Work-family balance experience of Omani career women

Abstract

Little is known about work-family balance in Arab countries. The existing studies in Oman focus mainly on work-family related policies. Thus, this thesis investigates work-family interface as experienced by Omani career women, by exploring the contributing factors from internal and external environments. It investigates the support career women received from their spouses, family members and colleagues as well as challenges they experienced in juggling work and family roles. Underpinned by constructivist and interpretivist paradigms and driven by feminist ethnographic strategy, interview was the primary data collection tool. Two types of interviews were conducted: in-depth one-on-one semi-structured interviews with ten core participants and nineteen informal interviews with local people of Oman. The interview transcripts were analysed using Charmaz’ Grounded Theory procedure. The key finding of the thesis is that family is the strongest and reliable support system to career women. Almost all conversational partners in this thesis were raised during the time when education was not favoured for girls and their parents had gone against the norm by supporting their daughters’ education. Those parents continue their unconditional supports by taking part in raising their grandchildren. Spousal supports are highly valued and desired by every woman in the study. Women experience various forms of support, ranging from highly supportive to non-supportive. Women who experienced low to none spousal support rely on domestic helpers and family members. Experience in work domain also played significant role in providing a sense of balance in a woman’s work-family experience. The finding also reveals that Oman lacks of the structural support for women workforce. The paid maternity leave is short and working mothers are suffering from lack of childcare facilities. This thesis concurs with the premise that work-family balance is a cultural construct. Theoretically, it contributes to a model that exhibits the all-pervading influence of culture in the work-family balance experience of Omani career women in the thesis. The model may serve as a guideline to organizations and human resource practitioners who wish to understand their workforce and optimize their performance. On top of this, should the government be committed in having women workforce at par with their men counterpart, improvement and enforcement of the work-family related policies are inevitable. Future research on work-family balance as experienced by women from various fields and industries are also imperative to formulate effective policies and engender healthier work-family experience.