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Gender, Work and Organization. Vol. 20 No. 3 May 2013

doi:10.1111/j.1468-0432.2011.00571.x

Balancing Work–family Life in Academia:

The Power of Time gwao_571 283..296

Gudbjörg Linda Rafnsdóttir* and Thamar M. Heijstra

In the article we analyse the structuring of time among academic employees in Iceland, how they
organize and reconcile their work and family life and whether gender is a defining factor in this
context. Our analysis shows clear gender differences in time use. Although flexible working hours
help academic parents to organize their working day and fulfil the ever-changing needs of family
members, the women, rather than men interviewed, seem to be stuck with the responsibility of
domestic and caring issues because of this very same flexibility. It seems to remove, for more
women than for men, the possibility of going home early or not being on call. The flexibility and
the gendered time use seem thus to reproduce traditional power relations between women and
men and the gender segregated division in the homes.

Keywords: academia, flexibility, gender, power relations, time, work–family balance

W omen and men often spend their time differently due to the widespread gender division in
work and family life. Thus, Bryson (2007), Kvande (2007) and Davies (1989) emphasize the
importance of analyzing the structuring of time and time consciousness when discussing gender
equality. Bryson (2007) mentions that the time squeeze can cause decreased autonomy among indi-
viduals and diminish their ability to become active citizens. The structuring of time is also a matter
of health and wellbeing. According to Frankenheuser (1993) who compared managers in a Swedish
factory, women showed the same level of stress as men until the afternoon when the stress increased
among women only due to their attempt to reconcile work and family life.
As far as gender equality in Iceland is concerned, the country passed an Act on gender equality
in 1976 in an attempt to secure the equal input of women and men in society, to work against
gender-based discrimination in the labour market and to enable both women and men to reconcile
work and family life. Today, the Icelandic welfare system is based upon the Nordic welfare model
(Esping-Andersen, 1991). In Iceland this includes 9 months of parental leave, of which 3 months is
reserved exclusively for fathers, and relatively cheap access to qualified day care for children aged
between 1 and 6 years. Each parent is also entitled to ten fully paid child sick days per year.
Iceland prides itself on promoting sexual equality and, according to the World Economic Forum’s
Global Gender Gap Index (2009, 2010) the country has claimed to be at the forefront of gender equality
in the world. The Index benchmarks national gender gaps using economic, political, educational and
health-based criteria. It is thus of interest to investigate how career-oriented people such as academics
manage to structure their time and combine their work and private life in Iceland. This article revolves
around the question whether or not female and male academics use the flexibility at work to balance
their work and family life, and if they do, how they do it. To start, we first look more closely at the
concept of time.

Address for correspondence: *University of Iceland, Faculty of Social and Human Sciences, Oddi, Sturlugata, IS 101 Reykjavík,
Iceland; e-mail: glr@hi.is

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Time and gender

Our standpoint is that time is multiple and linked to power. That means that we do not see time only
as clock time or as linear time that is to be divided into different components. We picture it, rather, as
a web where people can move around, at times situated in one compartment, and sometimes in many
simultaneously. Power is related to time since time is an essential resource to which access may be
unequally distributed. Those who have more power in their relationships are more likely to be able to
manage their own time and the time of others in both the private and public realm.
The concept of time can be viewed from different perspectives. Bryson (2007), Leccardi (1996) and
Davies (1989) point out that so-called traditional time was based on the natural rhythm of the seasons
and the tasks that had to be done. The relation to time was local, task-oriented, seasonal and repetitive.
With the development of capitalism and industrialization this traditional time consciousness gradu-
ally gave way to the modern time of waged workers who were paid for the hours they worked but not
on the basis of the tasks they performed or the service they provided. As time consciousness changes,
Davies and Bryson argue that time is socially constructed. Davies (1989, p. 17) states:

[T]ime consciousness and time measurement are crucial for the structuring and direction of
women’s and men’s everyday lives. Time can furthermore be used as an instrument of power and
control.

