Originally published here.

Being able to reconcile the demands of work and life is a serious organizational challenge currently faced by employees (Bourdeau, Ollier-Malaterre, & Houlfort, 2019). The field of information technology (IT) has been professed as the vanguard of new work practices, with the separation of work and life more blurred than in traditional occupations (Ahuja, 2002; Scholarios & Marks, 2004). In this field, work has been described as passionate, and connected to ideals of freedom and creativity (Scholarios & Marks, 2004; Walby, 2011). IT organizations have often been depicted as desirable places to work because of their low organizational hierarchy, close social relationships, and high work autonomy and flexibility (Hari, 2017; Walby, 2011). However, they are also blamed for normalizing long intensified working hours, as well as setting high demands on employees (Hari, 2017; Van Zoonen, Sivunen, & Rice, 2020), which can all be sources of stress and conflict between work and other life spheres (Ongaki, 2019; Wang, Gao, & Lin, 2019).

This study investigates how IT professionals produce work–life relations through discourse. We focus on work–life ideologies and explore the agencies produced, as well as how they are gendered. Although advances in technology-enabled work solutions have created new work models without constraints of time and place, there is limited knowledge of work–life integration for IT professionals (DePasquale et al., 2017; Holth, Bergman, & MacKenzie, 2017). In IT work, masculine ideals continue to dominate, perpetuating the naturalized connection of technical skill with a “male” job and placing women in clerical work and less technical positions (Lie, 1995; Tassabehji, Harding, Lee, & Dominguez-Pery, 2021; Kenny & Donnelly, 2020). Motherhood is often seen as a problem, an obstacle for women who want a professional career in the IT field, whereas fatherhood remains invisible (Holth, Bergman, & MacKenzie, 2017; Tiainen & Berki, 2019). Women in IT tend to scale down their work tasks and career objectives to meet their domestic responsibilities (Holth et al., 2017), and among women there are lower rates of return after having children than men (Walby, 2011).

Methodologically, we draw on critically oriented discourse analysis (Fairclough, 1992; Wodak & Chilton, 2005), which allows us to examine the ideological underpinnings of IT professionals’ discourses. We are also interested in what kind of gendered constructions are involved in agency and how gender is “done” (Davies & Harré, 1990; West & Zimmerman, 1987) and “undone” (Butler, 2004; Deutsch, 2007). Our data were collected in interviews with 24 professionals, female and male, working in IT in Finland. Work–life research and its theories have failed to adequately consider the variety of sociocultural contexts, or different fields of business in which people operate (Padavic, Ely, & Reid, 2020; Ollier-Malaterre, 2013). Therefore, research approaches that take into account country’s family and economic policy, labour market, social norms, and national culture are needed (Poggesi, Mari, De Vita, & Foss, 2020). We included both genders because both views are important to understand the gendered practices in the Finnish context and how people experience work–life issues in the fast-developing and male-dominated IT industry. Like the other Nordic welfare states, Finland offers extensive state-subsidized parental leave and day care. Nonetheless, the labour market continues to be marked by gendered segregation: in 2017, women comprised 25.5% of the workforce in IT (Statistics Finland, 2018), and only 10% of developers were women (Finnish Software and E-business Association, 2017).

The remainder of this article is organized as follows: first, we review earlier research on work–life issues in IT workplaces through the gender lens. Second, we introduce work–life ideologies and explicate the discursive approach to doing gender and agency. Third, we introduce the research setting, followed by the research data and analysis. We then present the research findings. Finally, we discuss the importance of our findings and draw some conclusions.

The study investigated how IT professionals produce work–life relations through discourse. We focused on work–life ideologies and explored the agencies produced, as well as how they were gendered and differently available to men and women. The first discourse was characterized as rational and emotion-free, putting forward fixed and straightforward solutions to cope with the requirements of work and other life spheres. Agency in this discourse was constructed as a matter of “shifting gears” from one mode to another. The discourse offered male interviewees the possibility of constructing a “long hours” culture, commitment to work, and care responsibilities in a naturalized status quo. Heroic, masculine stereotypes were used to stifle personal problems, and adventurous team journeys in the public sphere were related to work. Interestingly, the findings reveal that the men produced an easy care relationship to domestic responsibilities, describing themselves as performers of a routine. Thus the segmented ideology allowed the IT professionals to effortlessly travel through the interchanges of work–life relations. This implies locking the family into a traditional gender structure, in which men’s traditional roles affect their management of work–life relations. The traditional masculinities were hardly ever questioned and fatherhood was rarely discussed in the IT workplaces, which may further sideline the men’s participation and social recognition as equal parents (Burnett et al., 2013).

