WORK-FAMILY ROLE CONFLICTS AMONG WOMEN IN EXECUTIVE MANAGEMENT POSITIONS IN THE NIGERIAN BANKING INDUSTRY

Abstract

Women are massively gaining entry into various professions in the public sphere, yet the delineation of life into “public” and “private” continues to consign women within the private realm. Organisation’s policies and processes are, however, structured in surreptitious disregard of women’s ascribed gender roles. This creates conflicts for women, who seek to build and advance in their careers in the public world of work, especially in the attainment of leadership positions. Women in the banking industry in Nigeria are confronted with this barrier, especially as family-friendly programmes, at the disposal of working women in western developed countries seem to be generally lacking in the Nigerian context.  The study is a qualitative research conducted on women in executive management positions in banks in Lagos, southwest Nigeria on how they managed and resolved these conflicts in building their careers. The study sought two key objectives; how women who attained executive management positions in the Nigerian banking industry structured their work and family responsibilities and the resources that they leveraged on to manage their domestic sector, in the ways that they were able to build successful careers in the banking industry in Nigeria. The study findings indicate that the women executives re-defined and harmonized the societally ascribed gender roles and their career goals and merged these two seemingly conflicting roles in ways that they became practically compatible. They then went on to source and obtain spousal and family supports in managing their harmonized roles and the domestic sector as well as leveraging in outsourcing some aspects of childcare and domestic chores to paid domestic staff. This enabled them to achieve a work-family interface that earned them career success in the banking industry in Nigeria.