Former sociologists did not reflect much upon time when discussing the power structures in society.
However, a few deal with time, though more obliquely. Frederick W. Taylor (1964) became known for
the principle of scientific management or time and motion studies based on breaking a job into its
component parts and measuring each to a hundredth of a minute. The ideas behind Taylorism
resulted later on in theories like Fordism, principally known as a mass production system theory, and
just in time production processes (Watson, 2003 [1980]). Émile Durkheim noted that time is socially
constructed and linked to a society that encloses the individual (Durkheim, 1971) and time spent in
production is in some ways central to the thought of Karl Marx (1954). Even though these sociologists
discuss time, neither of them deals with time as being crucial for their theories, nor do they theorize
gender. In contrast, the feministic sociologists Davies (1989), Leccardi (1996) and Bryson (2007) do
shed light upon gender when analysing the structuring of time in society.
Bryson (2007) points out that the ways in which time is used, valued and understood are central
to the maintenance of gender inequalities in public and private life, and are damaging for both men
and women. She shows that while parental time with children and leisure in general have increased
during the last decades, parents, particularly mothers, partly achieve this by combining the time they
spend with their children with other activities. This explains why parents perceive themselves as
being more and more pressed for time because stress is not simply a matter of the total hours of paid
and unpaid work, it is exacerbated by the intensity of their use of time. Parents often have to force
different activities into the same period. Bryson refers to Southerton (2003) who has coined the useful
term ‘harriedness’ to cover women’s sense of being both harried and harassed by the seemingly
incompatible demands on their time and the need to co-ordinate a host of fragmented activities.
Davies (1989) argues that there are two major ways of conceiving time in modern society; cyclical
(female) and linear (male) time. However, she does note that this generalization may not account for
individual cases as they can be much more complex and partially dependent on lifestyle. The linear
conception of time — where time is seen as unfolding in a straight and unbroken line, unidirectional
and heading towards an unlimited horizon — is the conception that is preponderant today. It appears
to characterize men’s relation to time, in terms of the way in which they organize their daily lives as
well as their life course. Usually they do so in a much more clear-cut fashion than women. Linear time
also forms the dominant structure in present-day society and may be used, as an instrument of power
and control over women.
Cyclical time, or female time, on the other hand, is usually associated with everyday life prior to,
or concurrent with industrialization. Under a cyclical time consciousness people order the events of

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their lives according to local and natural rhythms and the future is a perpetual recapitulation of the
present. The precise measurement of time in these circumstances is superfluous. On a day-to-day
basis, people are not subject to clock time but rather to time that is task oriented. According to Davies
(1989), the two facets of women’s lives, that is, wage labour and reproduction, are associated with
time. She points out that the responsibility that women have for care and reproduction make their
daily lives a complex weaving between the dominant linear (male) time on the one hand, and cyclical
(female) time on the other.
In their experience, this work of weaving time goes beyond economic rationality. Its special quality
derives from being at the same time within and outside of economic logic. Davies (1989, pp. 37–8)
argues: ‘Time disposal is partly determined by the individual, partly by social or legal coercion and
partly through negotiations with others’. Davies shows that since women historically have been
responsible for the family, in addition to other tasks, these activities have engulfed all their time due
to the temporal nature of care. Women’s time is thereby characteristically others’ time. For these
women, doing several things at the same time appears to be the norm. Nevertheless, she maintains
that social and legal coercion as well as negotiation with others are closely related to the issue of
power. Thus, access to one’s own time and to leisure time is quite simply a question of power and
may function to enforcer of male identity and provide one of the means by which male hegemony is
constructed and reconstructed:
The more power and influence we have, the more we can decide over our own time and other’s
time, the more we can negotiate time and resist social control. Women’s subordinate position in the
public sphere as well as their ascribed role in the private sphere have major implications with
regard to this.... At home, their time — more than any other family member’s — becomes others’
time ... both men and women do not and cannot freely choose how to use and structure their time,
but ... for women there are specific structural relations which have special implications for how
their time is used. (Davies, 1989, p. 38)
Leccardi (1996) argues along the same lines as Davies. She insists that feminist theory calls into
question the representation of time in capitalist societies and provides an approach that point to a
different conception of the relationship between life and time for both women and men. Women’s
biographical time she says, as a result of their increasing capacity to produce income in an indepen-
dent manner, is increasingly confronted by the logic, scansions and rhythms of public time. The
various dimensions of women’s work are shaped by different forms of logic where family work is
governed not by the logic of the market, but by expectations of reciprocity. Even though the clock
remains an essential mediator in our everyday existence, its claim to being time per se and its taken-for
granted hegemony have been undermined. ‘As such, “women’s time” is shown to be “contaminated”
by emotions and affections, never to be merely clock time’ (Leccardi, 1996, p. 182).
Hassan (2007) connects the discussion about time to new information and communication tech-
nologies (ICTs). He points out that the network time provides people with the capability to create
their own time and spaces as ICTs and people in interaction undermine and displace the time of the
clock. In pre-industrial societies task-oriented time was dictated by the task itself and the interaction
between human, technological and local circumstances. Due to the effects of high speed and com-
puter technology a network-generated ‘fragmented time’ is emerging alongside the ‘industrial time’
of the clock. Hassan describes the possibilities within these digital spaces to create, experience and
control our context-dependent time, where the clock will have marginal or no effect:
The important point is that this context-created temporal experience is disconnected from the local
clock times of the users. The clock no longer governs, as it once did in the preinformation age.
(Hassan, 2007, p. 52)

