Profile: Linda Duxbury
By Lucinda Schmidt | theage.com.au | 23 April
Five years ago, work-life balance expert Linda Duxbury devised a new email holiday message. "I'm away and I won't be checking my emails. On my return on [insert date], I'll delete my in-basket. Please resend your email after that date."
"I'm either working or I'm not working," says Duxbury, 53, a professor at Carleton University's Sprott School of Business in Ottawa, Canada. She is a renowned authority on the work-family juggle, after conducting groundbreaking studies of 33,000 Canadians in 1991 and another 37,000 in 2001.
Duxbury recently visited Sydney and Melbourne to present the findings of a study, with Beaton Consulting, of about 13,000 Australians working in professions including law, accounting and engineering.
"What's very clear from the data is that Australia has worse balance problems than Canada," she says. "There's a workload issue, with more than half the respondents working more than 48 hours a week."
The issue that really shocked her was the effect on women, who are waiting longer to have fewer children. The worst off, she found, were professional women who worked part-time because of family responsibilities. "Where Australia is very different from Canada is the huge reliance on part-time work, especially females," says Duxbury, whose mother is Australian and who considers Australia her second home. "But they don't reduce their hours that much."
Duxbury concedes the findings apply to her. She waited until she got tenure at Carleton University, aged 36, before quickly having her only child, a daughter now aged 17.
She works 55-60 hours a week - but has strict rules to segment her work and family life. She never works on weekends or holidays and once a month the family takes a three-day weekend and goes away. She has no BlackBerry or mobile phone and doesn't answer calls during dinner.
"I work hard, then I don't work hard," she says. "I have a pretty tight separation between work and family."
Duxbury's route to work-family balance guru came via seven years studying chemical engineering. But she realised her true interest was in people and psychology. After a flirtation with social work ("too wishy-washy"), she decided business management would be a happy medium.
After she received two grants in 1991 to study the effect on family life of "teleworking" - where people took office work home on computer discs to complete in the evenings - she interviewed 33,000 Canadians and prepared what was then the largest data set in the world on work-life balance, detailing stress, prescription drug misuse and multiple doctors' visits.
"I thought people who ran companies just didn't get it. But I found very quickly that they don't actually care about the moral case for change, they only care about the bottom line."
Duxbury's similar study of 37,000 Canadians in 2001 was also grim.
"Everyone was saying, 'We've done work-life balance', but things had deteriorated dramatically," she says.
Now, in a tightening labour market and with Duxbury's data showing how employees' work-life imbalance affects the bottom line, she says Canada has turned the corner. "The really striking thing is that men have become more like women. Men under 45 don't want to be like their fathers, they want to see more of their kids and many are also caring for elderly parents."
The big questions
Biggest break In my career, it was getting funding in 1991. It allowed us to do this incredibly pivotal study [on the work-life balance of 33,000 people]. Personally, it was marrying someone who lets me be what I want to be.
Biggest achievement My daughter [Annie, 17]. It sounds corny but she's a really grounded person who is nice to older people. She's a daughter I'm proud of. In academia, it was becoming a full professor, in 1998. That's a big deal.
Biggest regret That I didn't go to Tibet when I was in China in 1985. And I probably would have liked to have two children.
Best investment My daughter's a huge investment. She's our only child. We've invested a lot of money, time, energy and love.
Worst investment Most people would say the seven years I studied engineering. I don't see it as a big mistake.
Attitude to money It's nice to have. I always say to my students "have some screw-off money". Make sure you have enough so that if you're really miserable you can walk away. Money is control.
Personal philosophy Don't count on you being here tomorrow or someone you love being here tomorrow. My brother was killed in a car accident at 23. [For me] that was a life-changing experience.
Best advice From my dad: If people walk all over you, whose fault is it - theirs for walking on you or yours for lying there? I don't put up with crap.
First published by TheAge.com.au on April 23 2008
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