Impact of Employee Engagement Practices of Private Universities on Work-Life Conflict of Female Academicians
Shaan Gulhar
Research Scholar
Department of Human Resources & Psychology
Dr Anshu Singh
Assistant Professor
Department of Human Resources & Psychology
Dr Priyanka Agarwal
Assistant Professor
Department of Human Resources & Psychology
Academicians have always been kept on a high pedestal in society with their work being considered very noble and one that shapes the future. In reality, most of the academicians’ grapple with the inconsistent and often flawed work policies promulgated by their respective institutions that lead to much heartburn and feeling of under-valued and under-appreciated contribution. In the case of the female academicians, this problem is more acute as they have to grapple with the home and child-rearing responsibilities as well, along with the official responsibilities. Many motivational and research literature have put the responsibility of work-life and career planning on the individual, while the role of organizational policies in this regard has often been ignored or kept out of the public scrutiny. In this empirical paper, the author makes an effort to understand the impact of the employee engagement practices on the life of female academicians, and how those policies affect the work-life conflict of this workforce. The scope of the paper has been defined to contain only the work-life conflict aspects of the female employees of private universities in northern and western India, since, the increased ‘Work from Home’ (WFH) pattern due to the Covid 19 pandemic has put immense pressure on the maintaining of this boundary between the personal and professional life. Using Correlation Analysis on the data collected through structured questionnaires on a convenience sampling mode, the results are presented in the study along with the limitations of the study and the scope for future studies.
Keywords: Employee Engagement Practices, Work-life Conflict, Work from Home, Female Academicians, Education Sector
As the Industrial Revolution progressed and, almost, every industry or product category had two or three players in the fray who services the market and provided employment in that category, people had no choice, but to work for those organizations in whatever conditions and on whatever pay the employer offered them. As the world economy progressed and the number of companies or organizations in each category increased, higher pay became a primary tool for the management to attract and retain qualified and deserving employees with them. However, as we approach the third decade of the millennium, all the industries pose multiple players who are vying for the best talent that is on offer in the market and are ready to pay the best of the packages for such talent. Education Industry was a laggard as far as this intense privatization and competition was concerned but has now arrived on the scene with aplomb and teachers, or the future – creators, as they are many times called, have for the first time in their life experienced an environment where they are being chased by big corporate universities and other trust operated colleges and institutions for accepting a position with them. However, the education employment industry has also reached the same crossroads where the employers are finding that money is not enough a pull to attract and retain these academicians.
Over a while, employers from almost all the industries realized the importance of employee engagement and the benefits that it brings to the organization in the form of higher productivity and happy employees, thus, ultimately, resulting in higher profitability for the organization and a stronger bottom line on the balance sheet. This path towards the most appropriate and effective employee engagement practices was also not easy as many practices were difficult to implement, while others lost their relevance as time went by and the employees grew more aware of their bargaining power. Salary restructuring for better tax management or ESOPS can be illustrated as an example for this point. As the organizations worked hard and found the best fit of the employee engagement practices for their respective employees, came the most unforeseen and unprecedented event of this millennium in terms of the Covid 19 pandemic. As the workforce was confined to their homes and all kinds of physical contact was lost with the employees, it threw a novel issue in front of the management of the organizations as to how to engage the employees without meeting them personally. As the world fumbled again and the best fit for new employee engagement practices was sought, the companies came up with new initiatives like online celebrations of major and minor achievements, sending small gifts and food packets and coupons as a token of appreciation or reward for achieving some target or completing some task. Understanding that family is a part of the life of the employee and the family members, especially kids would barge into the online meetings and, many a time, the employee will have to engage in both these roles simultaneously, created a much-needed relief for the employees and, especially, the female employees as these incidents occurred with them more often. The search for the best fit of these employee engagement practices is not over yet, and as the pandemic subsides and the workforce gets used to the hybrid model of online and physical presence in the office, the company management shall keep on searching for the right balance of these practices that shall benefit the employees also, and at the same time, would not prove to be a big burden on the company also.
The pandemic has also greatly affected the higher education market, which is a vital determinant of the economic future of a nation and is not only transforming the concept of the workplace, it is also changing the annual performance evaluation framework. With a broad population operating from home and educational establishments, the need to review faculty output is now feltand different perspectives particularly for female academicians as institutions are having the assumption that females are more concerned about the family affair and find it difficult to balance between work and personal life. Most of the private universities are assessing their employees butunfortunately, private Indian universities are assessing their employee’s particular based onthe number of hours which they are dedicating to institutions and compensation they receive and therefore it may have been a reason of higher proportion of female employees in higher educational institutions, as they demand lesser remunerations.
