The Myth of Work-Life Balance

Richenda Gambles is currently working as a Lecturer in theDepartment of Social Policy and Social Work at the University ofOxford, UK. As well as being an Associate of the Work-LifeResearch Centre, she has been involved with the Institute of Familyand Environmental Research as a Research Associate and has workedat the Open University as an Associate Lecturer. She has alsoworked as a journalist. She has a degree in Social Policy and amasters degree in Gender and Social Policy, both from the LondonSchool of Economics. Suzan Lewis is Professor of Organisational andWork-Life Psychology at Manchester Metropolitan University,UK, a director of the multi-site Work-Life Research Centreand was formerly Visiting Professor at the School of Management,UMIST. She has a degree in Psychology and a PhD in OrganisationalPsychology. Her research focuses on workplace practice, culture andchange in different social policy contexts. She has led manynational and international research projects on these topics and iscurrently directing a European Union funded eight-country study ongender, parenthood and well-being in changing European workplaces.She has published extensively including The Work FamilyChallenge, edited with her son, Jeremy Lewis (1996) andWork-Life Integration: Case Studies of OrganisationalChange, with C. Cooper (2005). She is also a founding editor ofthe international journal Community, Work and Family,published by Taylor & Francis. She has advised governments andworked with employers and policy makers in Britain, the USA andJapan, undertaking consultancy and research on work-lifeissues. Rhona Rapoport was director of the Institute of Familyand Environmental Research from 1977 until its closure at thebeginning of 2005. In addition, for over 20 years she has been aconsultant to the Ford Foundation working on affirmative actionissues and work and family issues in the United States and in'developing' countries, and in 1994-1995 she wasa scholar in residence at the Ford Foundation. During the 1990s,she was also Distinguished Fellow and adviser at the Center forGender in Organizations at the immons Graduate School of Managementin Boston. She has a degree in Social Science from the Universityof Cape Town, South Africa and a PhD in Sociology from the LondonSchool of Economics, which was based on work done in Uganda for twoyears. A major concern in her work is the issue of equity betweenmen and women. She has collaborated with action research projectsin the USA and the UK as well as with a training programme onorganisational change and work-family issues for advancing diversegroups in South Africa. She has published extensively over the past50 years, often with her husband Robert. These publications includeDual Career Families (1971) and Leisure and the FamilyLife Cycle (1975). In 2004, she was awarded The Work LifeLegacy award by the Families and Work Institute in New York. Shehas also won an award from the European Work-Life andDiversity Council.