It is well documented that there is a problem recruiting and retaining women in technology. People talk about a 'leaky pipeline' with girls and women being lost at all stages - the proportion of females gradually reducing through school, university and during work. This is a problem for a country committed to social justice and fair access to opportunities, and for the technology industry, as it is not capitalising on the talents of women.
We already know a fair bit about what's going on and why this happens. First, women don't get the same levels of early exposure to computers that boys do. Computer games, which are a key route into developing an interest in the field, are developed by, aimed at and played by men and boys. Boys too seem to get more access to computers at school and at home. Second, there is a masculine culture associated with technology-related environments. The stereotypes (which do, to an extent reflect the reality) indicate that technology is a male dominated field, filled with coding-obsessed geeks, where women just don't belong. This is off putting to many women both as they are contemplating their own future careers, and when they actually start their first jobs. Finally, it's confidence. Despite the reality that women and girls are perfectly adept at coding and well able to hold their own academically in this field, women believe that they are less capable than men in this arena.
A lot of research has been done in this field, but despite all of this understanding and the vast sums of money that have been poured into initiatives to change things, there has been little shift in the proportion of women choosing and sticking in technology. Clearly we are missing something.
My colleague Anke Plagnol and I decided to take another look, a deeper one, to explore the experiences of female computer science students studying in the UK. We found 200 students (male and female) to fill in a survey, and then followed up with in-depth interviews with 20 female students.
Some of what we found echoes findings we have seen elsewhere: the women have lower confidence than the men; they feel that they are less likely to fit in within the industry, and this seems to make them feel less sure about their career plans. But we were really struck by the extent and strength of the messages that these women had been getting from all angles, all their lives, reinforcing the idea that they are just not cut out for technology. The participants had been told by their parents, their school teachers, university professors, employers, colleagues, fellow students and even each other, that women's brains just don't work in the right way to succeed in this field. Every one of the women we interviewed had experienced and witnessed multiple incidents where their achievements were undervalued ('you only got that job because you are a girl'; 'they let girls into these courses with lower grades'); their ability questioned ('you won't be able to manage this'; 'perhaps you could ask your [male] colleague to help?') or their ideas dismissed. As one of the women summed up 'ultimately, they just think you're dumb'.
No wonder this relentless barrage takes its toll on women's confidence and choices.
The other really interesting thing to emerge from the interviews was that there might be a problem (for some women) with the way that computer science is taught in universities. People, in general, are split into those who are motivated by agency (which means they like to learn independently aiming to master a topic on their own, and are stimulated by competition), or commune (which means they prefer to work collaboratively, learning through being taught and supported by a tutor). In general, men are more likely to be motivated by agency and women by commune. But the computer science classroom is highly agentic. Students are expected to learn things on their own, and are not encouraged to team up, to help each other understand the more complicated ideas, or ask for help from their tutors. Departments too encourage students by setting up competitions. This approach just doesn't suit communal learners (mostly although not exclusively women) who enjoy and gain confidence from working collaboratively, and who need more input from their tutors to feel sure that they are doing the right thing. And the agentic teaching style adopted in computer science classrooms seems to make women feel less enthusiastic about their subject and less confident about their ability to succeed.
But where should this lead us? You might argue that we simply need to make the classrooms more communal, offering more support, and more opportunities for genuine collaboration. But it's not quite as simple as that. Technology evolves at such a pace that the industry needs its workers to be self-directed learners. Making the classrooms less agentic could actually end up doing the students and the industry a disservice.
But I wonder if it might be possible to find some kind of compromise? One in which students are taught to be self-directive, rather than tutors assuming from the star that they are comfortable with this approach to learning. Students could be given more support at the start, but encouraged to own their own learning, and taught strategies for working things out by themselves. And surely developing skills in collaborative working would be valuable for the industry? So perhaps close collaborations (not just group projects where everyone takes on their own tasks) could be encouraged alongside some of the existing focus on individual competition.
This suggestion that the pedagogical culture might not suit women as well as men is, I think, a new one and I think is definitely worth pursuing. It would be interesting to see if we could measure the degree of agency within a computer science classroom, and to find out whether we can generalise these findings - is it generally true that computer science classes in fact serving the agentic learners better? And how easy would it be to teach people who are naturally communal learners to be more confident about learning independently?
Sunday, 30 June 2019
Saturday, 22 June 2019
Relational Frame Theory: a simple summary
I've become a bit interested in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) over the last few months, as I think it might have a lot to offer the careers world. Underpinning ACT is a theory by Steven Hayes, called Relational Frame Theory (RFT). I don't know how vital it is to understand RFT in order to make good use of ACT, but I thought I would have a go.
RFT is a cognitive behavioural theory, which means that it is interested in the links between thoughts and behaviour. RFT has a reputation for being terribly difficult to understand, but I think that at least some of its key tenets are actually quite intuitive. One challenge is that the literature about RFT uses complex, technical and inaccessible language. It describes itself as an account of arbitrary derived relational responses non-arbitrarily applied. Well, that's clear, isn't it?
Let's start with the idea of relational responses. This is really based on the old notion of associations, but it takes it a bit further. So, an association is when you have an experience which links two things in your mind. At a basic level, you can imagine that the first time you tasted apple pie, you thought it tasted great. You thus established a link between apple pie and deliciousness. But you can go further. Perhaps you spent time during your childhood visiting your Granny in Woking and eating her fabulous apple pie; this may have established a link in your mind, between Woking and the loveliness of apple pie. And even though the chain of associations goes: Woking...Granny...Apple pie...delicious taste, the link between Woking and delicious taste becomes direct for you; Woking forever becomes a place which warms your heart. And you remember about reinforcement? The more times you had delicious apple pie in Woking, the stronger and more enduring that link between Woking and happy times becomes.
RFT talks about arbitrary relational responses, which are associations (relational responses) which are not linked to physical properties (ie are arbitrary). This can be illustrated with language as an example: there is 'cat' the animal, 'cat' the collection of sounds that we can produce and hear as the word 'cat', and the written word 'cat', spelled C-A-T. These are three separate things, and the links between them are entirely arbitrary. There is no God-given reason why the letter C should be pronounced the way we say it, or that the animal should be given the name 'cat' - the links are arbitrary, human inventions. But for us, the links have been very well reinforced, and it's almost hard for us to remember that the animal, the written word and the spoken word are three separate things.
So the idea of relational responses is about two or more things that in your mind are related to each other. The two things linked together are known as a frame, and the relationship between them is defined in different ways, for example, the two things might be considered as equivalent, one might contain the other or one might cause the other.
The idea of derived relational responses means that you can make links between things you haven't actually experienced. For example, you might have been told about a link between two things, and even if you hadn't seen the link for yourselves, you could still internalise the association and make one of your own relational frames. For example, if you are told that tigers are dangerous because they bite, you might be afraid of a tiger, even if you have never actually seen a tiger bite. You have thus established an association (a relational frame) between tiger and fear, even though you had never seen a tiger do anything to frighten anyone.
As well as these vicarious associations, which you can learn from others. you can also create associations between things based on two different sets of associations. So, if you went to a job interview in Tooting, and the interview went badly, you might develop two associations: job interviews make me feel bad; and; job interviews happen in Tooting, and this could lead you to believing that therefore Tooting makes me feel bad.
This could then become even more obscure as you might then establish a close link in your mind between Balham and Tooting (two stations next to each other on the tube line) and this then extends the relational frame in this way: job interviews make me feel bad; job interviews happen in Tooting; Tooting is very similar to Balham and therefore Balham makes me feel bad. This is called transformation of stimulus which refers to the process by which one association (Tooting and feeling bad) is applied elsewhere (Balham is similar to Tooting, so Balham also makes me feel bad).
RFT goes into a fair bit of detail about the different kinds of relationships that can be established between things, and talks about how they are built up. I'm not sure that level of detail is important for those engaging with RFT in order to understand ACT, but it's useful to know they are part of the overall RFT theory.
One final important aspect of RFT is the idea of cognitive fusion in which thoughts get tied up (fused with) reality and you start believing that your thoughts are in fact literally the same as the truth - the idea that thinking the thought or using the words 'I'm rubbish at interviews' leads you to believe that this is a true, literal fact. One thing that ACT is really good at, is making people understand that thoughts and words aren't the same as facts: the words are just words, the thoughts are just thoughts - and both these are distinct from the reality of your interview performance.
References
Blackledge, J. T. (2003). An introduction to relational frame theory: Basics and applications. The Behavior Analyst Today, 3(4), 421.
RFT is a cognitive behavioural theory, which means that it is interested in the links between thoughts and behaviour. RFT has a reputation for being terribly difficult to understand, but I think that at least some of its key tenets are actually quite intuitive. One challenge is that the literature about RFT uses complex, technical and inaccessible language. It describes itself as an account of arbitrary derived relational responses non-arbitrarily applied. Well, that's clear, isn't it?
Let's start with the idea of relational responses. This is really based on the old notion of associations, but it takes it a bit further. So, an association is when you have an experience which links two things in your mind. At a basic level, you can imagine that the first time you tasted apple pie, you thought it tasted great. You thus established a link between apple pie and deliciousness. But you can go further. Perhaps you spent time during your childhood visiting your Granny in Woking and eating her fabulous apple pie; this may have established a link in your mind, between Woking and the loveliness of apple pie. And even though the chain of associations goes: Woking...Granny...Apple pie...delicious taste, the link between Woking and delicious taste becomes direct for you; Woking forever becomes a place which warms your heart. And you remember about reinforcement? The more times you had delicious apple pie in Woking, the stronger and more enduring that link between Woking and happy times becomes.
