such a time commitment reduction should not affect career advancement. Ragga, an SSH assistant professor was in a situation similar to that of Nanna and Dísa. However, in Ragga’s case it was not the workplace that denied her a time commitment reduction, but herself.

[During] pregnancy, I was – my health wasn’t that good. Or I was able to work, but I spent [sic] all my focus on teaching, because teaching is what can’t wait. So I’d come here after teaching and I’d have a mattress here in the office, I would just lie on the floor and sleep, I was completely, like, my energy levels were like this much [very little], so I had a pillow and a camping mattress and would just take a half hour nap, recuperate and go back to work.

Ragga’s example is interesting because it illustrates that the informal pressure to live up to work responsibilities can be so strong that employees deny themselves basic rights (the policy) – as was the case with Aðalbjörg, who chose not to take maternity leave, because of workload. Moreover, Ragga was all too aware of what maternity leave was going to do to her career:

So it was very much like – went on maternity leave and ugh, then pregnant again and another maternity leave, so also getting my research off the ground – it’s here that I wanna be [with my research productivity], its – so I worry a little bit that I’m now stuck with few [research] points – and if you’re stuck with few points its harder to get the grants, and I do feel the system does not take that sufficiently into account – it worries me quite a bit.

Raggas’s experience exemplifies our point in a nutshell: there is an official work–life balance policy which states that employees have the right to maternity and paternity leave, a reduction in work-time commitment, or flexible working hours, without any of these factors damaging their careers; and while the system does take parental leave into consideration, by lowering the annual amount of points that an employee has to acquire, parental leave might still result in a career setback because of decreased research activity (Heijstra et al., 2015). Thus the formal evaluation system (incentive mechanism) will, in effect, punish anyone who claims any of the rights spelled out in the official work–life balance policy. Consequently, because the official policy does not address the basic fundamental fabric of the system, it can sound both lofty and ambitious, while the fact of the matter is that employees are unlikely to invoke it because there will be repercussions.

Flexibility to do what?

Flexibility is the focus of the fourth principle. It is generally considered one of the perks of academia because it supposedly helps employees to harmonize their work and family lives (e.g. Ward and Wolf-Wendell, 2012), and many of our participants did identify it as one of the more positive features of their job. For example, Lárus – a STEM assistant professor – explained that it is ‘the good thing about academia, you have this flexibility, there’s no [time clock]’. In this way, flexibility was greatly appreciated by interviewees in general, and the positive aspects and possibilities it brings about should not be ignored. However, there was pattern in our interviews as to how flexibility was appreciated, which was not straightforwardly positive. For Fjóla, flexibility was a means to an end:

I try to start my day early, around 7 or 8, try to get here, then I can leave earlier because my [child] is at home, so they’re really flexible here, sometimes if she is sick or something I can work from home and that’s great, you know, so – this semester, due to a lot of people being off on research sabbatical, I’ve taken on extra teaching, and that’s been really, really difficult with planning and making sure everything is done, so pretty much all I’ve done is teach this semester.

Another example is Aðalbjörg who was also accustomed to using flexibility to catch up with family responsibilities:

It’s one of the perks of academia, that you are not constrained by your chair, you do not have to sit in your chair between 9 and 5 every day, so – if I have some duties towards my [children], or – my mother who is growing older, I can obviously go and nobody cares.

In these examples, flexibility becomes a means of simply attending to other responsibilities in life. More specifically, it becomes a means of living up to cultural/social incentive mechanisms in the form of gendered expectations to domestic labour. Other research has indicated that flexibility in academia is gendered, in that women disproportionately end up using their flexibility in caring for family and carrying out domestic work (Probert, 2004). In researching the structuring of time among Icelandic academics specifically, Rafnsdóttir and Heijstra (2011) have also shown that, when it comes to making use of flexibility, it is predominantly women who ‘seem to be stuck with the responsibility of domestic and caring issues’ (Rafnsdóttir and Heijstra, 2011: 283). The same was true among our research participants. As such, while male participants did mention that they used ‘flexibility to spend more time with the family’ – as, for example, did Lárus – most often it was mentioned fleetingly and with the underlying sense that flexibility for family constituted a kind of leisure activity rather than a responsibility. As such, Andri, a STEM assistant professor, believed flexibility to be ‘fun’ because you have the freedom to ‘do what you want’. In contrast, Magnús believed that flexibility might be used for working even more:

People will want to produce those results and not worry about [being] confined by an eight-hour workday. So I think generally people will be working more than this. You know, you have a flexible work time, there’s no clock you have to punch when you go home, and I think that results in, you know, more than an eight-hour workday

Baldur echoed this sentiment:

It’s flexible so you can find ways to work more. You can take your laptop home and work in the evening or into the night or – I mean that’s not really flexibility. If you have a low output one year it could damage your prospects in the long run unless you’ve been extremely productive in the years before that.

