Research On The Work-family Balance For Women Executives: Based On Family Roles Transition

The position and role women have in modern society has been changed tremendously when compared with conventional, the consequence is now they are facing challenges both physically and mentally. Balancing the interests between family and career life is the most significant one among those. Women are now struggling with this; especially those who are quite successful in their career life. That is to say, women in senior management occupations need to give more effort to achieve the expected balance.This paper addresses above balancing issue women in senior management occupations are facing with, focusing on the period when they have role transitions with their family. Based on role theory,social gender theory, women’s role orientation and work-family balance model, narrative research is done by studying the real cases that women have to deal with the conflicts between family need and career development when their roles are changing among daughter, wife & mother. The research goes deep into the latent causes: it’s the failure of compromises between the interest and cost of the different role women have to play at home or at work leads to the problem. The analysis of the research also shows that the conflicts do exist. Even though the assistance from family and technology can somehow relief the pressure of household duties, thinking independently and work experience will also meet the mental needs in family life. But it ’ s still quite common that women in senior management occupations would give up the promotion or higher salary, stay with their family when they feel that they couldn’t maintain the balance further.The contention of this article is maintaining the balance is a win-win situation for family and career life, but it doesn’t necessarily mean splitting the resource(time,energy & knowledge) into two halves. Spending more resource at work will give more benefits than reverse way, this can ensure the career development and at the same time compensate the family life. The gap between 2 ways is getting bigger when women are changing along daughter, wife and mother. The outcome of this research give good references about time distribution and decision making for women in senior management occupations so that they can adapt the transition of their roles between work and home, find a proper way to have their own balanced life.