RFT talks about arbitrary relational responses, which are associations (relational responses) which are not linked to physical properties (ie are arbitrary). This can be illustrated with language as an example: there is 'cat' the animal, 'cat' the collection of sounds that we can produce and hear as the word 'cat', and the written word 'cat', spelled C-A-T. These are three separate things, and the links between them are entirely arbitrary. There is no God-given reason why the letter C should be pronounced the way we say it, or that the animal should be given the name 'cat' - the links are arbitrary, human inventions. But for us, the links have been very well reinforced, and it's almost hard for us to remember that the animal, the written word and the spoken word are three separate things.
So the idea of relational responses is about two or more things that in your mind are related to each other. The two things linked together are known as a frame, and the relationship between them is defined in different ways, for example, the two things might be considered as equivalent, one might contain the other or one might cause the other.
The idea of derived relational responses means that you can make links between things you haven't actually experienced. For example, you might have been told about a link between two things, and even if you hadn't seen the link for yourselves, you could still internalise the association and make one of your own relational frames. For example, if you are told that tigers are dangerous because they bite, you might be afraid of a tiger, even if you have never actually seen a tiger bite. You have thus established an association (a relational frame) between tiger and fear, even though you had never seen a tiger do anything to frighten anyone.
As well as these vicarious associations, which you can learn from others. you can also create associations between things based on two different sets of associations. So, if you went to a job interview in Tooting, and the interview went badly, you might develop two associations: job interviews make me feel bad; and; job interviews happen in Tooting, and this could lead you to believing that therefore Tooting makes me feel bad.
This could then become even more obscure as you might then establish a close link in your mind between Balham and Tooting (two stations next to each other on the tube line) and this then extends the relational frame in this way: job interviews make me feel bad; job interviews happen in Tooting; Tooting is very similar to Balham and therefore Balham makes me feel bad. This is called transformation of stimulus which refers to the process by which one association (Tooting and feeling bad) is applied elsewhere (Balham is similar to Tooting, so Balham also makes me feel bad).
RFT goes into a fair bit of detail about the different kinds of relationships that can be established between things, and talks about how they are built up. I'm not sure that level of detail is important for those engaging with RFT in order to understand ACT, but it's useful to know they are part of the overall RFT theory.
One final important aspect of RFT is the idea of cognitive fusion in which thoughts get tied up (fused with) reality and you start believing that your thoughts are in fact literally the same as the truth - the idea that thinking the thought or using the words 'I'm rubbish at interviews' leads you to believe that this is a true, literal fact. One thing that ACT is really good at, is making people understand that thoughts and words aren't the same as facts: the words are just words, the thoughts are just thoughts - and both these are distinct from the reality of your interview performance.
References
Blackledge, J. T. (2003). An introduction to relational frame theory: Basics and applications. The Behavior Analyst Today, 3(4), 421.
Tuesday, 18 June 2019
Where do clients get stuck? Theories of career decision making difficulties
I spend much of my working life thinking about the training of professional career practitioners. I base the content of my sessions, books or articles on the things that I think career practitioners will find useful, but as someone who claims to be fully committed to strengthening the evidence base underpinning our work, I wonder if I need a stronger theoretical basis to help me work out what topics to cover?
One useful starting point would be to find out what career dilemmas clients face. If we have a clear understanding of the career decision making difficulties career clients bring to their careers interviews, then we can start to ensure that the practitioners are equipped with the right range of techniques to help them.
This field is fairly under-researched (Kelly & Lee, 2002), with no real agreed definition of career decision making difficulties, and limited inclusion of the construct in career theories. The literature is also a bit confusing (ha! there's a surprise) but are a few different models I have come across.
Broadly speaking, it seems that there are two categories of career decision making difficulties: cognitive issues and affect issues (ie what is going wrong, and how people are feeling) (Chartrand, Robbins, Morrill, & Boggs, 1990). The bulk of the literature seems to focus on the cognitive issues, and aims to find scales which practitioners can use to help work out where their clients are struggling. This all feels very positivist to me and I think that perhaps career issues are a bit too complex to narrow down in this way. But I can see that it might form a useful start to a conversation.
1. Career Decision Making Difficulties (Gati et al., 1996)
One of the most widely cited (cognitive) frameworks of Career Decision Making Difficulties was written by Gati et al., in 1996. (Gati's name is all over the place within the career decision making difficulties literature). Gati identified three overarching difficulties, and separated that into 10 different strands:
2. Career Thought Index (Sampson et al., 1996)
Gati's framework overlaps a fair bit with another one called the Career Thought Index (Sampson et al., 1998) which is linked to the Career Information Processing theory which you may have come across before. This one is also divided into three areas:
These two approaches (Gati's taxonomy and Sampson's Career Thought Index) were compared and Kleinman et al. (2004) found that they basically measured the same thing, and suggested that it didn't much matter which one people chose either for research or for practice.
3. Emotional and Personality Related Aspects of Career decision making difficulties (Saka, Gati & Kelly, 2008)
This framework was developed by Saka, Gati and Kelly (2008) and focuses on the person rather than the content, suggesting that the personality and emotional state of the individual has a significant impact on their career decision making process. Their framework has three overarching factors: pessimism, anxiety and self-concept and identity, made up of 11 separate aspects.
I really like that this one focuses on the individual and their subjective experience - that seems important and is an obvious gap in Gati's taxonomy. But on its own, without the more objective, cognitive aspects of Gati's taxonomy, it seems equally limited.
4. Cluster Analysis of Career Decision Making Difficulties (Kelly & Lee, 2002)
Some other academics have had a go at looking at the similarities between some of the different career decision making frameworks. Kelly and Lee (2002) looked at the Career Decision Scale, the Career Decision Difficulties Questionnaire and the Career Factors Inventory, and identified six different factors: lack of information; need for information, trait indecision, disagreement with others, identity diffusion and choice anxiety.
There are a few interesting things to note about this framework. First that there is a distinction between lack of information and the need for information. It seems that, for some people, knowing that they have a gap in their knowledge isn't the same as wanting to find things out. The second thing is that the students in question didn't really focus on the lack of information about themselves. I wonder if this is a result of students who are not self-aware not realising that they aren't self-aware? This highlights that you might get different answers to these questions, depending on who you ask. A career counsellor might see clearly that an individual needs information and lacks self-awareness, but this view may not be consistent with the person's own analysis.
I like that this one brings in both affect factors (anxiety and identity) and cognitive factors, but it seems to miss some of Gati's useful things such as lack of motivation, lack of information about the self, dysfunctional myths and internal conflicts, and also only considers choice anxiety - Saka's model acknowledges other types of anxiety.
4. Combining Cognitive and Affective Models
Having had a look at all these different models, I wonder if I am most drawn to a combination of numbers 1 (Gati's cognitive taxonomy) and 3 (Saka's emotional and personality factors). This would give us a six factor model that looks like this:
To me this seem to provide a pretty comprehensive account of the difficulties that I see in my clients, and seems to cover everything that I have read in the literature. Its comprehensive nature means that we are left with 21 different aspects, which seems quite a lot, but then career decisions are complex, so they can only be simplified to a certain degree.
One point to note is that Gati's notion of 'dysfunctional beliefs' is not correlated with any other measures of career decision making difficulties. This is an interesting one because I think it implies that clients who have an unrealistic understanding of the career choice process actually feel fine. That makes sense, doesn't it? But I wonder how career practitioners should best deal with this one?
And so what?
Well, my starting point is about the training of career practitioners. I think this list of career decision making difficulties could be used as a sort of check list for practitioner training. We should be making sure that our practitioners are equipped with range of skills and techniques which are needed to help clients to deal with these kinds of scenarios. And I'm not sure that at the moment, we are.
References
Chartrand, J. M., Robbins, S. B., Morrill, W. H., & Boggs, K. (1990). Development and validation of the Career Factors Inventory. Journal of counseling Psychology, 37(4), 491.
Gati, I., Krausz, M., & Osipow, S. H. (1996). A taxonomy of difficulties in career decision making. Journal of counseling psychology, 43(4), 510.
Kelly, K. R., & Lee, W. C. (2002). Mapping the domain of career decision problems. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 61(2), 302-326.
Kleiman, T., Gati, I., Peterson, G., Sampson, J., Reardon, R., & Lenz, J. (2004). Dysfunctional thinking and difficulties in career decision making. Journal of Career assessment, 12(3), 312-331.
Saka, N., Gati, I., & Kelly, K. R. (2008). Emotional and personality-related aspects of career-decision-making difficulties. Journal of Career Assessment, 16(4), 403-424.
Sampson, J. P., Jr., Peterson, G. W., Lenz, J. G., Reardon, R. C., & Saunders, D. E. (1998). The design and use of a measure of dysfunctional career thoughts among adults, college students, and high school students: The Career Thoughts Inventory. Journal of Career Assessment, 6, 115-134
One useful starting point would be to find out what career dilemmas clients face. If we have a clear understanding of the career decision making difficulties career clients bring to their careers interviews, then we can start to ensure that the practitioners are equipped with the right range of techniques to help them.
This field is fairly under-researched (Kelly & Lee, 2002), with no real agreed definition of career decision making difficulties, and limited inclusion of the construct in career theories. The literature is also a bit confusing (ha! there's a surprise) but are a few different models I have come across.
Broadly speaking, it seems that there are two categories of career decision making difficulties: cognitive issues and affect issues (ie what is going wrong, and how people are feeling) (Chartrand, Robbins, Morrill, & Boggs, 1990). The bulk of the literature seems to focus on the cognitive issues, and aims to find scales which practitioners can use to help work out where their clients are struggling. This all feels very positivist to me and I think that perhaps career issues are a bit too complex to narrow down in this way. But I can see that it might form a useful start to a conversation.