Time use-studies
Davies (1989) and Bryson (2007) reveal that the problem with time-use studies in general is that they
are based on a view of time in which time can be divided into small measurable components. This

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makes it difficult to measure tasks that are carried out simultaneously and to measure the time that
is involved in caring for others and different kinds of caring responsibilities in which ‘being there’ is
important. Bryson (2007, p. 157) stresses: ‘Studies are also unable to record the intermittent worrying,
guilt and stress individuals may experience around what they are not doing while they are doing
something else’. She highlights that the studies are not able to show the different kinds of time people
experience and that all time is not equal. Some people’s time seem to be worth more than others’,
which reflects a certain kind of power.
Leisure studies are becoming more frequent as leisure appears to play an increasingly large role
in the life of adults, at least among the middle class. However, Bryson (2007) notes that, while the
rhetoric of time poverty is widely used, writers disagree as to the nature and significance of class and
gender-based differences in the availability and nature of free time. In spite of this it is clear to Bryson
that the manual working class has less control over its leisure time and does not have access to
time-saving resources. This finding is supported by Weigt and Solomon (2008) who compared work
and family management among women in low-wage services and female assistant professors at
universities in the USA. They found that women privileged by class were also privileged in their
ability to manage work and family demands. While class muted gendered experiences for the female
assistant professors it exacerbated gender experiences for women in the low-wage service sector.

Flexibility at work

Whenever describing so-called good jobs, the features autonomy and flexibility are often mentioned
(Constable et al., 2009). Flexibility at work has basically two characteristics; flexible working hours
and telecommuting. Flexible working hours, on the one hand, give employees a certain amount of
freedom to decide when to start and end their work day. Telecommuting on the other hand, allows
employees to decide where they work, as long as there is an Internet or phone connection (Dickisson,
1997). Autonomy is closely related to flexibility and it has been argued that flexibility at work
improves the work–family balance of the worker (Blair-Loy and Wharton, 2004; Reeves et al., 2007).
Moreover, some studies show that flexibility decreases stress levels among workers and makes
people more productive (Golden and Veiga, 2005; Kurland and Bailey, 1999). Dickisson (1997) notes
that employees in flexible organizations take fewer sick days and are often more creative, although he
emphasizes the importance of having one’s own work space at home, preferably with a door that can
be closed.
Kvande (2007) discusses flexibility from another point of view. She points out that especially in
knowledge organizations, the shift from standardization to the differentiation of working hours leads
to an endless flood of work, long working hours and less family time. Kvande refers, for example, to
Hochschild (1997) when she points out that the formal contract that regulates working hours is being
replaced by moral obligations and time norms that demand total commitment. Blair-Loy (2009)
support this findings as her studies shows that stockbrokers in firms with scheduling flexibility
experience more work–family conflict than those in firms with scheduling rigidity.
Hassan (2007) argues that the reality of network time and network communication for most
people is impelled by the need to constantly look for ways to be more efficient and productive. Speed
is fetishized and short-term outcomes are valorized. This is in line with Heijstra and Rafnsdóttir
(2010), who show that even though ICTs make some features of the life of academics easier, they also
initiate a proliferation of the workload, trigger a prolonging of the workday and enhance a demand
for extensive availability. While ICTs increase the flexibility of academics at work this does not seem
to improve their work–family balance. On the contrary, ICTs and flexibility are found to increase
work–family conflict, as the ICTs in combination with their flexibility make it increasingly difficult for
academics to disengage from work. Furthermore, according to Pétursdóttir (2009) and Rafnsdóttir
(1995) men often have more flexibility at work than women and this improves their autonomy in
private and public life. However, most of them do not use this flexibility to reconcile work and family
life.