Note in particular the fact that Baldur mentions here that if you make use of academic flexibility, it can decrease your research output and ‘damage your prospects in the long run’. This is another example of how a formal incentive mechanism works contrary to the policy on flexibility. Other women interviewees used flexibility to recuperate, but not in the way one might think. Aðalbjörg expressed it thus:

Because I can allocate time in my own fashion, even when I have to work 45–55 hours a week or more, it doesn’t matter because I feel that when I need the rest, I can take the rest, you know, I have a chair here and a blanket [points to a comfy looking chair and blanket], so I can just nap if I need to.

This is similar to Ragga’s experience that we touched on in the previous section in which she, while pregnant, would roll out a ‘camping mattress … take a half hour nap, recuperate and go back to work’. In both of these examples, recuperation becomes instrumentalized. Its function is not to enhance life quality or even improve work–life balance. As in the examples of Baldur and Magnús, it becomes a way for the academic to work even harder.

While almost all interview participants (except Baldur) spoke favourably about the possibility of having flexible working hours, women academics tended towards praising flexibility for what it allowed them to accomplish in terms of domestic labour and caregiving, while men spoke of it in terms of autonomy at work and the possibility for working even more. Looking at this through the lens of incentive mechanisms, it is clear that Baldur, at least, warned against using flexibility because of the formal evaluation system. When it came to women interviewees, broader cultural/social incentive mechanisms prevented some of them from using flexibility for leisure or a sense of freedom or autonomy.

Family: choice and condition

The fifth and final principle of the University of Iceland work–life balance policy is not so much a statement of the right of employees but, rather, more of an encouragement for fathers in particular to make use of the other principles. One could argue that this is a way for the policy to counter some of the deeper-rooted cultural/social incentive mechanisms that still primarily punish mothers for not being there for the family while generally encouraging men to pursue their careers by embracing the ideal worker construct. However, this is not at all to say that male academics tended towards not wanting to spend time with their families. During our interviews, male academics spoke very highly of their families and occasionally mentioned the importance of spending time at home, trying not to work too much, or even quitting their jobs in academia to be there for their children. This is a positive development.

However, as we saw in the previous section, women and men had very different experiences in relation to flexibility vis-à-vis family responsibilities, even though both men and women shared the feeling of never being off work. As Andri put it, ‘it’s too easy to take the job [home with you]’. Whereas this constant pressure of work was a very common theme for both women and men, only women described the pressure of home life in the same way as they would describe working circumstances. As Aðalbjörg said, ‘You can always do better and [I have to] stop beating myself up for not being everywhere for everybody all the time’. Not only does she take it for granted that she must find a way to tackle her work–life balance, but also she experiences a lot of internalized expectations to be both a good mother/wife and a good academic. Notice that her being there for her family is not constructed as a choice she has made for herself, but as an inevitable consequence of starting a family in the first place. In this way, as is evident from the examples in the previous section, women interviewees tended to speak of hardships and challenges when it came to compromising work and family life as an unquestionable condition. As Bára said, ‘It becomes this conflict between the academic way of living and family life … If you are constantly working, how do you take care of yourself and your family? How do you take time?’.

Male interviewees, in contrast, tended to talk about the difficulties of juggling work and home life in terms of concern, priorities and choices. For example, Ingi, an SSH assistant professor, expressed concern by saying: ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if my kid, at 17, asked to reflect upon her childhood […] would probably remember me working a lot’. Notice that while he expresses concern, he does not take it for granted that he ought to be home more. During the interview he also expressed the clear need to perform at work, but never mentioned the same pressure to perform at home.

Ragnar expressed concerns that were more priority-related when saying, ‘I came to that point that I wanted some other qualities in life – living with my family … It was a tough decision because I have ambitions for the academic development of [my academic field]’. Note especially the fact that while this former employee prioritized family over work, he clearly experienced that he had a choice as he executed a ‘tough decision’. Magnús echoes this when he says, ‘If I would have stayed here [during evenings and weekends] and been super driven and not … be with my family … I probably could have advanced faster’. Taken together, when faced with a lack of time to perform all of one’s roles in life, there might plausibly be a tendency among men to prioritize, i.e. choose either family or work and accept the consequences of prioritizing one over the other, but not to think of family responsibilities as a condition, as do the women. This might also be connected more broadly to men’s position in the labour market, where they experience a level of possibilities and choices that women do not (Pétursdóttir, 2009).