1. Career Decision Making Difficulties (Gati et al., 1996)
One of the most widely cited (cognitive) frameworks of Career Decision Making Difficulties was written by Gati et al., in 1996. (Gati's name is all over the place within the career decision making difficulties literature). Gati identified three overarching difficulties, and separated that into 10 different strands:
Most of the factors are fairly self-explanatory, but 'dsyfunctional myths' refers to an incorrect understanding of the process of either choosing or getting a job - the clients who think that you can tell them what to do, for example, or who think that making a living from writing novels is easy.
2. Career Thought Index (Sampson et al., 1996)
Gati's framework overlaps a fair bit with another one called the Career Thought Index (Sampson et al., 1998) which is linked to the Career Information Processing theory which you may have come across before. This one is also divided into three areas:
- Decision-making Confusion (thoughts and emotions which make it impossible to make career decisions)
- Commitment Anxiety (an inability to commit to one choice through anxiety)
- External conflicts (usually a conflict between what the client wants and what their loved ones want for them).
These two approaches (Gati's taxonomy and Sampson's Career Thought Index) were compared and Kleinman et al. (2004) found that they basically measured the same thing, and suggested that it didn't much matter which one people chose either for research or for practice.
3. Emotional and Personality Related Aspects of Career decision making difficulties (Saka, Gati & Kelly, 2008)
This framework was developed by Saka, Gati and Kelly (2008) and focuses on the person rather than the content, suggesting that the personality and emotional state of the individual has a significant impact on their career decision making process. Their framework has three overarching factors: pessimism, anxiety and self-concept and identity, made up of 11 separate aspects.
I really like that this one focuses on the individual and their subjective experience - that seems important and is an obvious gap in Gati's taxonomy. But on its own, without the more objective, cognitive aspects of Gati's taxonomy, it seems equally limited.
4. Cluster Analysis of Career Decision Making Difficulties (Kelly & Lee, 2002)
Some other academics have had a go at looking at the similarities between some of the different career decision making frameworks. Kelly and Lee (2002) looked at the Career Decision Scale, the Career Decision Difficulties Questionnaire and the Career Factors Inventory, and identified six different factors: lack of information; need for information, trait indecision, disagreement with others, identity diffusion and choice anxiety.
There are a few interesting things to note about this framework. First that there is a distinction between lack of information and the need for information. It seems that, for some people, knowing that they have a gap in their knowledge isn't the same as wanting to find things out. The second thing is that the students in question didn't really focus on the lack of information about themselves. I wonder if this is a result of students who are not self-aware not realising that they aren't self-aware? This highlights that you might get different answers to these questions, depending on who you ask. A career counsellor might see clearly that an individual needs information and lacks self-awareness, but this view may not be consistent with the person's own analysis.
I like that this one brings in both affect factors (anxiety and identity) and cognitive factors, but it seems to miss some of Gati's useful things such as lack of motivation, lack of information about the self, dysfunctional myths and internal conflicts, and also only considers choice anxiety - Saka's model acknowledges other types of anxiety.
4. Combining Cognitive and Affective Models
Having had a look at all these different models, I wonder if I am most drawn to a combination of numbers 1 (Gati's cognitive taxonomy) and 3 (Saka's emotional and personality factors). This would give us a six factor model that looks like this:
To me this seem to provide a pretty comprehensive account of the difficulties that I see in my clients, and seems to cover everything that I have read in the literature. Its comprehensive nature means that we are left with 21 different aspects, which seems quite a lot, but then career decisions are complex, so they can only be simplified to a certain degree.
One point to note is that Gati's notion of 'dysfunctional beliefs' is not correlated with any other measures of career decision making difficulties. This is an interesting one because I think it implies that clients who have an unrealistic understanding of the career choice process actually feel fine. That makes sense, doesn't it? But I wonder how career practitioners should best deal with this one?
And so what?
Well, my starting point is about the training of career practitioners. I think this list of career decision making difficulties could be used as a sort of check list for practitioner training. We should be making sure that our practitioners are equipped with range of skills and techniques which are needed to help clients to deal with these kinds of scenarios. And I'm not sure that at the moment, we are.
References
Chartrand, J. M., Robbins, S. B., Morrill, W. H., & Boggs, K. (1990). Development and validation of the Career Factors Inventory. Journal of counseling Psychology, 37(4), 491.
Gati, I., Krausz, M., & Osipow, S. H. (1996). A taxonomy of difficulties in career decision making. Journal of counseling psychology, 43(4), 510.
Kelly, K. R., & Lee, W. C. (2002). Mapping the domain of career decision problems. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 61(2), 302-326.
Kleiman, T., Gati, I., Peterson, G., Sampson, J., Reardon, R., & Lenz, J. (2004). Dysfunctional thinking and difficulties in career decision making. Journal of Career assessment, 12(3), 312-331.
Saka, N., Gati, I., & Kelly, K. R. (2008). Emotional and personality-related aspects of career-decision-making difficulties. Journal of Career Assessment, 16(4), 403-424.
Sampson, J. P., Jr., Peterson, G. W., Lenz, J. G., Reardon, R. C., & Saunders, D. E. (1998). The design and use of a measure of dysfunctional career thoughts among adults, college students, and high school students: The Career Thoughts Inventory. Journal of Career Assessment, 6, 115-134
Tuesday, 11 June 2019
Why, despite everything, women are happier at work than men
So here's an interesting thing. Despite being disadvantaged in the workforce, women report higher levels of job satisfaction than men. It's a strange paradox. We know that women have access to fewer opportunities than men - there are occupational fields they struggle to get into, and have a much harder time getting into senior posts than men do. They also get paid less, and are assumed to be less capable than their male counterparts, meaning that they have to work harder and perform better than men to achieve the same rewards. When children come along, their choices are yet more constrained as employers' perception of the value they can add in the work place goes down and their domestic responsibilities increase relative to men's. And yet, consistently, they report being happier at work than men, and women working part time report being the happiest of all.
There are a few different theories that have been put forward to account for this paradox. The first is the 'grateful slaves' view of Hakim (2000) which suggests that for women, the opportunity to work part time or flexibly is enough - they don't need high salaries or interesting roles to be happy at work, as long as they can pick their children up from school, nothing much else matters. The second theory is the 'making the best of a bad job' idea from Walters (2005) which suggests that women know that their opportunities are constrained, but they also know that their hands are tied, they aren't going to be able to do anything about it, so might as well just get on with it and be as positive as they can. The third theory is by Clark (1996) which suggests that job satisfaction is significantly related to what he calls 'relative income', described as the difference between what you expect to earn and what you actually earn. His theory is that women's expectations of pay are low and so they end up pleasantly surprised by their earnings and this increases their levels of satisfaction. Each of these theories has some empirical backing, and seems to account for some of the differences in levels of satisfaction between men and women, but by no means all of it.
A more recent study by Zou (2015) indicates that the key to solving the puzzle lies in what they call different work orientations.
Job satisfaction is made up of a range of different specific work features, and Zou's study suggests that women and men tend to derive their job satisfaction from different aspects of work. They describe five different work orientations:
Intrinsic orientation: getting your job satisfaction from the joy of the job itself
Extrinsic orientation: valuing pay and promotion
Effort orientation: work load and hours
Future orientation: personal and career development
Human orientation: interpersonal relationships
Their study found two interesting things. First, that people who are highly orientated towards intrinsic and human factors are most likely to have higher levels of job satisfaction, and then second, you've guessed it, women are more likely to have stronger orientations to intrinsic and human factors.
So, women work because they are interested in the jobs themselves, and because they like the people. Men also work for these reasons, but tend to think that pay and promotion and career development are more important. And it just so happens that intrinsic motivation and relationships are factors which link closely with job satisfaction.
These different orientations go some way to explaining career choices. Men are more likely to be orientated to pay and promotion, so perhaps push for higher salaries, choose higher paying occupations and focus more on getting promoted. Women are less interested in these things so don't go out of their way to make them happen.
But where does that leave us? Job satisfaction has always been my first goal as a career practitioner, and on this measure women are way ahead. But does that mean that we should stop trying to encourage women to go for promotions? I don't think so, although we don't want to be so keen to make women's lives better that we end up making their lives worse.
The Nordic model is interesting. Scandinavia has what is considered to be the most progressive regime for women, and though ideology and legislation has reached a point where women's participation in the labour market is fairly similar to men's. They have more women working full time than anywhere else in Europe, which is thought to be a real positive, but given that we know that women working part time are happier than women working full time, is this really the right aspiration for the rest of us?
One important issue that I can't see how to resolve is that of power in society. My instinct is to say that what we need to do is re-model our social values, and stop conceptualising pay, promotion and status as the signs of success. If we could start to value job and life satisfaction as much, or more, than money, then we could find ourselves in a society that accords women who work part time in female spheres and lower level jobs as equal to men who command higher salaries and have more senior roles. But how is this ever to be managed?
A less extreme range of salaries across the country could perhaps help. If senior roles were paid only a bit more than junior roles, then other factors would take on a more significant role in people's career development choices. At the moment, the increase in salary associated with promotion is so great that it overshadows other considerations - people go for promotions because of the money, regardless of whether they actually think they will be happier in these more senior roles. If the financial incentives were only marginal, then people might be more likely to take a balanced view of promotion, going for it only if it ticks a number of boxes for them. We might well then see more of a balance in the senior roles, as they will attract people who are motivated by a range of different factors, and not just those (disproportionately men) who are motivated by money.