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Academics

Being an academic is generally characterized by having a large amount of flexibility and autonomy.
Academics have for the most part the freedom to decide where, how and even when to work. Most
come close to being their own supervisors even if they are employees. With the arrival of ICTs the
possibilities of working from home have increased for them. However, at the same time studies from
the UK (Doherty and Manfredi, 2006) and the USA (Jacobs and Winslow, 2004) show that, while
academics have a high level of flexibility at work, they also have to deal with an intensification of their
workload and long working hours. This might explain why one out of five university teachers in the
USA displays serious burn-out symptoms (Lackritz, 2004). A study among university staff in the
USA, Canada and UK found that university teachers scored consistently lower on the work satisfac-
tion variable and that they were more negative about their workload and work–family balance than
other university staff (Horton, 2006).
Furthermore, in a study among 18 female Michigan university teachers, participants were asked
how they managed to balance career and family demands. ‘Getting used to little sleep’ turned out to
be the key answer (Damiano-Teixiera, 2006). Sleepless in academia is the title of an article by Acker
and Armenti (2004) in which they present two Canadian studies on academics. In these studies
women emphasized high stress levels, exhaustion, fatigue and sleeplessness in association with
building an academic career and bringing up young children simultaneously. Working harder and
sleeping less were the main responses when participants were asked how they coped at the univer-
sities. Acker and Armenti point out that these coping strategies can cause illness among women. The
men in the study were less likely to describe illness and their jobs seemed not to be tearing them apart
in the same way as they did in women.
In academia in Iceland the working hours are unregulated and the work is to a large extent
product oriented. Academics get monthly wages but they also get a bonus payment once a year for
performing certain tasks, such as publishing peer-reviewed articles in highly ranked international
journals. The pressure to publish has been intensified by actions that reward or punish the individual
university teacher and departments on the strength of research productivity.
The remaining part of the article revolves around our study and the question whether high
flexibility at work influences the way in which academics in Iceland manage their time and how they
reconcile their work–family balance. By emphasizing gender in this context we focus on everyday
experiences at work, family and leisure time of the academics interviewed and explore whether or not
gender meanings shape their time structure.

Method

The study is based on 42 semi-structured in-depth interviews with academics and top managers in
private Icelandic companies. In this article we focus on the 20 academics interviewed, 10 women and
10 men. The academics are from different faculties and different universities. They are employed full
time and rank either as lecturer, senior lecturer or professor. They are all parents and most of them
have two to four children varying in age from 6 months to a little over 20 years. According to Statistics
Iceland (2011) the fertility rate among Icelandic women in 2010 was 2.2, which is higher than in other
Nordic countries and among the highest in the western world (Eurostat Demographic statistics, n.d.).
The average fertility rate of the academics interviewed was 2.7.
One of the participants was a single parent and all the others were married or cohabiting. Most of
the interviews were done in or around the universities, but some took place in the participants’
homes. The interviews, which lasted between 25 and 90 minutes, were tape-recorded, transcribed and
analysed according to grounded theory.
Smith (1987, p. 99) quotes Marx and Engels stating that ‘Individuals always started, and always
start, from themselves. Their relations are the relations of their real life’. In accordance to this, we
focus on the interviewees’ everyday life when analysing their structuring of time in the academy. We

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asked them, among other things, about the organization of their work, work procedures, flexibility,
leisure and family life, housework and childcare arrangements.
Regarding anonymity, performing qualitative research in a small community is not easy. The
academics’ freedom of speech was based on our commitment to anonymity, which is quite
complex in Iceland as there are only seven universities and a few hundred tenured academics. In
order to strengthen anonymity, we have therefore decided not to describe our interviewed
professors as precisely as we would have done in larger communities. The only information pre-
sented here is whether the participants are male or female and if they have small children, teenage or
grown-up children, or both. To give the reader further information could put the anony-
mity of the interviewees into jeopardy. We believe that the information given will be sufficient
for the reader to understand the topics we are presenting in the article. Like Smith (1987)
we are constrained by our commitment to ensure that the academics we spoke to speak again in what
we write, like active and reflective subjects, despite our reinterpretation of what they had to say.

Findings

This section discusses the findings from the study with the interviewed academics. We start from the
basic assumption that social life (Berger and Luckmann, [1966] 1987) and time (Bryson, 2007; Davies,
1989) are socially constructed and linked to power.

Flexibility
The academics in our study generally enjoy a high level of flexibility at work. They refer to this
flexibility as one of the main advantages of working in academia. They feel that the flexibility helps
them to balance work and family life. Nonetheless, the female participants seem to utilize this
flexibility in different ways from the men. Even if there have been certain changes during the last
years between women and men regarding the division of housework and childcare, it may not be
as much as we would like in terms of gender equality. For instance, mothers are more likely than
fathers to use this flexibility to be on call for the family. Ólöf, an academic mother of both young
and teenage children, explains how flexibility at the university helps family life to continue. She
says:

I always came home early ... he, [her husband] couldn’t do it himself and in the past I have always
taken more days off when the children were sick because my workplace is more flexible.

