Academic work/life balance: a brief quantitative analysis of the Australian experience

In this article, we explore the discourse of work/life balance and how academics experience and understand it. Using survey data from research conducted in 2014, the article argues that the concept of ‘life’ within the dichotomy of work/life has often assumed characteristics. While we find in our survey work that academics are indeed working longer hours and often sacrificing leisure time for outputs such as publications, it is still widely unknown how academics understand ‘life’ in relation to their occupation/vocation. Our data indicates further that pressures on academics to establish their credentials through quantifiable data (such as publication statistics) causes notions of work/life balance to become porous, with many academics reporting working from home and in ‘non-labour time’ such as the weekend. Despite these results, we argue that a more nuanced account of work/life balance needs to be attained for the discussion to proceed further.