Northcentral University

3 The Psychology Bulletin mental or physical effort done in order to achieve a purpose or result." Furthermore, another definition is "a task or tasks to be undertaken; something a person has to do." For this reason, even those without a traditional "job," whether they have officially retired, or whether they have never even held a "job" by these conventional standards, do "work" by these definitions. Therefore, the term "work-life balance" applies to most individuals and it is why I find it a fascinating concept. Most people, even those who do not have a traditional job, have to balance their personal lives with some form of work. Personally, I have had the opportunity for the past year and a half to focus on completing my dissertation, and therefore, deem this to be my work at the present time. Balancing this activity with other aspects of my life currently has been challenging at times, given some important obstacles I have had to face and overcome, health-wise. Nonetheless, I feel immensely blessed to have this and other opportunities, which have presented me with wonderful and highly valuable lessons. The term "work" is most widely applied to working environments, a workplace, or a place of business. For the purpose of this article and given it would not be feasible in this modest excerpt, to review every single way in which this term could be applied, I will focus for the remainder of this article, on this term as it is used in the traditional workplace, and more specifically as it relates to women in STEM jobs and perceived barriers by women in these careers (my dissertation focuses on women in STEM jobs and barriers they must overcome in order to persist). WLB is an aspect of professional life often seen as conflicting for women because they often have many priorities outside of work, leading them to have difficulties balancing their professional and personal lives (Haile, Emmanuel & Dzathor, 2016). WLB in careers associated with STEM is essential, and, according to scholarly literature available on the topic, often these careers are missing the necessary policies to produce a prosperous situation and balance of a stable job with family or personal lives (Guillaume & Pochic, 2009; Savaria & Monteiro, 2017). Another aspect of WLB is how women tend to perceive different work environments, creating different types of perceived barriers in STEM careers (Bannikova, Baliasov, & Kemmet, 2018). For instance, women tend to look for "collective," rather than "competitive" working environments, where collaboration can be a prominent factor (Holtzblatt & Marsden, 2018). Women tend to perceive the information technology industry, for example, as not being very social or collaborative, a characteristic typically not seen very favorably by women (Cidlinská, 2019; Harris et al., 2010). One of the aspects of WLB, as it relates to gender barriers experienced by women, is the desire to start a family during a given stage in their career (Holtzblatt & Marsden, 2018). Although some organizations have special work-family policies to aid women who may decide to have a family during a stage in their careers in place.This is often perceived as unfavorable because they require "special treatment" (Holtzblatt & Marsden, 2018). According to Savaria and Monteiro (2017), occupations in STEM areas lack specific guidelines to allow professionals to balance family-oriented ideologies with their careers. To offer improvements in WLB, researchers have discussed modifications in organizational cultures to produce improvements in this area (Savaria & Monteiro, 2017; Filsinger & Worth, 2012; Roebuck et al., 2013). As noted above, WLB is an important concept in relation to women's job performance. The concept encompasses a wide range of topics, and it is an interesting term to explore for this reason. A brief and modest fragment of this complex topic has been presented here.

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