Here Ólöf points out that because her husband does not have the same flexibility at work as she does
it is always her duty to be on call. The academic male participants that also have this flexibility do not
mention, as some of the women do, that it is their primary obligation and not their partners’ to be on
call. However, they do stress that their flexible working schedules are good for their family. Their
wives seem to take the primary responsibility for the household and for ‘being there’, independent
of whether they themselves have flexible schedules or not.
This probably explains why some of the women interviewed praise their flexibility but at the same
time point out that, unlike the men, they do not have flexibility as individuals because their time
schedule is too tight. ‘I think it is probably more in my mind than it is in reality [that I can decide]
when I work and where I work’, says Maria, one of the academic mothers with both young and
grown-up children.
Even though the participants mention that the flexible working schedules and telecommuting
improve their work and family balance, it turns out that those work characteristics lengthen their
workday and prevent them from spending time with their family without having work-related issues
on their mind all the time.

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A double-edged sword
When asking about the negative side of the unregulated working hours we see that what is felt as the
most positive aspect of their work, that is, the flexibility and the freedom to work ‘whenever and
wherever’, is also the most negative aspect. The unregulated working time in the academy thus feels
like a double-edged sword:
[The] disadvantage, of course, is that it’s much more difficult to keep a clear distinction between
your free time and your work time and if you are not careful, all your time will be swallowed up
by work. (Tómas, an academic father of small children)
Sigurdur, also a father of small children says: ‘You are never off’. Johanna, a female colleague with
small children, has similar thoughts in relation to her workload:
I think [the workload] is too much.... So what I do in the evening is to write, try to write some
articles. So I feel like I am doing all of that just in my free time.
Interestingly enough, Johanna argues, however, that the balance between her work and family life is
good, but she adds:
It has to be at the expense of feeling that I haven’t done anything except work and be with the kids.
After saying this, she points out that having children was something she decided to do: ‘Of course, it
was my choice’ she says. This is a remarkable statement which we find in several of our interviews
with women. Some of them seem to feel that they were not allowed to complain about a heavy
work–family workload because it was their choice to have children. None of the interviewed fathers
refer to their own liability for having children when discussing the combination of work and family
life and long working hours. Regardless of how many children the academic fathers have, and even
if they do some of the household chores, they are less likely than the academic mothers to say they
have a heavy family workload.
The flexible working hours and the possibility of going home early to care for the children and the
household before they continue working in the evenings are praised by both women and men.
However, women are more likely than men to express time poverty and lack of personal time:
Last winter, and even more the year before that, I felt that I never had time for myself to read a book
or do anything besides just working and being with the kids. And, you know, when they are small
it’s like, it’s of course very nice being with your children but it’s still a lot of work, you know, doing
all that. (Ólöf)

Working always and everywhere

Even if some scholars like Dickisson (1997) stress the importance of having a separate room in the
home to work in, most of the academics choose to work where the family was even if they have a
separate room. Favourite places to work in are the living room, the children’s bedroom and the
kitchen. Working where the family is can partly be explained by the fact that academics, especially
women, work ‘in bits and pieces’ at home. This means that they work whenever they get the chance
and they feel it is easiest to do this by having the laptop closely at hand in the places where they most
often are, that is, in the living room or the kitchen. Based on the interviews, working everywhere also
seems to be a way for these academics to hide from themselves and their families the fact that they are
constantly working. They hope that their families may not experience it as work when they are
‘playing on the laptop’ in front of the television or in the kitchen. In addition, for the academics
themselves it feels more as if they are supporting their family when they do not isolate themselves in
a separate room.
Maria, who always has her laptop with her, says: ‘I am on the computer in bits and pieces if I am
at home’. Ragnar, a father of small and grown-up children, says:

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The laptop fits everywhere ... we have an office at home but I don’t use it much. I work ... in the
living room, I have my laptop in the couch.
Nevertheless, how well the academic parents are able to work while their children are around varies.
Tómas, who works a lot at weekends, says:
I like waking up early on Saturdays and Sundays, then the kids want to watch TV. So maybe I will
just take my computer and sit with them for 2 or 3 hours. I get a lot of work done and they are just
... watching television.
The quote shows that his children do not interrupt him while he is working but he feels he is
supporting the family by his presence. Other parents give examples of how they integrate work and
childcare, even in the children’s bedroom. Helena, a mother of both young and teenage children says:
I often take my youngest daughter to bed ... and then I bring with me an article, books ... so while
she is falling asleep I am reading something I need to read up for work.
Johanna says:
Last winter I worked every single evening and it was very difficult to do that, but, I mean, that was
just the price, really, that [I] had to pay for leaving work so early.
She usually picks up her children from preschool in the afternoon and experiences her university
work in the evenings as the ‘price I have to pay’ for this. The men interviewed do not say that working
in the evenings is the price they have to pay. Magnús is a father who has both young children and
teenagers. He says:
A long work week really means that you have a lot of time to work on things that you added, you
know, you are working on it because you decided to and that’s what you like to do, and that’s why
you are doing it.
Unlike Johanna, Magnús says that he has power over his own working time. He works long hours
because he likes it and has decided to do so. Working late in the evening is not a consequence of the
time he has to spend with his family.
The official summer leave in Iceland is 5 to 6 weeks for academics, depending on their age. As in
other Nordic countries, many employees take these 5 to 6 weeks for their summer vacation but also
make sure that they have some days left that they can use as a Christmas break. However, this is not
the case for most of our interviewees. Ólöf says:
Actually when I started working here, I asked a lot of people, ‘How much time do we have as a
summer vacation?’ And nobody really knew that, and I was like, ‘Ooh, that’s very interesting’.
She continues:
I feel sometimes like ... the atmosphere here is that you are not supposed to have any family life.
Sometimes I feel like I can read between the lines ... that people who are working in the university
... should always be working.... And I feel a little bit like it’s prestigious in this institution not to
take a summer vacation or not to know when you are going to take it.
She mentions that when you have children you must take some days off: ‘Having the kids forces you
a little bit to take vacation, which I think everyone should do anyway’. Helena says that it is a
conscious effort not to work during the summer vacation. She usually takes some books with her and
the laptop when she is on leave. But her husband doesn’t like her working when the family is on
vacation and she usually makes an agreement with him about how much she can work. She tries to
convince him that her work during the vacation is in the interest of the family:
I got that piece published and now I was getting my points and I was telling my partner, you know,
‘Just for this article we get this much money’. [Laughs]

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The interviewed men do not express the need to justify their work to their wives or their family. The
wives of these academic men in general seem to have a better understanding of the ‘endless work’
than the academic women’s husbands.1 Furthermore, the academic women express more guilt over
working at inconvenient times than their male colleagues. We interviewed the academics’ partners, to
bring to the light their views on academic working schedules, flexibility and the work–family life
balance. Actually none of the men interviewed talked about remorse in relation to their family because
of their long working days. The reason for this might be that some of the men still considered
themselves to be the main breadwinners, even though their wives or partners worked full time and
had their own income. The breadwinner role thus releases them from the main responsibility for the
household, even if they participate in the household tasks allocated to them.
Maria often comments that she is the main breadwinner in the family. However, this does not free
her from having the main responsibility in the household, which she believes is unfair. It would be
interesting to know whether her partner also considers her as the main breadwinner, or whether he
feels that he is the main breadwinner even though he earns less than she does. Sigurdur often refers
to his father when describing why he likes to work long days even during family vacations. His father
liked to work a lot, and so does he. The female academics do not refer to their mothers or fathers when
describing their long days at work. Quite the opposite, their image of a good mother rather seems to
make the women express bad feelings about their heavy workload.

The time that never comes

The academics interviewed define their workload at the university as heavy because ‘you have never
done enough’. Maria says:
I started to have health problems due to too much work and some heavy family responsibilities....
I am working my ass off. Of course, I am working because I like it.
Like Johanna, who prefers to stress that she chose to have children, when explaining the struggle for
mastering the work–family balance, Maria underlines that she likes her job when talking about her
workload. In both cases these remarks are like excuses that tone down their complaints and leave
images of a problem that is self-inflicted. What remains is that these women blame themselves for
being unable to balance their work and family life.
The women and the men describe their workload differently. Even if both genders say they work
about 60 hours a week, the men seem to get more support for their long working schedules and they
seem to bear less overall responsibility for their work within the family. The women are more likely
to make a formal or informal agreement with their family members while working during periods
when the family expects them to be off, while the men’s working time seems to be more on their own
premises. Some of the women interviewed express struggles in their work–family life, while they are
fighting to create time for their work and for their family to become more engaged in the household.
Iris, a mother of both young and teenage children, says: ‘I think there is always gonna come a time
when things are better [laughs]. I always have that idea but that time never comes’. She is referring
both to her husband and her teenagers, whom she feels take little responsibility in the household.
In Icelandic academia research points are very important. As mentioned above, Johanna convinced
her family that finishing an article during a family holiday is in their best interest, and not without
good reason. Research points are built into the structure of their wages, increasing the possibilities to
get grants and speed up the advancement process in the academic career hierarchy. Also, research
points make it easy to keep track of who is productive and who is not, and who publishes in highly
ranked journals. It seems to be more of a struggle for the female participants in this study than for
academic males to earn an acceptable amount of research points each year, which consequently
brings about lower wages and slower career advancement. Hildur, who has teenagers and has been
working for many years in academia, supports this: ‘On the whole, I mean, this job suits me but [it
is] very stressful, you know, I get very stressed’.