On a more individual level, if we can find ways to encourage men to pursue options which don't just satisfy their monetary motivation, then they might end up being happier in the workplace. And this will allow for more opportunities for women to find a wider range of options which can meet their needs. Much of the push towards gender equality is focused on women - empowering them to make bolder choices. But I wonder if here, I am suggesting that actually it's men who need to be re-educated to work out what is going to make them happy?
Just as an aside, I think the literature on job satisfaction is a bit patchy and part of the reason for that is that there are so many things that seem to be linked to it, yet academics seem to hone in on just one or two, meaning that we don't have a particularly good overall picture. A lot of the large scale studies have been done by economists, for example, who seem convinced that income is the most important thing to study, which is a bit strange, given that we know that income has only a small, weakly significant correlation with job satisfaction (Judge et al.'s 2010 meta-analysis found a correlation of 0.15 p<0.05)
References
Clark, A. E. (1996). Job satisfaction in Britain. British journal of industrial relations, 34(2), 189-217.
Hakim, C. (2000). Work-lifestyle choices in the 21st century: Preference theory. OUp Oxford.
Judge, T. A., Piccolo, R. F., Podsakoff, N. P., Shaw, J. C., & Rich, B. L. (2010). The relationship between pay and job satisfaction: A meta-analysis of the literature. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 77(2), 157-167.
Walters, S. (2005). Making the best of a bad job? Female part‐timers’ orientations and attitudes to work. Gender, Work & Organization, 12(3), 193-216.
Zou, M. (2015). Gender, work orientations and job satisfaction. Work, employment and society, 29(1), 3-22.
There are a few different theories that have been put forward to account for this paradox. The first is the 'grateful slaves' view of Hakim (2000) which suggests that for women, the opportunity to work part time or flexibly is enough - they don't need high salaries or interesting roles to be happy at work, as long as they can pick their children up from school, nothing much else matters. The second theory is the 'making the best of a bad job' idea from Walters (2005) which suggests that women know that their opportunities are constrained, but they also know that their hands are tied, they aren't going to be able to do anything about it, so might as well just get on with it and be as positive as they can. The third theory is by Clark (1996) which suggests that job satisfaction is significantly related to what he calls 'relative income', described as the difference between what you expect to earn and what you actually earn. His theory is that women's expectations of pay are low and so they end up pleasantly surprised by their earnings and this increases their levels of satisfaction. Each of these theories has some empirical backing, and seems to account for some of the differences in levels of satisfaction between men and women, but by no means all of it.
A more recent study by Zou (2015) indicates that the key to solving the puzzle lies in what they call different work orientations.
Job satisfaction is made up of a range of different specific work features, and Zou's study suggests that women and men tend to derive their job satisfaction from different aspects of work. They describe five different work orientations:
Intrinsic orientation: getting your job satisfaction from the joy of the job itself
Extrinsic orientation: valuing pay and promotion
Effort orientation: work load and hours
Future orientation: personal and career development
Human orientation: interpersonal relationships
Their study found two interesting things. First, that people who are highly orientated towards intrinsic and human factors are most likely to have higher levels of job satisfaction, and then second, you've guessed it, women are more likely to have stronger orientations to intrinsic and human factors.
So, women work because they are interested in the jobs themselves, and because they like the people. Men also work for these reasons, but tend to think that pay and promotion and career development are more important. And it just so happens that intrinsic motivation and relationships are factors which link closely with job satisfaction.
These different orientations go some way to explaining career choices. Men are more likely to be orientated to pay and promotion, so perhaps push for higher salaries, choose higher paying occupations and focus more on getting promoted. Women are less interested in these things so don't go out of their way to make them happen.
But where does that leave us? Job satisfaction has always been my first goal as a career practitioner, and on this measure women are way ahead. But does that mean that we should stop trying to encourage women to go for promotions? I don't think so, although we don't want to be so keen to make women's lives better that we end up making their lives worse.
The Nordic model is interesting. Scandinavia has what is considered to be the most progressive regime for women, and though ideology and legislation has reached a point where women's participation in the labour market is fairly similar to men's. They have more women working full time than anywhere else in Europe, which is thought to be a real positive, but given that we know that women working part time are happier than women working full time, is this really the right aspiration for the rest of us?
One important issue that I can't see how to resolve is that of power in society. My instinct is to say that what we need to do is re-model our social values, and stop conceptualising pay, promotion and status as the signs of success. If we could start to value job and life satisfaction as much, or more, than money, then we could find ourselves in a society that accords women who work part time in female spheres and lower level jobs as equal to men who command higher salaries and have more senior roles. But how is this ever to be managed?
A less extreme range of salaries across the country could perhaps help. If senior roles were paid only a bit more than junior roles, then other factors would take on a more significant role in people's career development choices. At the moment, the increase in salary associated with promotion is so great that it overshadows other considerations - people go for promotions because of the money, regardless of whether they actually think they will be happier in these more senior roles. If the financial incentives were only marginal, then people might be more likely to take a balanced view of promotion, going for it only if it ticks a number of boxes for them. We might well then see more of a balance in the senior roles, as they will attract people who are motivated by a range of different factors, and not just those (disproportionately men) who are motivated by money.
On a more individual level, if we can find ways to encourage men to pursue options which don't just satisfy their monetary motivation, then they might end up being happier in the workplace. And this will allow for more opportunities for women to find a wider range of options which can meet their needs. Much of the push towards gender equality is focused on women - empowering them to make bolder choices. But I wonder if here, I am suggesting that actually it's men who need to be re-educated to work out what is going to make them happy?
Just as an aside, I think the literature on job satisfaction is a bit patchy and part of the reason for that is that there are so many things that seem to be linked to it, yet academics seem to hone in on just one or two, meaning that we don't have a particularly good overall picture. A lot of the large scale studies have been done by economists, for example, who seem convinced that income is the most important thing to study, which is a bit strange, given that we know that income has only a small, weakly significant correlation with job satisfaction (Judge et al.'s 2010 meta-analysis found a correlation of 0.15 p<0.05)
References
Clark, A. E. (1996). Job satisfaction in Britain. British journal of industrial relations, 34(2), 189-217.
Hakim, C. (2000). Work-lifestyle choices in the 21st century: Preference theory. OUp Oxford.
Judge, T. A., Piccolo, R. F., Podsakoff, N. P., Shaw, J. C., & Rich, B. L. (2010). The relationship between pay and job satisfaction: A meta-analysis of the literature. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 77(2), 157-167.
Walters, S. (2005). Making the best of a bad job? Female part‐timers’ orientations and attitudes to work. Gender, Work & Organization, 12(3), 193-216.
Zou, M. (2015). Gender, work orientations and job satisfaction. Work, employment and society, 29(1), 3-22.
Monday, 25 February 2019
The ideal mother, the ideal father and the ideal worker
I've done a little bit more reading on the topic of motherhood and work, and I've found another theoretical explanation which really strikes a chord with me.
In 1996 Hays wrote an influential book which described the notion of 'intensive mothering'. She described this as an ideology - a set of ideas which encompass what people (or a society or an individual) think exists, what is possible and what is good. Hays proposed (and this has been widely demonstrated empirically since) that our (Western) current most prevalent ideology is that mothering should be 'intensive', with the mother staying at home full time, devoted to her children, putting her children's needs above her own and feeling totally fulfilled by her domestic responsibilities. That is our society's version of the ideal mother, and this becomes internalised by individual women, guiding their expectations, their actions and their self-esteem.
In stark contrast from this is the ideology of the ideal worker. The ideal worker is totally committed to work and available to work long hours if needed and to travel oversees at the drop of a hat (Ely & Meyerson 2000)
You can see where I'm going with this, I'm sure. It is clearly not possible to be both the ideal worker and the ideal mother: you just can't be 100% committed to both your children and your job. You just can't.
So for those mothers who do combine both motherhood and work, this then leads to some level of cognitive dissonance (Festinger, 1957). Cognitive dissonance is the uncomfortable feeling we get when there are two contradictory thoughts in our minds. In this case those two thoughts are:
1) I want to be the ideal mother, my child is my main priority, and
2) I want to be the ideal worker, my work is my main priority.
Our brains are uncomfortable with these conflicting thoughts and look for a way to resolve the conflict. Johnston and Swanson (2006) suggest that there are a number of common approaches which working mothers use to allow them to reconcile their desire to be a good mother and a good worker. The terms in brackets in the list below refer to Bakhtin's (1981) options for resolving dialectics (opposing tensions pulling someone in two different directions):
1) Women find a way to work which doesn't interfere with their families (modifying the situational constraints). Garey (1995) studied nurses who chose to work night shifts to ensure that they were 100% available to their families during the day, and Hattery (2001) talked to women whose choice to become self-employed allowed them to be available when their families needed them.
2) Women re-frame the 'intensive mother' ideology (reframing their ideology). Perhaps they reconceptualise it as 'intensive parenting' and share the responsibility with their partner and extended family.
3) Women do things in stages (cyclical alternation), taking a career break, or extending their maternity leave, and then going back to work a little later on.
4) Women find a way to justify their choices (reframing their choices). These narratives are often financial. Women justify going back to work because the family needs the money, or justify putting their careers on hold because their husbands have higher earning potential.
5) Women compromise (neutralisation) - working part time and staying home part time and strive to be as close to the ideal mother and ideal worker as they can.
6) Women make a choice (selection) and entirely renounce their work identity and stay at home with their children.
Johnston and Swanson then went on to explore the narratives of mothers (full time working, part time working, and stay at home mums) and found some interesting differences, in particular that the women's views of what makes a good mother were associated with their work choices:
In terms of causality, the authors concluded that ideologies influenced behaviour, but that behaviour also shaped ideologies.
