Time: 14 December 2022  (Wednesday)  9：00-10：30am  (Beijing Time)

Venue: Zoom meeting

Meeting ID: 86089981580

Password: 491045

Language:  English

Topic: The Balancing Act: Corporate Norms and Practices that Affect Work-Life Balance

Abstract: 

Balancing work and life outside of work is a challenge for many employees. Lack of work-life balance hampers employee performance and health, and prompts exit. It has especially negative effects on female employees because women do more domestic labor than men. We focus on firms in the tech sector and capture norms and practices concerning work-life balance by analyzing employees’ descriptions of their firms using natural-language-processing techniques. We develop and test arguments about who discusses work-life balance. One-quarter of employees discuss work-life balance. Supporting our arguments, these are mostly women in their 30s, and women in privately owned and smaller firms. Second, we develop and test arguments about opinions about work-life balance. Most tech employees express positive opinions about work-life balance. But, contrary to expectations, there are no gender differences. Analyzing a random sample of reviews for other themes revealed a common concern that firms did not have uniform work-life balance policies; instead, managers had considerable discretion to approve or deny employee requests to deal with life outside work. Because this is an important issue for many employees, male and female alike, all firms would gain from standard policies that offer cafeteria-style work-life-balance benefits that fit employees’ personal circumstances.

Lecturer: 

Heather Haveman is Professor of Sociology and Business at the University of California, Berkeley.  She received her BA in history and her MBA from the University of Toronto, and her PhD in Organizational Behavior and Industrial Relations from UC Berkeley Haas School of Management.  She has been on the faculty at Duke, Cornell, and Columbia.  She returned to UC Berkeley in 2006.She studies how organizations, industries, and employees’ careers evolve, and the impact of organizations on their employees and society.  Her work combines insights from sociology and management studies, as well as computational linguistics, economic geography, law, and social history.  Her most recent project related to on gender issues in the workplace involves analyzing data from the job-search portal GlassDoor.com to understand how organizational cultures and everyday practices create (or remove) obstacles to gender inequality in the tech sector.