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Maria, who is younger than Hildur and has been working in academia for only a few years, is
critical of the structuring of time and the workload:
You look at things and think, ‘How much am I willing to sacrifice? I am not going to sacrifice my
family completely. I am not going to sacrifice my health to be this excellent researcher with the most
prestige. No.... I am not going to hang the whole of who I am onto how many points I get. And I
am not gonna, you know, compare myself all the time with somebody else’.
However, Maria has had health problems due to workload, as remarked before. None of the partici-
pating men reflect on their work as a threat to their health or family life and they do not seem to
question equating their work with who they are. They do not express any sacrifice or struggle when
talking about overtime, research points and their everyday life. When discussing work development
and promotion Johanna said:
Of course, it is sometimes annoying when young boys ... [speed up the career ladder], and you
think, oh my God, they’ve been carried in this world.... I don’t wanna sound like a bitter woman
or something but, I think, for a lot of us women, we had to fight to do what we love doing and to
get a position that enables us to do what we like doing. A lot of support, and a lot of criticism.
Ragnar supports this view, referring to old role models and social control. He refers to his colleague
who said that ‘being an academic was perfect for bachelors ... with wives’. This is certainly a joke but
one of these jokes that academics can easily identify with.

Managing time
It is interesting to notice that the men interviewed in general were more likely than the women to say
they had power over their own time, and they seem to allocate that time between the family and their
work much more easily than the women interviewed. The men approach their work and family life
more like different projects in which they decide for themselves when to start and when to finish.
Even though they are responsible for different household chores, they appear to be better able than
the women to divide their time between these tasks without bearing the generic responsibility for
them. Their time, unlike the women’s time, seems to be divided into different projects on a timeline.
The men’s time seem in general to be what Davies (1989) calls linear time:
If I am given a project to take care of I do it, even if that project has to do with the family I do it ...
I happily do it. That’s probably my way of managing the balance between work and the family, to
create projects.
Here Sigurdur describes his participation in the household. Someone gives him a project in the family.
Sigurdur is actually referring to his wife. He was far from being the only one who used this rhetoric,
which seemed though to be quite gendered. Tómas said this about how he used the flexibility at the
university: ‘Of course when they [the children] are sick and so on, you sometimes are in a position to
take leave from work’.
Tómas is ‘sometimes’ in a position to take leave, indicating that he has the choice not to take leave
when his children are sick if he is bound to other projects. Pétur, another father of young children,
says:
To be completely honest, I am not very good at balancing work and family life, but what I try to do
is to be available when needed.
This utterance indicates that Pétur, like Tómas, has the choice not to be available. In general, the
academic men, as opposed to the academic women, participate in paid work for longer hours than
their partners and thus have in general higher salaries. So, even though the men in academia do not
necessarily work more than their female colleagues they seem to get more support from their partners
than the academic women, who are more or less bogged down in their daily time-consuming routines

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and family responsibilities besides their work. When Maria is commenting on the structuring of time
in academia she says: ‘it’s not a good deal for most women, I think’. What she is referring to is that
the unequal distribution of responsibility within the family together with the endless stream of work
in academia creates an unhealthy workload for women.

Similar to how I feel about being a mother

It turns out that a typical workday in academia does not exist. Nothing is normal, every day is very
different. ‘The only thing that is constant is too little time and too many tasks’, says Iris. The academics
workday generally continues into the evening or even into the night. They work in the evening
because there is ‘this endless stream of work’, but also because the evenings and the nights are times
when they are not interrupted and can work in relative peace and quiet. When asked about the end
of the workday, Andrea, a mother of adolescents, says:
Never ... when I fall asleep.... I don’t quit at five because I work at home ... if there is something
I want to do, or need to do, I work at night.
She doesn’t quit when she leaves the university because she brings her work home with her in the
afternoon. The possibility of working at home seems to lengthen her working day.
Maria says, ‘I am always working when I am not asleep’. Ólöf takes a few days off when she feels
too tired and Iris states that when she starts dreaming about work or isn’t able to fall asleep because
of work, it is time to take a day off.
Eirikur, a father of adolescent children, affirms that he does not mind long working hours as long
as he can be creative. Iris supports his statement by revealing that when she gets into the writing
mood she writes non-stop. Hildur has had health problems, probably because of a work overload, and
she tries to follow the advice of her physical doctor of only saying ‘yes’ to projects and things she
likes. However, she feels that this is easier said than done.
It turns out that many participants do not see their profession as a job but rather as many different
jobs or even as a lifestyle rather than work. ‘Being an academic is a way of life’ is a common phrase.
Some mention that their profession is a part of their identity, something they cannot just switch on
and off. Iris says:
In many ways it’s the same thing as, or similar to how I feel about being a mother: it is not a real
job, it is who I am, you know.
Defining work as a hobby or a life style is probably a way of escaping the fact that the work tends to
drown both their families and their private lives in general.