So much for the challenges women face, but what about the men? What is the ideal father and how easy is it to enact?
The traditional view of the good father is one who provides economically for the family - father as breadwinner (Marsiglio et al., 2000). Thus to be the ideal father entails being an ideal worker - in order to be a good father you HAVE to be a good worker, so that you can maximise your earning potential and earn as much money as you can for your family. So men who buy into this ideology don't have to make a compromise.
But what of the men who want to spend more time at home? The father as breadwinner is not the only version of the ideal father in our society. The ideology of the involved father (Henwood & Procter, 2003) depicts the ideal father as one who is actively engaged with their children's lives and who gets pleasure from those close relationships. This then is a step away from the ideal worker, and can leave fathers with a dilemma, more akin to that typically faced by mothers, about how to reconcile their identity as a good father and a good worker.
Policies and legislation have been put in place to allow men to share in parental leave, and work flexibly, but in reality men find that the cultural norms of organisations make them fear being penalised at work for taking advantage of these policies. The negative consequences of men taking paternity leave are felt particularly keenly in male-dominated spheres (Bygren & Duvander, 2006). Even in Sweden, where legislation and policies are very family-friendly and the culture is egalitarian, organisational norms are lagging behind policies, and not all employers actively support fathers taking time out (Has & Hwaang, 2009).
The traditional and still dominant ideology of father-as-breadwinner means that men who embrace a more involved-father ideology are considered as lesser workers for spending more time with their children and lesser fathers for spending more time with their children (Sallee, 2012).
So we are in a bit of a bind. If women want to work more, then we have to change the ideology of the ideal mother and the ideal worker: the new ideology needs to accept that workers can also be good mothers, and that mothers can also be good workers. If men want to spend more time with their children we also need to change the ideology of the ideal father, so that involved fathers can also be seen as good workers. But this kind of change in such entrenched cultural norms seems like a huge mountain to climb. The relatively straightforward aspects of legislation and policy have been changed already, but these new regulations have had a limited impact on cultural norms. A much bigger hurdle is to change how people conceptualise motherhood, fatherhood and work.
Any bright ideas?
References
Bakhtin, M. M. (1981). The dialogic imagination: Four essays by MM Bakhtin.
Bygren, M., & Duvander, A. Z. (2006). Parents’ workplace situation and fathers’ parental leave use. Journal of Marriage and Family, 68(2), 363-372.
Ely, R. J., & Meyerson, D. E. (2000). Theories of gender in organizations: A new approach to organizational analysis and change. Research in organizational behavior, 22, 103-151.
Festinger, L. (1957). A theory of cognitive dissonance (Vol. 2). Stanford university press.
Garey, A. I. (1995). Constructing motherhood on the night shift:“Working mothers” as “stay-at-home moms”. Qualitative sociology, 18(4), 415-437.
Hattery, A. (2001). Women, work, and families: Balancing and weaving (Vol. 19). Sage.
In 1996 Hays wrote an influential book which described the notion of 'intensive mothering'. She described this as an ideology - a set of ideas which encompass what people (or a society or an individual) think exists, what is possible and what is good. Hays proposed (and this has been widely demonstrated empirically since) that our (Western) current most prevalent ideology is that mothering should be 'intensive', with the mother staying at home full time, devoted to her children, putting her children's needs above her own and feeling totally fulfilled by her domestic responsibilities. That is our society's version of the ideal mother, and this becomes internalised by individual women, guiding their expectations, their actions and their self-esteem.
In stark contrast from this is the ideology of the ideal worker. The ideal worker is totally committed to work and available to work long hours if needed and to travel oversees at the drop of a hat (Ely & Meyerson 2000)
You can see where I'm going with this, I'm sure. It is clearly not possible to be both the ideal worker and the ideal mother: you just can't be 100% committed to both your children and your job. You just can't.
So for those mothers who do combine both motherhood and work, this then leads to some level of cognitive dissonance (Festinger, 1957). Cognitive dissonance is the uncomfortable feeling we get when there are two contradictory thoughts in our minds. In this case those two thoughts are:
1) I want to be the ideal mother, my child is my main priority, and
2) I want to be the ideal worker, my work is my main priority.
Our brains are uncomfortable with these conflicting thoughts and look for a way to resolve the conflict. Johnston and Swanson (2006) suggest that there are a number of common approaches which working mothers use to allow them to reconcile their desire to be a good mother and a good worker. The terms in brackets in the list below refer to Bakhtin's (1981) options for resolving dialectics (opposing tensions pulling someone in two different directions):
1) Women find a way to work which doesn't interfere with their families (modifying the situational constraints). Garey (1995) studied nurses who chose to work night shifts to ensure that they were 100% available to their families during the day, and Hattery (2001) talked to women whose choice to become self-employed allowed them to be available when their families needed them.
2) Women re-frame the 'intensive mother' ideology (reframing their ideology). Perhaps they reconceptualise it as 'intensive parenting' and share the responsibility with their partner and extended family.
3) Women do things in stages (cyclical alternation), taking a career break, or extending their maternity leave, and then going back to work a little later on.
4) Women find a way to justify their choices (reframing their choices). These narratives are often financial. Women justify going back to work because the family needs the money, or justify putting their careers on hold because their husbands have higher earning potential.
5) Women compromise (neutralisation) - working part time and staying home part time and strive to be as close to the ideal mother and ideal worker as they can.
6) Women make a choice (selection) and entirely renounce their work identity and stay at home with their children.
Johnston and Swanson then went on to explore the narratives of mothers (full time working, part time working, and stay at home mums) and found some interesting differences, in particular that the women's views of what makes a good mother were associated with their work choices:
- Stay at home mums felt that good mothering was about being available. They thought that a happy child makes a happy mother.
- Part time workers said that being a good mother was about quality time with their children. They thought that having a bit of a break from each other led to both a happier mother and a happier child.
- Full time workers said it was about psychological availability and felt that their goal as a mother was to empower their children. They thought that a happy mother makes a happy child.
In terms of causality, the authors concluded that ideologies influenced behaviour, but that behaviour also shaped ideologies.
So much for the challenges women face, but what about the men? What is the ideal father and how easy is it to enact?
The traditional view of the good father is one who provides economically for the family - father as breadwinner (Marsiglio et al., 2000). Thus to be the ideal father entails being an ideal worker - in order to be a good father you HAVE to be a good worker, so that you can maximise your earning potential and earn as much money as you can for your family. So men who buy into this ideology don't have to make a compromise.
But what of the men who want to spend more time at home? The father as breadwinner is not the only version of the ideal father in our society. The ideology of the involved father (Henwood & Procter, 2003) depicts the ideal father as one who is actively engaged with their children's lives and who gets pleasure from those close relationships. This then is a step away from the ideal worker, and can leave fathers with a dilemma, more akin to that typically faced by mothers, about how to reconcile their identity as a good father and a good worker.
Policies and legislation have been put in place to allow men to share in parental leave, and work flexibly, but in reality men find that the cultural norms of organisations make them fear being penalised at work for taking advantage of these policies. The negative consequences of men taking paternity leave are felt particularly keenly in male-dominated spheres (Bygren & Duvander, 2006). Even in Sweden, where legislation and policies are very family-friendly and the culture is egalitarian, organisational norms are lagging behind policies, and not all employers actively support fathers taking time out (Has & Hwaang, 2009).
The traditional and still dominant ideology of father-as-breadwinner means that men who embrace a more involved-father ideology are considered as lesser workers for spending more time with their children and lesser fathers for spending more time with their children (Sallee, 2012).
So we are in a bit of a bind. If women want to work more, then we have to change the ideology of the ideal mother and the ideal worker: the new ideology needs to accept that workers can also be good mothers, and that mothers can also be good workers. If men want to spend more time with their children we also need to change the ideology of the ideal father, so that involved fathers can also be seen as good workers. But this kind of change in such entrenched cultural norms seems like a huge mountain to climb. The relatively straightforward aspects of legislation and policy have been changed already, but these new regulations have had a limited impact on cultural norms. A much bigger hurdle is to change how people conceptualise motherhood, fatherhood and work.
Any bright ideas?
References
Bakhtin, M. M. (1981). The dialogic imagination: Four essays by MM Bakhtin.
Bygren, M., & Duvander, A. Z. (2006). Parents’ workplace situation and fathers’ parental leave use. Journal of Marriage and Family, 68(2), 363-372.
Ely, R. J., & Meyerson, D. E. (2000). Theories of gender in organizations: A new approach to organizational analysis and change. Research in organizational behavior, 22, 103-151.
Festinger, L. (1957). A theory of cognitive dissonance (Vol. 2). Stanford university press.
Garey, A. I. (1995). Constructing motherhood on the night shift:“Working mothers” as “stay-at-home moms”. Qualitative sociology, 18(4), 415-437.
Hattery, A. (2001). Women, work, and families: Balancing and weaving (Vol. 19). Sage.
Hays, S. (1996). The cultural contradictions of motherhood. New Haven, CT: Yale
Henwood, K., & Procter, J. (2003). The ‘good father’: Reading men's accounts of paternal involvement during the transition to first‐time fatherhood. British Journal of Social Psychology, 42(3), 337-355.
Henwood, K., & Procter, J. (2003). The ‘good father’: Reading men's accounts of paternal involvement during the transition to first‐time fatherhood. British Journal of Social Psychology, 42(3), 337-355.
Johnston, D. D., & Swanson, D. H. (2006). Constructing the “good mother”: The experience of mothering ideologies by work status. Sex roles, 54(7-8), 509-519.
