Investigating the evolution of gender’s role in work-life discourse: Bibliometric and visualization analysis

For almost three decades, the issue of work-life interface of employees has been considered by researchers in this field. With the wider presence of women in professional activities, the issue of gender and its role in work-life interface is becoming more important and the number of research in this field is increasing. The purpose of this article is to provide a systematic review of research conducted in this field and to examine their evolution. Accordingly, studies in the field of work-life interface with emphasis on the role of gender, from the beginning until now (1991 to 2021) were extracted from the Web of Science database and analyzed using VOS Viewer software. The results were presented in two main sections. First; Descriptive information that included the quantitative trend of research and citations in this field, top articles, most active researchers, countries, journals and universities, and second; visualization analyses also include co citation and keywords co-occurrence which show the intellectual and conceptual structure of this field. The results showed that in addition to the increasing quantitative growth of research on this concept, the evolution of research topics in this discourse was from the negative side of work-life interface of women in the form of work-life conflict to the positive side of this concept in the form of enrichment and work-life balance and finally, the ideological concepts of gender role, gender attitude, gender equality, and gender inequality.