Work-life balance and job satisfaction among female IT professionals in Sri Lanka’s technology sector

Abstract

The number of women in the technology field in Sri Lanka is on the rise, but women in technical jobs complain of struggling to have a balance of work and life (WLB) as they strive to meet the demands of high performance and household women. This paper will look at the predictability of perceived WLB on job satisfaction among female IT professionals in Sri Lanka in response to the paucity of local evidence that is specific to women in technical roles. A cross-sectional survey, conducted online was quantitative and involved 115 female IT professionals working in various fields. WLB and job satisfaction were measured by validated Likert-scale questions. Due to the composite scores, simple linear regression (job satisfaction as the dependent variable) were to be used in order to analyze them. The correlation between WLB and the satisfaction with the job was moderate and positive (r = 0.512, p < 0.001). In regression analysis, the results show that WLB is a significant predictor of job satisfaction (b1 = 0.744, SE = 0.118, t =6.335, p<0.001) with 26.2% of the variance (R2 =0.262, Adjusted R2 =0.256). Results of this sample indicate that the enhancement of the working expectations, and conducive flexibility can become the source of improved job satisfaction of women in Sri Lankan IT environments. To illustrate this point, a simple predictive model (linear regression) was fitted to learn job satisfaction based on WLB; performance on the test was moderate (R2 = 0.18), suggesting that more organizational and personal predictors would probably be required.