Marsiglio, W., Amato, P., Day, R. D., & Lamb, M. E. (2000). Scholarship on fatherhood in the 1990s and beyond. Journal of marriage and family, 62(4), 1173-1191.
Sallee, M. W. (2012). The ideal worker or the ideal father: Organizational structures and culture in the gendered university. Research in Higher Education, 53(7), 782-802.
Marsiglio, W., Amato, P., Day, R. D., & Lamb, M. E. (2000). Scholarship on fatherhood in the 1990s and beyond. Journal of marriage and family, 62(4), 1173-1191.
Sallee, M. W. (2012). The ideal worker or the ideal father: Organizational structures and culture in the gendered university. Research in Higher Education, 53(7), 782-802.
Monday, 18 February 2019
Motherhood, career breaks and career development
Another post about women. This time, I'm looking at the literature which explores the working patterns of mothers, particularly those who have career breaks. The literature on women returners is pretty broad, looking at women in the US and the UK, and combining quantitative and qualitative studies that explore women who leave, women who stay and women who decide to go back. There has been a particular focus on women who have had professional and managerial roles, perhaps because the cost to society of this loss of talent is particularly keen. The literature below may be a bit skewed in that direction.
What do mothers do?
Looking at the careers of women who have dependent aged children, we see that it splits fairly neatly into three equal groups: those who are not working, those working part time, and those working full time. Some women go back to work full time after their first child, but opt for part time or lower level jobs after their second or third child comes along. The proportions shift a bit as the children get older, with a drift towards work: by the time the children are 16-18, about a third still work part time, but the proportion full time is greater and the proportion not working is smaller.
Incidentally, the proportion of fathers not working is tiny and just 6% work part time, and most of the reasons cited for men working part time are not to do with children (they are more likely to take a career break or go part time due to ill-health, or because they want a career change). Fathers do, however, often request to take advantage of flexible working practices - so are likely to work eg later days so that they can, for example, drop the kids at childcare, or work from home on Fridays to pick up from school.
There are four common options, with women making choices about the nature of their occupation and industry, and their conditions or mode of working - whether part time, full time or freelance.
The proportions of women going back into the same job, same conditions, are particularly small after a career break (ie anything longer than their maternity leave), and this small number reflects both what they want to do and what they actually do (around 5% of professional women). And cutting ties with your pre-maternity organisation makes this particularly difficult. A large proportion of women (61%) are interested in changing industries altogether. (Lovejoy & Stone, 2012).
Career breaks for women incur penalties, (as far as objective career success is concerned). Women very often find that they go back to jobs which are lower level or lower paid and are more likely to work for smaller organisations. They incur a wage penalty which increases with the length of the career break, (at 3 years out of work stands at about 37%) and which never goes away, even 25 years after the career interruption women are earning less than they would have been had they not interrupted their careers (Reitman & Schneer, 2005). Another shift that is often seen is that women after a career break revert to more traditionally female occupations, retraining in education or moving into not for profit roles (Hewett et al., 2005). The reasons cited for this are that their values sometimes shift whilst they are at home, and they want to 'give something back', or that they they are looking for part time work which is more often available in traditionally female spheres. In McGrath et al.'s study of professional and managerial women, 83% took a lower level job after a career break. Women who work in these kinds of roles or industries before children are more likely to stick with their previous occupations than those whose careers started in traditionally masculine jobs. Self-employment is another trend that we see, as women find that this is a good route to a career that fits around their families and makes them feel that their skills and experience are valued (McKie, 2013).
Why do mothers make these choices?
Women who leave their previous jobs usually do so for a combination of reasons, including push factors (reasons to leave their jobs) and pull factors (reasons to be at home). Spending time with their children tends to be at the top of the list, but it is rarely the only factor. The relative importance of push and full factors seems to vary from industry to industry, with those in business citing push factors more often than those in the public or service industries (Hewlett et al., 2005). The women who carve out a successful re-entry to work after maternity leave or a career break tend to be those who have a) a supportive employer (in terms of their boss, organisational policies and organisational culture) b) a supportive home arrangement, with a partner or other family members who contribute to childcare and domestic chores and c) appropriate childcare facilities.
Women who go back do so because they are looking for the intellectual challenge and the company of good colleagues, and for intrinsic interest in their work. They are also keen on the money, whether to contribute to the family finances overall, or because they are keen to have the independence associated with their own income (McGrath et al., 2005)
It interests me that the role of the dads in the families is rarely mentioned in women's narratives about their choices. Fathers are discussed mostly in the context of the need for women to find jobs that allow their husbands to continue unchecked in their work, and will ensure that the women are able to take responsibility for most of the domestic chores (Stone & Lovejoy, 2004). I think a fuller exploration of this would be great, if anyone is looking for a new research project!
How does it work for the women?
The process of giving up work seems to be quite hard for women and many of them hang on to their professional identity even years after they were last in the workplace. Women don't usually anticipate an identity crisis, but they are often giving up a hard won, high status identity that they have inhabited for some years, so this grieving process is perhaps to be expected.
Kanji & Cahusc (2015) looked at women's experiences of identity, and identified 4 stages that women go through during their career breaks.
Stage 1: identity is under threat at work. This can happen during pregnancy, as women find they are marginalised, miss out on important meetings because of medical appointments and feel guilty for not pulling their weight. But it also happens when women return to work after maternity leave as, for example, they can't join colleagues in the pub after work as they have to rush back for school pick up.
Stage 2: Making sense of identity at home. Once they have decided to take the plunge, women then need to start to come to terms with their new identity as a stay at home mum, which often takes time and involves some to-ing and fro-ing as they keep their work identity alive through freelance or temporary bits of work. This stage can be hard as it involves a loss of identity.
Stage 3: Creating a new identity while at home. In this stage women become more involved in their local community and develop, justify and defend a new home and community based identity. They may get more involved at school, and engage in collective sense making with other mothers in the same position.
Stage 4: Springboard for action. Having made their peace with the loss of their previous work identity, they are in a position to consider something new. Alongside this can be a period of uncertainty as women try to work out what kind of options are open to them and to decide what to do next.
The vast majority of women want to and intend to go back to work, but totally underestimate how hard it is going to be (Hewlett et al., 2005). They can feel very positive about the career break itself but as soon as they start to engage with the process of re-entry, they find that they are unprepared for the barriers they will face (McGrath et al., 2005). Women often imagine that their education and experience will be enough to keep them employable, even after a career break, and are surprised with the challenges they face. This can be significantly disappointing and dispiriting for women.
The challenges include:
1. Changes in the work place, as technology and regulations have moved on and mergers have resulted in a new industry landscape. This links to the idea of human capital, which is the sum of the knowledge, skills and experiences that an individual has which they can operationalise to help their career development. There is a perception (held by women themselves and by employers) that human capital will gradually erode during a career break. This may be true to some degree, in that there are technological and regulatory changes which women may need to catch up with, but this probably has more impact on women's confidence (and employers' perceptions) that it warrants.
2. Personal changes, as women's networks have become dormant, their confidence is eroded and they have limited support at home. One of the challenges here is that families get used to a new normal, as the family adjusts to living on one wage (so the second wage isn't given the weight of the first one) and domestic chores become set as the responsibility of the mother.
3. Hiring managers, who have no understanding of the challenges facing working mothers and have no real appreciation of their assets. Women's career capital has been shown to take a knock from the moment they become pregnant, with employers assuming that they are less committed to work (Woolhough & Redshaw, 2016), despite evidence (Ruderman, 2002) that time at home with children makes women more effective workers (with better interpersonal skills, psychological resources, leadership ability, and time management skills). Women can also find themselves in a double bind in that they can't get senior jobs as their experience is not rated, but they also can't get junior jobs as they are so overqualified. Women emerging from longer career breaks too can face the added challenges of age-related discrimination.
Is this good enough?
My mother's generation felt that they had no choice. Social pressures dictated that they should stay at home and any job needed to be part time and secondary both to their husband's career and to their roles as wives and mothers. These days there are at least different options open to women. But despite significant changes in policy and legislation, women still have to compromise. It's a process of trade-offs, and although women do have a choice, every option has its price. The options on offer are often not the options that women want, but they reconcile themselves to their losses and compromises over time (Kanji & Cahusac, 2015). Women, generally, want to work, and want to work part time, in interesting, challenging and well paid roles. But for a combination of reasons (social and individual pressure, discrimination, childcare, economics) they can't, and then they have to make sense of it. Women find the decision to leave work hard (Lovejoy & Stone, 2012) and it takes a long time to make and to reconcile (Kanji & Cahusac, 2015).
The changes in policy and legislation don't seem to have had the impact we hoped: the 'ideal worker' is still basically a man, with the ability to work long hours and travel if needed and total commitment to his role. New policies have been drawn up and legislation supports equality, but culture hasn't moved on: mothers are still assumed to be less committed and capable at work than fathers, and women find that they are stigmatized for taking advantage of family-friendly working policies (Stone & Hernandez, 2013).
Theory and rhetoric
The literature which discusses the 'opt-out revolution' (coined in 2003 by Belkin to describe the decision of professional women to give up work), frames mother's career trajectories as the result of choice. These are privileged women, married to wealthy men, and they are in control of their own professional destinies. Career theories too which have been used to help explain women's choices suggest that they are a reflection of women's choices and an expression of their agency. But the studies that I read have portrayed women more as dealing with compromises and trade-offs, making the best of and making sense of the options that are available to them.
