Women’s strategies in balancing career and family in the academic community in Serbia: Differences in ethnic and social origins

Abstract

Even though the confrontation of women with the necessity to seek a balance between career and family in academia has become a subject of various research studies, a structural solution for this phenomenon still does not exist. The goal of this paper is to compare the narratives of Hungarian ethnic minority and Serbian majority female university staff members working at the Universities of Novi Sad and Belgrade, with respect to the difficulties they face when balancing family life and academic career. The qualitative research was based on twenty semi-structured interviews, conducted in 2014 and 2015. The findings show that women when balancing between their careers and families used certain strategies to explain their views and decisions. The challenge of finding work-life balance is great for women, who decide to deal with it on a micro level, in their own family and in their own way, to keep up with their commitments. Although these are women with the same socio-economic status, the intersectional analysis showed that there is a difference between the strategies used by respondents of different nationalities when balancing their career and family, and that their different social origin, family and life circumstances lead to establishing differences between these professional categories of women. The abovementioned differences lead to new inequalities between women in academia.