Training is an important dimension of employee engagement and few of the institutions, not all, have taken this situation as an opportunity to train their teacher and enabled them to become creative. Some teachers are using video conferencing facilities such as Zoom and BlueJeans Meetings for online teaching. These video conference facilities have features such as one-click scheduling, screen sharing and collaboration, Cloud streaming and recording, and so on. Some educators use Google Meet.
Technology-intimidated teachers had to grab the bull by its head. Planning for an online world required some re-learning for those who were proficient in planning and teaching in the conventional classroom. Many Private universities not paid much attention to the training part as assumed that most of the teachers were equipped with technology, therefore one-day training at no additional cost, benefitted these institutions, and applications like zoom and google meet proved cost-effective instruments to these intuitions.
The success of education programs facilitated by technology is often related to teacher autonomy and encouragement. It has also served well for others where the teacher is strongly encouraged to have access to different learning resources: books and other types of learning materials. In its performance, the ability to reach and negotiate complex services and contexts plays a critical role. This is why, as an autonomous learner, certain means and media are effective in supporting those who choose to update their expertise or skills as a supplemental or complementary mode in situations where access to technology is otherwise reasonably ubiquitous. It has been popular for that section of Indian society as well. This preparation and technologies, which they have acquired in the last 9 months, will certainly increase their working performance until the condition becomes normal. While COVID 19 has generated cognitive dissonance in the mind of the faculty against different circumstances they have encountered in connection with culture, families, and teaching and learning in their everyday life. The revolution in Indian higher education has been established, as there was a lot of resistance in teaching brotherhood to respond to technology and student virtual interaction. Because of the scenario, the technology has been generally adopted by much of the higher education and the attendance of students is more than the normal class participation. E-learning encourages the individuality of learners and helps students to develop expertise and skills without relying on teachers. India needs to seriously take and encourage the challenge of many developed and emerging countries leading the way in online education.
Career progression and planning is a harsh reality even in a normal situation in a private higher education institution and teachers do not see any future prospects there. Many private higher education institutions have reduced their teachers'salaries and the idea of teacher promotion and annual increment has been locked in the back door.
Any employerin any industry would have two choices in front of them; either do not engage their employees more meaningfully and let the employees leave them soon, or create more employee engagement opportunities, and help in the overall development of the employees who would then leave them for greener pastures. However, as any human resource expert or researcher would tell these employers that the second condition is much better, as better engaged employees who feel more valued and being taken care of by the employer would give more effort in their work and may often, surpass the expected levels of dedication while performing their day to day duties. As the market gets intensely competitive and consumers or the customers become more aware of their buying and bargaining power, there is little scope for lax performance from any organization that wishes to stay in this hyper-competitive market and make a mark for themselves. It is only through the employees that a company serves its customers and every employee of the organization must feel valued and actively engaged in their work which challenges their existing skills and gives them a chance to grow.
When this discussion is brought to the education sector, there creeps in certain dissonance regarding the engagement factor of the academicians to their jobs, because, it is considered as an inherent feature that the academicians love their job of teaching so much that the employer efforts do not matter much. This is a flawed perception since the author believes that, even the academicians, who are otherwise engaged in their noble profession need certain tangible and intangible cues from their employers that they matter, that the employer values their presence, their service, the skill set, and expertise that they bring to their job, and the value addition that they do in their students’ life who are the customers of their employers. In the present turbulent times, when the studies have shifted to online mode due to Covid 19 and almost the entire academic world is operating from the confines of their homes, the employees are feeling further disconnected from their place of work, and need a sense of purpose and oneness with the organization which should make them feel like one of the valued family member of the organization.
A recognition of the work of the employee and a suitable compensation or reward for that appreciated work goes a long way in making that employee feel valued and engaged with the organization. Performance appraisals were, precisely, designed for that purpose, i.e. to evaluate and appraise the employees about their performance and give them guidance for future performance in terms of important areas of growth and targets for the next year. Over some time, a lot of methods of performance appraisal have been developed like 360-degree appraisals, KPI method, and many more.
