Gendered Devotions to Work and Family: Implications for Work/Family Conflict among Ghanaian Professionals

Abstract

This thesis contends that the gendered nature of Ghanaian institutions of work and family, together with the traditional gender division of labour, gender ideologies and gender accountability in Ghana produces gendered devotions to work and family. These gendered devotions shape the work/family conflict experiences of Ghanaian mothers and fathers. Similar to women in the West, Ghanaian women have been drawn in large numbers into the labour market. Consequently dual income families have become commonplace, especially among middle-class, professionals living in urban areas. This situation has a longer history in the West and has been called work/family conflict or work/life balance. However, explorations of work/family conflict in non-Western countries like Ghana are in short supply. To investigate work/family conflict in Ghana, this thesis analyses Ghanaian teachers' and bankers' struggles with combining work and family roles. Using a qualitative approach, I interviewed 15 married men and 15 married women from intact families who were employed full-time at the time of the interview. Participants were aged 31 to 52 years, who had children ranging from six-months to 25 years. In making sense of their narratives, I relied on work and family as gendered institutions and how these gendered institutions get reproduced by social forces of gender ideologies and gender accountability. The findings indicate that men and women have their respective primary devotions to work and family. As a result, men experience work/family conflict in the form of demands for family money and therefore, work hard in meeting such demands. By so doing men intensify their relationship to paid work, although some men are gradually getting involved with domestic and caring activities, indicating the existence of different types of men - traditional, transitional and modern men. Again, it was found in this study that men as husbands/fathers are often able to exercise greater power to determine outcomes about negotiations with their wives around domestic and caring work because as breadwinners they have more financial resources. The women in this study do the double shift of paid work and unpaid work and so experience work/family conflict to a greater extent than the men, but their primary devotion to the family makes them respond to family demands whenever such demands come into conflict with their paid work. I therefore propose that equal sharing of domestic work between men and women will ensure Ghanaian men and women have equal devotions and commitments to work and family roles. Such equal commitments and devotions will create an equal platform for women in competing with their male counterparts at iii work and reduce gender inequality existing in the Ghanaian families. This will further ensure more egalitarian family life and make men have the same commitments to domestic tasks as women do in developing countries.