Work/Life Balance

Work/life balance is the precarious art of men's and women's balancing act of their multiple roles and responsibilities associated with engagement in paid work and unpaid activities, such as family care, community service, professional development, and self-care. This also involves mechanisms that employers enact to help employees effectively handle work/life pressures so that they can be more productive and achieve their goals.

Women, many of whom were mothers, entering the workforce in increasing numbers in the 1960s and 1970s in the United States and Canada created a need for greater emphasis on supports requisite to maintaining the status quo in businesses and homes. Thus, women in the workforce likely were the impetus for the term work/life balance. Employers found that working women needed child care, maternity leave, and flexible schedules more than their traditional male workers.

Beginning in the 1980s and gaining momentum ever since, work/life balance has become a term frequently used to describe the combination of the two critical spheres in working men's and women's lives-work and home. This is likely due to technological advancements that elevated work and family pressures. With the increase of dual-earner households, due in part to growing economic constraints and social demands and greater emphasis on quality life outside of work, work/life balance reflects an aspiration of all working people, regardless of whether or not they are married or have children. Most adults want jobs that support their work/life balance.

Possibly in response to the new stresses working adults faced post-World War II that emerged from men's and women's engagement in the labor force, businesses took notice and provided potential stress solutions, which evolved into workplace best practices in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Stress management strategies gained popularity, while work hours and on-the-job demands increased significantly over the last six decades. Nowadays, it is not uncommon for adults to be working 50 hours or more a week and traveling greater distances for work, which is not counted in their work hours.