A performance appraisal system, without adequate opportunities for training to acquire the required skill set to perform to the best of their capacity, will not serve any purpose, as it would be impractical for the organization to demand a change in the outcome by the employee without training them first for it. Pandemic and Work From Home have further enhanced the need for this training as newer skill sets and attitudes are required to work effectively from home. Any salary increment or promotion in terms of the post is not going to bear much fruit if the employee is not sure about the progression of his / her career in the organization and the growth levels that they can achieve in their work life. Thus, a proper and foreseeable career plan goes a long way in enhancing the engagement of the employee with the organization. If these three factors deal with an employee’s engagement with the organization in long term, autonomy to make decisions about the work given and the ability and chance is given to the employee to participate in the decision making of the organization on a day to day basis keeps the employee engaged and make them feel a valuable part of the organization who contributes in the performance of the organization daily, with his / her experience in the organization being suitably used and valued.
Any person or an employee of an organization has three dimensions or aspects to their existence, the paid work, which generates money for their livelihood, the family, which provides the mental and physical protection and sense of belongingness, and the personal duties or care, that provides the sense of self-worth to the person by engaging in the activities that fulfill the purpose of existence of that being. (Hill et al., 2001) Till the time, all three aspects of a person’s life are in harmony and balanced against each other, the person can live happily and contribute towards their job and family meaningfully while engaging in activities and tasks for self – development or soul nourishment. When any of these aspects enlarges her scope and starts to overshadow the other two, the balance of life vanishes that increases the stress, unhappiness, and withdrawal tendencies among people, extending to a fall in the performance on the job – front also. (Quick et al., 2004) This imbalance situation is termed as work-life conflict and it proves detrimental to the physiological and psychological wellbeing of any person experiencing it. Prolonged imbalance or heightened work-life conflict may lead to chronic depression and other physical ailments along with reduced efficiency at work. The family also has a role to play in reducing the work-life conflict, but, it is the work-place and the organizational policies that lead to the creation of this conflict in the first place.
It is no secret that a complex collection of problems faces women serving at universities. In academia, there are sharp disparities in advancement patterns, wage, and workload, among other variables, between men and women. In comparison, the ' educational motherhood' definition has been extensively discussed and presented. Educational women are flooded with service when working as the sole caregiver for their children at the same time. Navigating as a mother and an academic has taken on a whole new significance in the sense of the COVID-19 crisis. Now that a worldwide pandemic is upon us, working mothers are trying to keep up with their male peers more than ever before, particularly in academia. Recent research shows that while journal submissions from male researchers have risen as universities have gone interactive, women's submissions have declined dramatically.
It has been reported among working women in general that this economic recession has brought to light a wide disparity between women and men in household jobs. Pre-pandemic findings have found that even in households where all spouses occupy full-time jobs, including those where women are the primary breadwinners, women are forced to retain and overwhelmingly do the bulk of household duties. In reality, despite the rise in women employed in technical professions, the division of labor in housework has not progressed significantly over the past few decades. In academics, women view their 'failure' to maintain work-life harmony as a personal challenge rather than a social one. This resonates with the contributors in this essay and will be further discussed.
As the author proceeded with this inquiry in mind that how important is employee engagement in an inherently satisfying profession like teaching and came across some studies that discussed this point of view in various settings to date. As (Amin et al., 2014) studied the human resource practices of chosen public universities in Malaysia, they concluded that some particular practices like compensation, career planning, job description, and recruitment and selection processes play an important role in the performance of academicians. This study also revealed that, despite popular notions, training is not a very important factor in this regard.
While (Johari et al., 2018) studied the impact of autonomy, workload, and work-life balance on the job performance of school teachers and concluded that autonomy and work-life balance have a stronger impact on the job performance while workload doesn’t affect much, (Woodruffe, 2006) did a theoretical study on the employee engagement practices of companies in general and concluded that most of the higher management in today’s organizations doesn’t understand the importance of employee engagement and still consider higher pay package as the most important aspect of the same.
(Hill et al., 2001) in a study for IBM compared the various job-related parameters like performance, motivation, retention, workload success, and career opportunity for employees working from the traditional office, virtual office, and home office and found that the virtual office concept was the best suited for higher levels of efficiency and performance, but, it also led to an imbalance in the personal life of the employees
(Quick et al., 2004) put forth a further dimension to the work-life conflict when they studied and proposed that work-life imbalance will lead to work-life conflict only when there is a dysfunctional competition between a person’s personal and professional time requirements, otherwise, if the work-life and home are mutually reinforcing, then it will not lead to conflict.
