Not surprisingly, the coalition’s announcement of cutting “increasingly ridiculous research grants” has angered many in the research community. Well, given that my doctoral research also falls under the somewhat criticised social science, I feel better to do a bit justification here.
As the Economist claims, “Forget China, India and the internet: economic growth is driven by women“, economic power of women is vital to our country’s economic success, especially that here we have such a small workforce in Australia. Hence my research has a focus on work-life balance for women executives. We know that many working women tend to withdraw from employment, either temporarily or permanently in their career life. One of the key reasons reported is the inability to balance work and life demands, once they have children. So to gain a better understanding of work-life balance for women has an important economic meaning. Needless to say, flexibility to balance work and life has become a key attraction for many organisations to recruit and retain the desired talents. From an organisation’s point of view, that links to employee loyalty, work performance and productivity, which in turn affects the bottom line of a business. We have to admit that nowadays people’s attitude toward work has changed substantially. People put more emphasis on personal development, family life and leisure, challenging the traditional centrality of paid work. If we don’t seek changes, then we are continuing losing half of our talent pool, women professionals. Some research suggests that if we could increase our women workforce participation, then we can improve our GDP by 11%. Moreover, in Australia, poverty has a gendered face. Majority of the pensioners are women. We ask women to sacrifice for family but we do not recognise housework as paid work; instead, we give women financial penalty for staying at home. In that sense, insights into women executives and their work-life balance bear significant social meanings as well. I do believe social socience like this is as important as “hard” socience such as medicine or spacewalks. So I guess my research is worth its 2 cents.
Work-life balance 