The choice versus condition construct is strongly related to broader, gendered cultural/social incentive mechanisms in which women are still perceived as having the main responsibility for the well-being of the family. Another previous example of this came from Dagbjört, who, in a manner of speaking, was one of the exceptions to confirm the rule when she ‘didn’t even take maternity leave’.The fact that she had concerns about even saying this out loud on tape (rest assured, we have express permission to use her testimony) – that she made a choice no different from that which men often make – shows the extent to which gendered incentive mechanisms for women to be at the centre of the family, and their taken-for-granted role as mothers, have been internalized in the minds of some. As mentioned, when the fifth principle encourages fathers especially to make use of work–life balance policies, it recognizes the unfortunate social trend for fathers to be less likely to do so than mothers. However, as with the rest of the University of Iceland’s work–life balance policy, this remains an encouragement and fails to establish any real incentives for fathers to do so.

Conclusion

Policy-making is generally considered a useful tool for bringing about positive change in the academy and, in the right hands, simple words on paper can indeed make a difference. However, what we have aimed to show from our local context is that the neoliberalization of higher education and the resulting emphasis on new public management strategies (perhaps in the western hemisphere more broadly) is not just an unfortunate reality that might halt the realization of policies aimed at social change, or, as in this case, work–life balance policies. Instead, as the results of our qualitative analysis seem to indicate, overt, covert and cultural/social incentive mechanisms derived from a neoliberal framework are all in place effectively to stop work–life balance polices from being adequately implemented altogether.

We have shown how the very premise of the university’s work–life balance policy is compromised by the systemic construction of the tireless ideal academic with endless energy and no family. While all participants decried these circumstances, male participants appeared to have an easier time living up to these expectations, which created an atmosphere of guilt in relation to work–life balance to which women appeared to be especially susceptible, arguably due to broader gendered social processes. The incompatibility between the workloads and pressure to produce created by the university’s points-based research evaluation system as well as other informal pressures was a consistent theme throughout. As such, we have shown examples of when the needs of the institution for producing more and living up to its own promises of excellence and performance output were prioritized over the dire familial needs of employees. In agreement with previous research, we have also shown that academic flexibility is not just an option that (predominantly) women use for the sake of their families; it also becomes a way for them to amend broader social/cultural incentive mechanisms of gendered guilt connected to domestic responsibilities and the role of caregiver. In this way the different incentive mechanisms within the neoliberal university intersect to create an intrinsic web of precarious conditions for modern academics. We have also suggested that the professional advancement of employees might be compromised by invoking the principles of work–life balance policies and that, while these policies might encourage fathers to make better use of them, the policy ultimately fails to address the fundamental issues that are preventing it from reaching its full potential, thus doing no more than merely scratching the surface of deeply rooted gendered, neoliberal incentive mechanisms.

It is important, however, to note that the neoliberal university did not create the notion of the ideal worker or the gendered expectations heaped upon academic women. While these were all known concepts before the dawn of the neoliberal project, they do seem to fit somewhat perfectly into the neoliberal melting pot, where they appear to complement and reinforce one another into a modern academic ethos in which the notion of the ideal worker is sustained by new public management strategies which, in turn, reinforces the expectation to participate in a long-hours culture where women end up missing out because of ancient – and outdated – patriarchal ideals. This means that those who wish to effect change have not only to battle internal bureaucracies and policies in academia, but also have to face the more subtle pressures of those taken-for-granted gendered structures of society itself. However, this is not to say that there are no parameters for action. We suspect that a key plan for action will include the continued insistence that change is urgent and necessary combined with on-going research that may identify beyond reasonable doubt the mechanisms working against women .

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interest

The authors declare that there are no conflicts of interest.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article: This research was carried out as part of the GARCIA project, which is supported by the European Union 7th Framework Programme SiS.2013.2.1.1-1 - Grant agreement n° 611737.

Author biographies

Thomas Brorsen Smidt is a PhD student in Gender Studies at the Faculty of Political Science, University of Iceland. He completed his MA in Gender Studies from the University of Iceland in 2013. His research interests are mainly centered on gender relations in higher education as well as on a range of different topics relating to the politics of sexuality, including queer studies. He is currently part of the Icelandic project team of an EU 7th framework research project, Garcia - Gendering the Academy: combating Career Instability and Asymmetries.

Gyða Margrét Pétursdóttir is an assistant professor in Gender Studies at the Faculty of Political Science, University of Iceland. She completed her PhD in Gender Studies from the University of Iceland in 2009. Her research areas include gender relations, masculinities, femininities, organizational culture, and work & family life. She currently co-manages the Icelandic part of an EU 7th framework research project, Garcia - Gendering the Academy: combating Career Instability and Asymmetries.

Þorgerður Einarsdóttir is professor of Gender Studies at the Faculty of Political Science, University of Iceland. She has been involved in critical equality and gender studies and her research areas cover a range of gender relations such as in higher education, work and family life, politics and media. She is currently the Icelandic project leader of the EU 7th framework research project, GARCIA, Gendering the Academy: combating Career Instability and Asymmetries.

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