(J., 2014)conducted a causal study to decide those factors that are important for employee engagement and how employee engagement affects the performance of these employees and deduced that working environment and team and co-worker relationship are the important determinants of employee engagement.(Woodward, 2007)conducted a qualitative study on the Women academicians of Britain and came out with the conclusion that longer working hours and higher workload leads to work-life conflict and creates problems in defining the work-life boundaries for these women, which is more difficult in the case of women academicians with dependent children.
(Taneja et al., 2015) puts the onus of developing employee engagement practices in the organization on the higher management with human resource departments often acting as only conduits for the same. The presence of women in higher management makes it more effective for the female employees of the organization in terms of the effectiveness and relevance of these practices.
(Robertson & Cooper, 2010) study the sustainability of employee engagement from the perspective of the employee and not from the organizations’ work efficiency perspective. They deduce that employee wellbeing is a very crucial factor in the sustainability of employee engagement.
(Gulhar, 2020) studied the impact of various factors like flexible schedules, supervisor support, spouse support, switch off time, emotional exhaustion, the autonomy of work and organizational support on the work-life balance of the female academicians and further on the employee productivity and found that all these factors affected employee productivity by affecting the work-life balance with flexibility in the schedules and supervisor support being the most prominent among the studied factors.
(Bell et al., 2012) studied the impact of job work-related stress and the job continuity threat stress on the work-life conflict and work-life balance of the Australian academicians and concluded that both the types of stress harm the work-life balance which results in enhancement of work-life conflict.
(Kevin E. Cahill, Tay K. McNamara, Marcie Pitt-Catsouphes, 2012) studied the impact of macro-economic changes on the job satisfaction and employee engagement of the employees of large organizations and concluded that any negative impact on the macroeconomic environment reduces the job satisfaction and engagement of the employees with their work, thus rendering the organizational interventions pointless.
(de Mello e Souza Wildermuth & Pauken, 2008) did a literature survey on employee engagement and came out with factors like leadership, an environment of an organization, job conditions, and individual factors that impact the employee engagement that any organization should take care of.
(Doherty, 2004) studied the role of organizational initiatives in helping women employees to progress to higher management and concluded that these initiatives work only when the labor market is scarce and even then, longer working hours associated with managerial positions is often a hindrance.
(Ali & Farooqi, 2014) studied the impact of work overload on employee engagement using job satisfaction and employee performance as intermittent factors. The study showed that increasing workload leads to reduced employee engagement which further exacerbates the problem in terms of employee performance.
(Kanten & Sadullah, 2012) rue that most of the studies till date have concentrated on workload and employee engagement relationship while ignoring the quality of work-life, which according to authors is a more important factor while determining the employee engagement policies.
(Jarvis & Pratt, 2006) proposed that extension of work into the home hours needs to be factored into the studies and discussions around work-life conflict and employee engagement because of the connected devices and changing organizational perspectives on employee work – hours.
(Saltmarsh & Randell-Moon, 2015) studied the employee engagement practices of Australian universities and concluded that such practices lead to the organizations engaging their employees on a more holistic level and not only on the work-related aspects.
(Guest, 2014) studies the distinction between work engagement and organizational engagement and how the confusion among the two leads to ineffective policy formulations that do not lead to any enhancement in employee engagement and their performance.
(Zheng et al., 2015) came up with a novel concept that compares the individual work-life balance strategies against organizational ones and concludes that individual policies are more effective in increasing employee engagement and performance as compared to the organizational policies.
According to (Delaney & Huselid, 1996) recruitment and selection, training and development and employee participation are very important factors for an employee to feel engaged with the organization, while (Lee et al., 2010) deduced that teamwork, compensation, planning, and job security were key factors that determined an employee’s satisfaction with the job. At the same time, (Quresh et al., 2010) came up with career planning; selection, compensation, and a fair and transparent performance appraisal system were the pillars of employee engagement that HR practices helped in managing for the organizations.
