Attitude towards work-life balance for parents v child-free depend on where you live?

I’m happy to start this piece off by answering that question with a resounding “no”. However, there were interesting findings related to work-life balance arrangements for parents versus child-free employees and where the respondent lived in the study this piece focuses on.

The authors of the article, "Un-deserving of work-life balance? A cross-country investigation of people’s attitudes towards work-life balance arrangements of parents and childfree employees”, compared the perceived deservingness of work-life balance for parents versus the child-free in the Netherlands and in Italy. Also examined was the perceived priority to make use of available work-life balance arrangements.

In the article, work-life balance referred to “the way in which individuals combine paid work and commitments outside of work”. Work-life arrangements included access to paid leaves and the ability to request flexible or remote working. 

When the results were looked at generally, study participants perceived employees in both scenarios (parent versus child-free) as deserving of work-life arrangements, and were unlikely to attribute priority to use the arrangements. These results are encouraging. Scores showed no significant effects in terms of parental status, gender or their interaction, on the extent to which respondents were deserving of work-life balance arrangements. Scores also did not show a significant effect for parental status or gender on ratings of priority for work-life balance arrangements. 

Respondents rated the priority of a female employee with children to work-life arrangements higher than her child-free counterpart. This same effect was not seen for male employees. In the child-free scenario, the priority of male employees to work-life arrangements scored higher than the priority for female employees. This same priority effect was not seen when the male and female employees had children. 

What was most interesting, were the results when examined by nationality of the respondents. For the Netherlands, there was no significant interaction between the employee’s parental status and their gender. However, amongst Italian respondents, the priority of access to work-life arrangements was higher when the female employee had children than when she did not. This effect was absent when the employee was male. 

Before discussing the significance of these findings, a word of caution about extrapolating from this study. The data for the study was collected using convenience sampling. I looked into why this limited wide application of the study. Convenience sampling means that the participants were collected in a manner that was convenient to the researcher. In this study, respondents were obtained from social media and direct requests from the authors to family, friends and other contacts. Therefore, the results are not from a random sample of people. 

The authors hypothesized that the greater acceptance of women being child-free in the Netherlands could account for why priority for female employees with children to work-life arrangements was not seen amongst Dutch respondents. In my opinion, the Netherlands gets a gold star for acceptance of a woman’s choice to bear children. In the 1960s, acceptance of people that were child-free by choice was 20 percent in the Netherlands; in early 2000, it was up to 90 percent! Other reasons offered to explain the results included over-representation of female respondents, and the fictional employee in the study scenario not being given an age.

While recognizing the limitation in making generalizations from this study, I am still encouraged by the results. It suggests that as a community becomes more accepting of a person’s (and especially a woman’s) choice to not have children, the disparity in priority for access to workplace benefits to support a more balanced life is reduced, and perhaps even disappears. One can hope that the advocacy efforts of CFW2 and its members will result in parents and child-free employees having equal access, and priority, to work-life balance arrangements.

Alysia Christiaen

Creator of CFW² and a child-free woman.