Discussion and conclusion

In this article we have analysed how academics in Iceland structure and use their time and reconcile
their work and family life. We have found that in general the male participants manage their time
better than the female participants, independently of their age or the number of their children. On the
other hand, time poverty is prominent among both the women and men interviewed, even if the
academic women placed stronger emphasis on time scantiness, as well as on fragmented and
constrained leisure and working time.
Earlier we referred to Bryson (2007), who argued that time is linked to power. Our interviews with
women and men in academia support that view, as well as the argument that time is linked to gender.
We also notice the paradox that at the same time as the flexible working hours help academic parents
to organize their working day and fulfil the ever-changing needs of family members, the women,
rather than the men interviewed seem to be stuck in the responsibility of domestic and caring issues;
indeed, because of this very same flexibility. The flexibility seems to remove, more from women than
men, the possibility of going home early or not being on call. This flexibility and the gendered time

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use seem thus to reproduce traditional power relations between women and men and the gender-
segregated work division in their families. This probably explains why the men interviewed seemed
to be more relaxed and happy with the structuring of their time than their female colleagues, despite
their high workload.
ICT encourages academic teachers to bring work home thereby blurring the boundaries between
family life and work. But, interestingly, this has in general different consequences for each gender.
Davies wrote during the 1990s that women’s time at home ‘becomes others’ time’ (1989, p. 38). Our
data, collected more than 20 years later among highly educated women and men in a country that
scores the highest on the gender gap index show that men are still more able than women to be off
work when home, either to recharge their batteries or to work, if they like. Our finding is also in
accordance with the 20-year-old Swedish study of Frankenheuser (1993), who found that women
managers experience more stress than men while attempting to balance their work and family life.
Even if the men in our study take care of their children and perform different household tasks, we
also find similarities with Leccardi (1996) who, in the final years of the 20th century, claimed that
‘women’s time’ is shown to be ‘contaminated’ by emotions and affections, rather than clock time.
To conclude, when analysing our data, we do not get full support for the assertion of Reeves et al.
(2007), Blair-Loy and Wharton (2004) and Golden and Veiga (2005) that flexibility improves the
work–family balance, in the sense that this flexibility brings a lot of their work into their homes and
diminishes their possibility not to be on call. It also does not necessarily support Golden and Veiga’s
results that flexibility decreases stress levels, because working during supposed family time can
create stress and strain. In both cases, however, this could be more legitimated for men than for
women. Our results can support Blair-Loy (2009) who points out that even if the common finding is
that workplace flexibility reduces work–family conflict, this is not generalizable for all occupational
groups. As our study is based on only 20 interviews with female and male academics, we cannot
generalize our results to other occupational groups or to differences between men and women in
general. However the results highly support Kvande (2007), who stresses the importance of analysing
the gender aspect of flexibility, and Davies (1989) and Bryson (2007), who show the gender aspect of
the time. In future studies it would be of interest to include academics who do not have children to
see if we notice similar patterns regarding the power of time among couples without children.
However, there are only few in Icelandic academia, as it is uncommon for married or cohabiting
Icelandic women to choose not to have children because of their career.
It is important to stress that even though we question the assertion that flexible and autonomous
working schedules improve the work–family balance, we cannot claim that this flexibility makes
maintaining the balance more difficult. This sounds like a paradox and leads us to rethink the
widespread results of much work–family and flexibility research where we have to take gender
power and occupation into closer consideration.
In her study Rafnsdóttir (1995) referred to men’s greater flexibility and mobility at work when
describing the fact that the gender division of labour in the fishing factories leads men to jobs that
have more autonomy than the jobs women have. In our study we are not dealing with a gendered
division of labour, as women’s and men’s work in the academia were fully comparable. So the
contribution of this study to former studies is that, even when comparing highly educated women
and men in the same kind of work, that is, academics, men seem to have more personal autonomy
than their female colleagues and they are better able to utilize this autonomy for their own interest.
The flexible working schedules seem to accentuate the gender role and reproduce unequal gender
power.

Acknowledgements

We thank the University of Iceland Research Fund for supporting the study, and the two anonymous
reviewers for their useful comments. We would also like to thank the academics who gave us access
to their valuable time and important reflections.

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PROBLEM REPRESENTATIONS OF EQUAL PAY 295

Note

1. We interviewed the academics partners to bring to light their views on academic working schedules, flexibility
and the work–family life balance.

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