As the author surveyed the existing research literature in this domain, it is apparent that many researchers have considered the importance of the overall well - being of an employee as a crucial pre-condition for the performance at the work. Various researchers have conducted studies in different sectors and industries that study the effect of working conditions and organization policies on the work-life balance of employees of that particular sector or industry, including the education sector. However, most of these studies are gender-neutral in nature and do not specifically focus on the problems of the women engaged in the workforce. It is established wisdom that the women in any society have to undertake more work as compared to their male counterparts in the household, even if they work outside the house also. The current situation of the Covid 19 pandemic and the resulting ‘Work from Home’ that has been boosted due to the lockdowns and the restrictions on the movement and meeting of people has further aggravated the problems of these female workers, academicians in our case. A female academician is expected to perform at the same level she was performing before this situation, and, at the same time, take care of the household and the family members as well. The author feels that this is the most appropriate time to study the functionality of professional women when they are embedded in their homes while working at the same time.A study of the work-life conflict in this situation is very critical since the organizations and the workers are trying to find the balance between work and family life that serves both the purposes of – organizational profitability and employee well-being.The number of employee engagement practices and strategies has been studied earlier, although in normal phenomena only, and a situation like COVID-19, happened almost 100 years back, thoughthe absence of internet did not create the problem of work-life conflict particular for females, as they require to balance between professional and personal life, on the other hand, phenomena is not the same in COVID- 19 Period, as internet has given access beyond office hours and employer watch you all the time. Therefore. Keeping this point in mind, the following objective was decided to be pursued in this paper:
With this objective in mind and the learnings from the extensive literature review led the author to choose performance appraisal, career planning, training, participative decision making and autonomy as the independent variables to represent employee engagement practices of the private universities, while work-life conflict works as the dependent variable and the following hypothesis was created:
Ho: There is no impact of the factors like performance appraisal, career planning, training, participative decision making, and autonomy of work on work-life conflict.
Ha: There is a statistically significant impact of the factors like performance appraisal, career planning, training, participative decision making, and autonomy of work on work-life conflict.
In order to fulfil the objective mentioned in the previous section, the author decided that an empirical study would be conducted using a structured questionnaire which was first validated through a pilot study of 25 people, and reliability analysis of the variables was also conducted in order to check for the reliability and relevance of the chosen variables. Once the pilot study verified the suitability of the questionnaire and the reliability analysis proved the relevance of variables as important, the questionnaire was administered to the sample population. The questionnaire content was adopted from three previous studies in the same field mainly, i.e. from (Quresh et al., 2010; Shahzad et al., 2008; Singh, 2004), and the questionnaire was divided into three sections, with the first section dedicated to general and demographic information of the participants, the second section devoted to Likert Scale based statement related to the employee engagement practices of universities and the third section contained statements related to work-life conflict situations that also used the 5 point Likert Scale for gauging the response of the academicians.
Convenience sampling method was chosen and a total of 150 female academicians were sent the questionnaire through emails and social media contacts, of which 110 were received back and, in the end 98 were used for analysis after checking for incomplete forms and anomalous data entries, thus achieving a 65.33% response rate. These 98 responses were subjected to a Regression Analysis for establishing the effect of the chosen variables on the dependent variable of work-life conflict.
The Reliability Analysis conducted on the variables exhibited that all the chosen variables were significantly related to the study as exhibited in the following table.
Table 1: Reliability Analysis
|
Reliability Analysis |
|
|
Performance Appraisal |
0.856 |
|
Career Planning |
0.913 |
|
Training |
0.869 |
|
Participative Decision Making |
0.756 |
|
Autonomy of Work |
0.836 |
|
Work-life Conflict |
0.738 |
|
Overall Reliability |
0.852 |
As the regression analysis was done to determine the most prominent factors that affected the work-life conflict, it was clearly exhibited that all the chosen factors were significant in this regard with an adjusted r2 value of 62.3%, as depicted in Table 2.
Table 2: Regression Model Summary – Work-life Balance
|
Regression Statistics |
|
|
Model |
1 |
|
Multiple R |
0.823 |
|
R Square |
0.678 |
|
Adjusted R Square |
0.623 |
|
Standard Error |
0.24837 |
Any variance proportion value above 25% is always considered significant as per the legacy literature review, which is an important factor in this case, as the present variance of 62.3% is significantly higher than the threshold variance value, thus clearly establishing the impact of performance appraisal, career planning, training, participative decision making and autonomy of work on the work-life conflict. Also, the ANOVA table generated along with the Regression Model (Table 3) also establishes the impact of the chosen variables on the work-life conflict.