A number of career theories have been proposed to help explain the process. The Boundaryless and Protean career models have both been applied to explain women's non-linear career paths. Although neither of these models was developed with women's career paths in mind, they do reflect women's choices to some degree, although the implication for both models is that this approach is one which people aspire to, choose and enjoy, whereas, as we have identified, women tend to see this as more of a forced compromise rather than their ideal approach.
Catherine Hakim's preference theory (2004) suggests that women have natural preferences either towards the family, towards work or towards a hybrid of both and her theory implies that women can get what they want. Women work part time because they want to and they leave the workplace because that meets their personal needs. But actually, the research quoted above offers an alternative perspective. Stone and Lovejoy (2004) found that 90% of the women on careers breaks they studied were ambivalent about their choice to leave the workplace. The 'choice rhetoric' (Williams, 2000), that women's behaviour is all down to women's preferences lets everyone else off the hook. Yes, women have preferences, but they are not always free to enact them.
Proposed by Mainiero and Sullivan (2005) as an alternative explanation to the opt-out revolution, the Kaleidoscope Career Model explains women's career paths in terms of drivers. The model doesn't quite challenge the choice rhetoric, but it does offer an insight to the complexities of some of the decisions. The authors suggest that women are driven, throughout their working lives by three goals: challenge (career ambition and the impetus to learn, develop and succeed), balance (the desire that work should allow them to balance the various aspects of their lives of the roles they fulfill) and authenticity (the need to find meaning through work). The authors suggest that all three drivers will be present throughout a career path, but that one may take centre stage at any one time. And for women who (the authors argue) are essentially relational, the need for balance dominates during their mid-career stage, when they have dependent children and ambitious husbands to support.
One final comment is that much of the contemporary and feminist literature rages against the system which makes women less likely to achieve career success in objective terms, measured by promotion and pay. There is much less written about the subjective career success of women and perhaps we need to reconsider how we measure success in these debates. I have struggled to find much literature which focuses on the job satisfaction of working mothers, although there is plenty of evidence that women, in general are more satisfied in work than men, and part time women are more satisfied at work than full time women (Zou, 2016). The reasons put forward to explain women's higher job satisfaction despite their lower opportunities for objective success are many and varied, but one suggestion is that women are more likely to feel able to leave unsatisfying jobs than men are. Perhaps, however unsatisfactory women find their options, men find theirs worse, and limiting our discussions to the narrow outcomes of salary and seniority are unhelpful. Ranson (2012) points out that we don't have a need for the expression 'working fathers', because the notion of working is integral to the notion of fatherhood. Fathers are expected to be the family breadwinner, and perhaps they find this constraint as challenging as women find theirs. But I think I might leave that exploration for another time.
Focusing back on mothers then, the key points are that women struggle with their choices because the options available to them are not the options they want: everything is a compromise. The reasons behind this are complex, with societal and individual pressures leading women (and perhaps their partners) to feel that they need to engage in 'intensive mothering' (Hays, 1996), and discriminatory cultures at work which lower mother's status in the work place and fail to accommodate family needs. Clearly women's opportunities in the workplace are dramatically different and better than they were a generation or two ago. But we're not there yet and it is important to keep the discussions going.
References
Hakim, C. (2006). Women, careers, and work-life preferences. British Journal of Guidance & Counselling, 34(3), 279-294.
Hewlett, S. A., Luce, C. B., Shiller, P., & Southwell, S. (2005). The hidden brain drain: Off-ramps and on-ramps in women's careers. Harvard Business School Press.
Kanji, S., & Cahusac, E. (2015). Who am I? Mothers’ shifting identities, loss and sensemaking after workplace exit. human relations, 68(9), 1415-1436.
Lovejoy, M., & Stone, P. (2012). Opting back in: The influence of time at home on professional women's career redirection after opting out. Gender, Work & Organization, 19(6), 631-653.
McGrath, M., Driscoll, M., & Gross, M. (2005). Back in the Game. Wharton Center for Leadership and Change, Pennsylvania, PA.
McKie, L., Biese, I., & Jyrkinen, M. (2013). ‘The best time is now!’: The temporal and spatial dynamics of women opting in to self‐employment. Gender, Work & Organization, 20(2), 184-196.
Ranson, G. (2012). Men, paid employment and family responsibilities: Conceptualizing the ‘working father’. Gender, Work & Organization, 19(6), 741-761.
Reitman, F., & Schneer, J. A. (2005). The long-term negative impacts of managerial career interruptions: A longitudinal study of men and women MBAs. Group & Organization Management, 30(3), 243-262.
Stone, P., & Hernandez, L. A. (2013). The all‐or‐nothing workplace: Flexibility stigma and “opting out” among professional‐managerial women. Journal of Social Issues, 69(2), 235-256.
Williams, J. (2000). From difference to dominance to domesticity: care as work, gender as tradition. Chi.-Kent L. Rev., 76, 1441.
Woolnough, H., & Redshaw, J. (2016). The career decisions of professional women with dependent children: What’s changed?. Gender in Management: an international journal, 31(4), 297-311.
Zou, M. (2015). Gender, work orientations and job satisfaction. Work, employment and society, 29(1), 3-22.
What do mothers do?
Looking at the careers of women who have dependent aged children, we see that it splits fairly neatly into three equal groups: those who are not working, those working part time, and those working full time. Some women go back to work full time after their first child, but opt for part time or lower level jobs after their second or third child comes along. The proportions shift a bit as the children get older, with a drift towards work: by the time the children are 16-18, about a third still work part time, but the proportion full time is greater and the proportion not working is smaller.
Incidentally, the proportion of fathers not working is tiny and just 6% work part time, and most of the reasons cited for men working part time are not to do with children (they are more likely to take a career break or go part time due to ill-health, or because they want a career change). Fathers do, however, often request to take advantage of flexible working practices - so are likely to work eg later days so that they can, for example, drop the kids at childcare, or work from home on Fridays to pick up from school.
There are four common options, with women making choices about the nature of their occupation and industry, and their conditions or mode of working - whether part time, full time or freelance.
Occupation
|
|||
same
|
different
|
||
Mode
|
same
|
Same
job, same mode:
going back to work exactly like before
This almost always happens straight away. If ties with an organisation are severed then women rarely return to their old role (only 5% after a career break). Mothers are more likely to do this after the first than after subsequent children.
|
Whole new
career:
full time
Often a shift to a more values-driven career, or a more traditionally female occupation. These choices are often made after a career break and women can find it hard to identify and chose options. Sometimes women start part time and build up their hours gradually.
|
different
|
Same
job, different mode:
going back to work part on different hours; job
sharing; going freelance
Working part time is the no.1 choice of mothers, but it's not always feasible. Self-employment is an option that allows women control over their working conditions but still gives them status and earning potential.
|
New
family friendly career:
A new career that can fit with your new family
Many women choose lower grade jobs and opt for jobs in (eg) education where flexible hours are more accepted.
|
|
The proportions of women going back into the same job, same conditions, are particularly small after a career break (ie anything longer than their maternity leave), and this small number reflects both what they want to do and what they actually do (around 5% of professional women). And cutting ties with your pre-maternity organisation makes this particularly difficult. A large proportion of women (61%) are interested in changing industries altogether. (Lovejoy & Stone, 2012).
Career breaks for women incur penalties, (as far as objective career success is concerned). Women very often find that they go back to jobs which are lower level or lower paid and are more likely to work for smaller organisations. They incur a wage penalty which increases with the length of the career break, (at 3 years out of work stands at about 37%) and which never goes away, even 25 years after the career interruption women are earning less than they would have been had they not interrupted their careers (Reitman & Schneer, 2005). Another shift that is often seen is that women after a career break revert to more traditionally female occupations, retraining in education or moving into not for profit roles (Hewett et al., 2005). The reasons cited for this are that their values sometimes shift whilst they are at home, and they want to 'give something back', or that they they are looking for part time work which is more often available in traditionally female spheres. In McGrath et al.'s study of professional and managerial women, 83% took a lower level job after a career break. Women who work in these kinds of roles or industries before children are more likely to stick with their previous occupations than those whose careers started in traditionally masculine jobs. Self-employment is another trend that we see, as women find that this is a good route to a career that fits around their families and makes them feel that their skills and experience are valued (McKie, 2013).
Why do mothers make these choices?
Women who leave their previous jobs usually do so for a combination of reasons, including push factors (reasons to leave their jobs) and pull factors (reasons to be at home). Spending time with their children tends to be at the top of the list, but it is rarely the only factor. The relative importance of push and full factors seems to vary from industry to industry, with those in business citing push factors more often than those in the public or service industries (Hewlett et al., 2005). The women who carve out a successful re-entry to work after maternity leave or a career break tend to be those who have a) a supportive employer (in terms of their boss, organisational policies and organisational culture) b) a supportive home arrangement, with a partner or other family members who contribute to childcare and domestic chores and c) appropriate childcare facilities.
Women who go back do so because they are looking for the intellectual challenge and the company of good colleagues, and for intrinsic interest in their work. They are also keen on the money, whether to contribute to the family finances overall, or because they are keen to have the independence associated with their own income (McGrath et al., 2005)
It interests me that the role of the dads in the families is rarely mentioned in women's narratives about their choices. Fathers are discussed mostly in the context of the need for women to find jobs that allow their husbands to continue unchecked in their work, and will ensure that the women are able to take responsibility for most of the domestic chores (Stone & Lovejoy, 2004). I think a fuller exploration of this would be great, if anyone is looking for a new research project!
How does it work for the women?
The process of giving up work seems to be quite hard for women and many of them hang on to their professional identity even years after they were last in the workplace. Women don't usually anticipate an identity crisis, but they are often giving up a hard won, high status identity that they have inhabited for some years, so this grieving process is perhaps to be expected.