The second discourse emphasized the primacy of work, along with professional competence and personal investment. In this discourse, female professionals’ need to achieve work goals often led to work-life conflicts. Grünberg and Matei (2020) argue that the conflict discourse reinforces traditional gender roles and causes unsustainability in working life. Our results, however, showed some overturning of traditional gender roles, with the women positioning themselves as agentic, self-assured, and daring subjects. The women’s use of a strong competence discourse can be understood as a response to the work–life conflict experienced by women who enter a professional masculine environment. The ideal worker in IT is still predominantly masculine (Acker, 1990). We suggest that this continues to create unequal possibilities for women in IT and to contribute to the unsustainability of working life (ibid.). Our results suggest that the work–life ideologies constructed here may lead to men having fewer possibilities of devoting themselves to other spheres of life than work and to women being required to foster a certain type of work–life balance, with mothering responsibilities combined with a continuous effort to achieve self-discipline and self-development. These are all demands that are typically set in a neoliberal society (Rottenberg, 2018). In the contemporary gender regimes in these types of IT organizations, particularly women are expected to act heroically (Kelan & Mah, 2014), and to be willing to be active and responsible for creating their own career success (Gill, 2007). While women are offered a broader spectrum of positions (availability of positions typically considered masculine), and can be hence interpreted as a means to disrupt gender relations, we argue that the discourse serves to conceal structural inequalities by emphasizing women’s individual responsibility. Based on our study we can conclude that masculinities procuded in a male-dominated IT workplace are often left untouched or difficult to change (e.g. Berggren, 2014).

In our study, the gendering of work–life ideologies indicated that women experience gendered pressures (i.e., balancing work and motherhood, gaining acceptance in a male-dominated field), whereas men continue to be placed in the traditional breadwinner role and any new type of fatherhood is sidelined in the work–life discourse. In terms of the (un)doing gender perspective of our study, we conclude that the men’s discourse tended to reproduce conventional gender norms, whereas the women engaged with more dynamic constructions of gender as they distanced from and partially challenged traditional motherhood expectations and enacted a masculine career orientation. We argue that this study of professionals in the IT workplace not only shows the dilemma of women’s agency in contemporary postfeminist culture but also perpetuates a stagnant and narrow agency for men that is left untouched and unchallenged, therefore maintaining gender inequalities in IT.

Because the IT sector is often considered a trendy and dynamic field, is was somewhat surprising that the men’s discourse contained hardly any presence of parenthood, in this case the fatherhood. In contrast, the women expressed their difficulties (e.g., the need to work extra hours), but they rarely addressed or questioned the implications of inequalities or power. The study also points out that even though work-family practices are in place in IT organizations, they often remain as mere policies rather than actual available practices due to the gendered notions embedding IT work and career. Given that work–family conflict can have detrimental consequences for both employees and employers (e.g., burnout, turnover, loss of productivity, absenteeism, presenteeism) (DePasquale et al., 2017), IT organizations should make greater efforts to ensure the reconciliation of work with other life spheres by promoting family-friendly policies that take into account different types of life situations and families, developing flexible work scheduling that would increase work-wellbeing, with innovative initiatives specifically designed for knowledge work. IT organizations could also offer mentorship or supervisory support to tackle the gendered implications of work-life relations.

In conclusion, we suggest that the need to prove and reaffirm their competence reveals the continued vulnerability of women in the IT workplace (Hari, 2017; Holth et al., 2017). In the face of such pressure, there is no room for failure or hesitation (Kelan & Mah, 2014). The agency produced by women is strongly goal-oriented to meet the requirements of the competent self, compared with the agency that emphasizes team effort typically reported by the men in our study. In other words, it is more important for women in IT to attain the position of valued expert. The competence talk produced by the women supports the ideals of postfeminist sensibilities, which require women to silence their insecurity and vulnerability and to act in a way that portrays them as capable of creating their own success (Gill & Orgad, 2015).

Our findings point out that the field of IT is experiencing subtle changes in terms of the gender regime: Unlike the women in Swedish ICT sector (Holth et al., 2017), the women in our study evinced a strong work orientation, and rather than opting out from career opportunities, they were somewhat resistant of the traditional motherhood norms and established themselves as competitive and self-reliant as they pursued professional development. Such masculinist, career-oriented behaviours have been more recently identified also in other Finnish studies on professional women (Niemistö et al., 2021). However, it is important to denote how the understanding of IT work in itself, remains untouched, as it continues to be marked by the naturalization of long-hours and competition. Furthermore, in our data, fatherhood was silenced and backgrounded, as has been shown both in Nordic (Holth et al., 2017) as well as North American studies (Hari, 2017) of IT work.

On a practical level, our study has shown that both the psychosocial and the equality perspectives in managing work-life relations will be a great concern for IT organizations as they seek to hire new employees and retain them by ensuring their work well-being (Hari, 2017; Holth et al., 2017; Poggesi et al., 2020). Our interview data comes from a sample of heterosexual, white-collar employees with rather traditional caregiver roles (usually in a family with small children). This means that employees with other types of family situations (e.g., single) may be under-represented here. Future studies looking at diverse roles in life and taking into account different types of life situations in specific work roles (e.g., game developers, managers) would be a valuable addition to this vein of research. It would also be worth examining, how young fathers structure their work–life relations in these types of organizations. Nor did our results produce any information about spousal support or alternative forms of social support (e.g., grandparents’ support), or the use of organizational support to facilitate the reconciliation of work and life, all of which warrant exploration in future research. From the organizational perspective, it would be fruitful to explore how IT organizations can improve the management of work and life relations and ultimately enhance gender equality (Padavic et al., 2020; Poggesi et al., 2020). This study also builds on a broadened scope of work–family research by drawing attention to work-life ideologies (Leslie et al., 2019) in the field of IT. We feel that this theoretical understanding merits further research, particularly from the perspective of sustainability and promoting gender equality (Grünberg & Matei, 2020; Kivijärvi & Sintonen, 2021).

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