Table 3: ANOVA for Work-life Conflict Model
|
Model |
|
df |
SS |
MS |
F |
Significance F |
|
1 |
Regression |
5 |
17.543 |
2.479 |
43.23 |
0.000 |
|
Residual |
134 |
8.027 |
0.056 |
|||
|
|
Total |
139 |
23.570 |
|
|
|
The above two tables (Table 2 and Table 3) clearly establish that the Null Hypothesis stands rejected and the Alternate Hypothesis can be accepted, thus establishing the impact of the chosen factors performance appraisal, career planning, training, participative decision making and autonomy of work on work-life conflict. Table 4 gives us the following Regression Equation that depicts the relationship of these variables:
Work-life Conflict = 0.446 × performance appraisal + 0.069 × career planning + 0.037 × training + 0.247 × participative decision making+ 0.059 × autonomy of work
Table 4: Regression Coefficients for Work-life Conflict
|
|
|
Unstandardized Coefficients |
Standardized |
|
||
|
Model |
|
B |
SE |
Β |
t |
Significance |
|
1 |
(Constant) |
0.818 |
0.21 |
3.887 |
0.000 |
|
|
Performance Appraisal |
0.446 |
0.084 |
0.53 |
5.503 |
0.000 |
|
|
Career Planning |
0.069 |
0.091 |
0.074 |
0.71 |
0.479 |
|
|
Training |
0.037 |
0.087 |
0.36 |
3.623 |
0.000 |
|
|
Participative Decision Making |
0.247 |
0.09 |
0.003 |
0.023 |
0.982 |
|
|
|
Autonomy of Work |
0.059 |
0.049 |
0.055 |
1.069 |
0.287 |
As the Regression Analysis has clearly established the impact of the chosen five factors, performance appraisal, career planning, training, participative decision making and autonomy of work on the work-life conflict of the female academicians in private universities of India, it is important for the policy makers of the education industry and the top management of these institutions to pay heed to these findings and findings of other such studies to create new and modify their existing policies in such a manner that encourages the female academicians to participate more in this industry in terms of employment, and at the same time, get equal opportunities of career advancements that their male counterparts are privy to.
The study clearly depicts that of the five factors, two of these are important viz. performance appraisal and training, while career planning, participative decision making and autonomy to work do not play such a significant role. The pay – gap among the genders is a common story across all the industries and education is no different from them. However, if the private universities want to create a more empathetic environment in their institutions, attract and retain talent from other institutions and industry, they will have to, soon, address this pay gap among the male and female employees. Training here is expressed in terms of using the LMS systems and the other proprietary or licensed software and machines that every university develops or acquires in order to ab added as a competitive advantage over their competition. A proper training of such systems and software are a valid expectation of the female academicians in order to give their best to the institution and perform to their maximum potential.
Although, career planning is a typical ordeal for the female academicians as the motherhood responsibilities, almost always, puts them at a disadvantage over their male colleagues andthe top management is also less inclined to promote female academicians to higher posts due to the same reason. While, autonomy of work and participative decision making makes the employee feel valued and gives them a chance to put their own initiatives and innovations in the running of the day to day program of the institution,any organization that provides her employees of these two opportunities would make the employees feel as being valued by the institution and their work-life conflict would automatically reduce of this independence to decide their own pace and method of working. These three factors seem to be important in the current context as per the common understanding of the female employment dynamics. However, the study reveals that these do not play any significant role in the work – life conflict of the female academicians.
It is high time that the education industry wakes up to the coming change of online education which will make these huge campuses redundant and their chalk and board facilities as worthless with outdated faculty members who would be unable to adapt to this new normal. This change has already got a major boost, during the pandemic, with the market and Government through their regulatory bodies like UGC, AICTE and others are devising newer policies and methodologies to promote the online mode of education. Attracting industry experts as mentors and facilitators of the core audience is a way out for these private universities, but, in order to do that, they will have to create a level playing field for the female academicians with an equal opportunity of work, pay and growth irrespective of their gender or any other such characteristic.
As this study was limited to the North and Western India, the results may not be generalized for the entire country. A detailed study covering universities from all across the country would give results that may be considered as more representative of the female academicians of the country. Moreover, the government university situation might be different as those universities do not have any independence in deciding their policies leading to more problems for the female academicians. A third aspect of the current study would be to search for the departmental and faculty wise distinction in the important factors that affect the work-life conflict of the female academicians.
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