Kanji & Cahusc (2015) looked at women's experiences of identity, and identified 4 stages that women go through during their career breaks.
Stage 1: identity is under threat at work. This can happen during pregnancy, as women find they are marginalised, miss out on important meetings because of medical appointments and feel guilty for not pulling their weight. But it also happens when women return to work after maternity leave as, for example, they can't join colleagues in the pub after work as they have to rush back for school pick up.
Stage 2: Making sense of identity at home. Once they have decided to take the plunge, women then need to start to come to terms with their new identity as a stay at home mum, which often takes time and involves some to-ing and fro-ing as they keep their work identity alive through freelance or temporary bits of work. This stage can be hard as it involves a loss of identity.
Stage 3: Creating a new identity while at home. In this stage women become more involved in their local community and develop, justify and defend a new home and community based identity. They may get more involved at school, and engage in collective sense making with other mothers in the same position.
Stage 4: Springboard for action. Having made their peace with the loss of their previous work identity, they are in a position to consider something new. Alongside this can be a period of uncertainty as women try to work out what kind of options are open to them and to decide what to do next.
The vast majority of women want to and intend to go back to work, but totally underestimate how hard it is going to be (Hewlett et al., 2005). They can feel very positive about the career break itself but as soon as they start to engage with the process of re-entry, they find that they are unprepared for the barriers they will face (McGrath et al., 2005). Women often imagine that their education and experience will be enough to keep them employable, even after a career break, and are surprised with the challenges they face. This can be significantly disappointing and dispiriting for women.
The challenges include:
1. Changes in the work place, as technology and regulations have moved on and mergers have resulted in a new industry landscape. This links to the idea of human capital, which is the sum of the knowledge, skills and experiences that an individual has which they can operationalise to help their career development. There is a perception (held by women themselves and by employers) that human capital will gradually erode during a career break. This may be true to some degree, in that there are technological and regulatory changes which women may need to catch up with, but this probably has more impact on women's confidence (and employers' perceptions) that it warrants.
2. Personal changes, as women's networks have become dormant, their confidence is eroded and they have limited support at home. One of the challenges here is that families get used to a new normal, as the family adjusts to living on one wage (so the second wage isn't given the weight of the first one) and domestic chores become set as the responsibility of the mother.
3. Hiring managers, who have no understanding of the challenges facing working mothers and have no real appreciation of their assets. Women's career capital has been shown to take a knock from the moment they become pregnant, with employers assuming that they are less committed to work (Woolhough & Redshaw, 2016), despite evidence (Ruderman, 2002) that time at home with children makes women more effective workers (with better interpersonal skills, psychological resources, leadership ability, and time management skills). Women can also find themselves in a double bind in that they can't get senior jobs as their experience is not rated, but they also can't get junior jobs as they are so overqualified. Women emerging from longer career breaks too can face the added challenges of age-related discrimination.
Is this good enough?
My mother's generation felt that they had no choice. Social pressures dictated that they should stay at home and any job needed to be part time and secondary both to their husband's career and to their roles as wives and mothers. These days there are at least different options open to women. But despite significant changes in policy and legislation, women still have to compromise. It's a process of trade-offs, and although women do have a choice, every option has its price. The options on offer are often not the options that women want, but they reconcile themselves to their losses and compromises over time (Kanji & Cahusac, 2015). Women, generally, want to work, and want to work part time, in interesting, challenging and well paid roles. But for a combination of reasons (social and individual pressure, discrimination, childcare, economics) they can't, and then they have to make sense of it. Women find the decision to leave work hard (Lovejoy & Stone, 2012) and it takes a long time to make and to reconcile (Kanji & Cahusac, 2015).
The changes in policy and legislation don't seem to have had the impact we hoped: the 'ideal worker' is still basically a man, with the ability to work long hours and travel if needed and total commitment to his role. New policies have been drawn up and legislation supports equality, but culture hasn't moved on: mothers are still assumed to be less committed and capable at work than fathers, and women find that they are stigmatized for taking advantage of family-friendly working policies (Stone & Hernandez, 2013).
Theory and rhetoric
The literature which discusses the 'opt-out revolution' (coined in 2003 by Belkin to describe the decision of professional women to give up work), frames mother's career trajectories as the result of choice. These are privileged women, married to wealthy men, and they are in control of their own professional destinies. Career theories too which have been used to help explain women's choices suggest that they are a reflection of women's choices and an expression of their agency. But the studies that I read have portrayed women more as dealing with compromises and trade-offs, making the best of and making sense of the options that are available to them.
A number of career theories have been proposed to help explain the process. The Boundaryless and Protean career models have both been applied to explain women's non-linear career paths. Although neither of these models was developed with women's career paths in mind, they do reflect women's choices to some degree, although the implication for both models is that this approach is one which people aspire to, choose and enjoy, whereas, as we have identified, women tend to see this as more of a forced compromise rather than their ideal approach.
Catherine Hakim's preference theory (2004) suggests that women have natural preferences either towards the family, towards work or towards a hybrid of both and her theory implies that women can get what they want. Women work part time because they want to and they leave the workplace because that meets their personal needs. But actually, the research quoted above offers an alternative perspective. Stone and Lovejoy (2004) found that 90% of the women on careers breaks they studied were ambivalent about their choice to leave the workplace. The 'choice rhetoric' (Williams, 2000), that women's behaviour is all down to women's preferences lets everyone else off the hook. Yes, women have preferences, but they are not always free to enact them.
Proposed by Mainiero and Sullivan (2005) as an alternative explanation to the opt-out revolution, the Kaleidoscope Career Model explains women's career paths in terms of drivers. The model doesn't quite challenge the choice rhetoric, but it does offer an insight to the complexities of some of the decisions. The authors suggest that women are driven, throughout their working lives by three goals: challenge (career ambition and the impetus to learn, develop and succeed), balance (the desire that work should allow them to balance the various aspects of their lives of the roles they fulfill) and authenticity (the need to find meaning through work). The authors suggest that all three drivers will be present throughout a career path, but that one may take centre stage at any one time. And for women who (the authors argue) are essentially relational, the need for balance dominates during their mid-career stage, when they have dependent children and ambitious husbands to support.
One final comment is that much of the contemporary and feminist literature rages against the system which makes women less likely to achieve career success in objective terms, measured by promotion and pay. There is much less written about the subjective career success of women and perhaps we need to reconsider how we measure success in these debates. I have struggled to find much literature which focuses on the job satisfaction of working mothers, although there is plenty of evidence that women, in general are more satisfied in work than men, and part time women are more satisfied at work than full time women (Zou, 2016). The reasons put forward to explain women's higher job satisfaction despite their lower opportunities for objective success are many and varied, but one suggestion is that women are more likely to feel able to leave unsatisfying jobs than men are. Perhaps, however unsatisfactory women find their options, men find theirs worse, and limiting our discussions to the narrow outcomes of salary and seniority are unhelpful. Ranson (2012) points out that we don't have a need for the expression 'working fathers', because the notion of working is integral to the notion of fatherhood. Fathers are expected to be the family breadwinner, and perhaps they find this constraint as challenging as women find theirs. But I think I might leave that exploration for another time.
Focusing back on mothers then, the key points are that women struggle with their choices because the options available to them are not the options they want: everything is a compromise. The reasons behind this are complex, with societal and individual pressures leading women (and perhaps their partners) to feel that they need to engage in 'intensive mothering' (Hays, 1996), and discriminatory cultures at work which lower mother's status in the work place and fail to accommodate family needs. Clearly women's opportunities in the workplace are dramatically different and better than they were a generation or two ago. But we're not there yet and it is important to keep the discussions going.
References
Hakim, C. (2006). Women, careers, and work-life preferences. British Journal of Guidance & Counselling, 34(3), 279-294.
Hewlett, S. A., Luce, C. B., Shiller, P., & Southwell, S. (2005). The hidden brain drain: Off-ramps and on-ramps in women's careers. Harvard Business School Press.
Kanji, S., & Cahusac, E. (2015). Who am I? Mothers’ shifting identities, loss and sensemaking after workplace exit. human relations, 68(9), 1415-1436.
Lovejoy, M., & Stone, P. (2012). Opting back in: The influence of time at home on professional women's career redirection after opting out. Gender, Work & Organization, 19(6), 631-653.
McGrath, M., Driscoll, M., & Gross, M. (2005). Back in the Game. Wharton Center for Leadership and Change, Pennsylvania, PA.
McKie, L., Biese, I., & Jyrkinen, M. (2013). ‘The best time is now!’: The temporal and spatial dynamics of women opting in to self‐employment. Gender, Work & Organization, 20(2), 184-196.
Ranson, G. (2012). Men, paid employment and family responsibilities: Conceptualizing the ‘working father’. Gender, Work & Organization, 19(6), 741-761.
Reitman, F., & Schneer, J. A. (2005). The long-term negative impacts of managerial career interruptions: A longitudinal study of men and women MBAs. Group & Organization Management, 30(3), 243-262.
Stone, P., & Hernandez, L. A. (2013). The all‐or‐nothing workplace: Flexibility stigma and “opting out” among professional‐managerial women. Journal of Social Issues, 69(2), 235-256.
Williams, J. (2000). From difference to dominance to domesticity: care as work, gender as tradition. Chi.-Kent L. Rev., 76, 1441.
Woolnough, H., & Redshaw, J. (2016). The career decisions of professional women with dependent children: What’s changed?. Gender in Management: an international journal, 31(4), 297-311.
Zou, M. (2015). Gender, work orientations and job satisfaction. Work, employment and society, 29(1), 3-22.
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