Niluka Samarakoon;

Abstract

The door to a dignified future in most of the developing countries is education and this accord to persuade students of these countries to follow not only primary and secondary education but also the tertiary level of education. In addition, Sri Lanka focuses on the concept of ‘Education For All’ as a Millennium Development Goal. In this milieu, with a limited number of state sector tertiary educational institutions in the country, private sector institutions have to fill in the gap of providing educational needs. Therefore, the quality of the service provided by them is of paramount importance. This mostly depends on the staff of these institutions of which the majority (around 60%) is female. The main reasons for females being attracted to these posts are remuneration, status, opportunities for career progress, to stay closer to home and families, and to avoid working in difficult geographical areas. But in most of the developing nations, a female has to play a triple role: personal role, social role as a daughter, sister, wife, and a housewife, mother, maintaining relations with neighbors, etc. and the role of an employee, the economic role as a breadwinner/supporter of the family due to increased household expenditure and other reasons. Though, a lecturing job is attractive to these females, turnover, absenteeism, frequent grievances, low contribution to other events, and a lack of career progress shows that these female lecturers have not maintained Work Life Balance (WBL). This seriously could affect the quality of private sector education. This qualitative study was carried out on the private higher education sector in Sri Lanka, focusing on 11 private higher educational institutes to verify the factors affecting WLB and the conclusion of the study was that in addition to the triple roles, the role of ‘a student’ for career progress, too affect their WLB.