Work-Family Balance: Experiences of Successful Professional Women in Academia in Pakistan

The purpose of this study was to discover the characteristics and experiences of successful professional women, instrumental in their career success, in the context of a social system where the work-family segregation of the male and female roles is still very strong. Semi structured interviews were conducted with eight successful professional women from academia, selected through purposive sampling. Interpretative phenomenological analysis of the interviews revealed three levels of experiences of these women. First level is the external influence like academically encouraging childhood environment and at the same time explicit family role expectations. Second level reflects the internal experiences such as feelings and cognitions under various contradictory external influences, such as motivation for individual achievement, acquiescence to the traditionally held gender norms and the resulting role conflict. The third level is the outward manifestation of these internal experiences, such as stretching the effort levels to manage the responsibilities of home and profession equally well. As an important determinant of the achievement motivation in these women, fathers were found to have played a significant role. Besides, the combination of risk-taking and diplomatic approaches was found to be a typical way of dealing with the conformity pressures from family.