I've blogged before about the challenges facing the engineering industry as it tries to create a more diverse workforce, and we know that women are more reluctant to enter the profession and quicker to leave it. Previous studies suggest that one of the key reasons for women's dissatisfaction with their jobs is that they are frustrated with their career progression, feeling that the are not being as well paid, as quickly promoted or as valued, as they deserve.
We wanted to find out a bit more about what was going on here, so interviewed 50 women working in one global engineering firm based in the UK, to find out about their career development experiences. We asked them how it felt to be working in a male-dominated environment, what impact they felt that their gender had on their career development, and how they accounted for the gender pay gap in their organisation.
Before I describe the key findings, I need first to introduce the Intelligent Career Framework. This was developed by Arthur, Claman and Fillippi back in 1995, and offers advice on how to navigate your career. According to this framework, you can really enhance your chances of career success through Knowing How, Knowing Whom and Knowing Why. Knowing How is about your actual work-related skills - do you have what it takes to do the job well? Knowing Whom is all about your networks - do you know people who can advise and inform you, and who will put career enhancing opportunities your way? Finally Knowing Why is all about motivation - being clear about your career goals and your professional identity and having the drive to work hard. High levels of all three Knowings combine to give an individual the best chance of career success.
And trawling through our women's interviews, it became clear that for each of the three Knowings, women were disadvantaged.
Knowing How: This one is about having the right skills to do the job, and whilst the women we spoke to all were highly skilled and competent, they found that their skills were not give the same value as their male counterparts'. The participants talked about the assumptions which they saw all over the place that showed that women had a lower status than men in the organisation. Women's achievements were devalued (she only got that promotion because she was flirting with the boss / they wanted to promote a woman); feminine characteristics were devalued (empathy, emotions and sensitivity were looked down on); and women were assumed to be less capable than their male peers (women were asked to do lower level tasks than their male colleagues). The examples given were often quite subtle, but the message was clear: although women were just as capable as their male peers, their skills and abilities were always considered to be a bit inferior.
Knowing Whom: This one is about social capital, and when it came to developing useful networks, we found that men seemed to have two advantages over women. The first was that the men seemed to be a bit more comfortable putting themselves forward. They tended to talk more at meetings, brag about their achievements a bit more and ask for promotions and pay rises more often, so they generally did a better job of making themselves known. The second advantage was to do with friendships. The women talked about how much easier it is to make same-sex friendships, and they could see that the men were more likely to share common interests and just felt more comfortable with each other than they did with women. There was a lot of talk about the banter in the office, which cemented the men's friendships, but risked sounding flirtatious when it was seen between men and women. The men weren't trying to exclude the women, it was just that they more naturally gravitated to other men, and in such a male-dominated organisation, this meant that they had plenty of opportunity to build good relationships with a large number of influential colleagues.
Knowing Why: This one is about motivation, and only started to be problematic for women once they because mothers. At the heart of the problem are two ideologies - two ideas or templates, of an 'ideal'. The ideal mother (according to our current Western culture) is one who is always available for and devoted to her children. The ideal worker (according to this organisation) is one who is always available for and devoted to the organisation. You can immediately see then how this puts mothers in an impossible situation: they simply can't be the ideal mother and the ideal worker: something has to give. The women we spoke to explained that they made the choice to leave work on time to pick up their children, they accepted calls from the school when their children were ill, and they sometimes choose to work part time. This all meant that the organisation got the message that they were less than 100% committed to their organisation, and so were less keen to put career enhancing opportunities their way.
So with lower value accorded to their abilities, less chance of developing useful networks, and conflicting motivations for mothers, the women were disadvantaged on all three aspects of the Intelligent Career Framework. No wonder they found negotiating their careers an uphill struggle.
The framework was intended as a tool to help people to work out how to navigate their own careers, and assumes that it's down to the individuals to put the effort in, and that people are in control of their own career destinies. This study suggests that the problems are far more entrenched than that. Think about the example of conflicting ideologies: where do these ideologies come from? Of course workers don't need to be 100% devoted to their organisation to make an excellent professional contribution. It is quite possible to do an excellent job at work, but still feel that your children come first; but as soon as you make your dual loyalties apparent to your employer, they assume that your commitment to work has plummeted to zero. And there are many different ways to be a good mother - who is to say that the idea of total devotion is the right one? But these ideologies are deeply entrenched, and embedded within individuals, organisations and the whole of society. It's just not as easy as suggesting that these women should Lean In a bit more.
So, what can be done?
One obvious solution is to make sure that the culture reflects the policies. In the organisation we were looking at, there are many good policies in place to support career development, to ensure that selection for promotion is fair, and to allow for flexible working and shared parental leave. In practice though, the culture did not support the policies. In reality, the systems for promotion were opaque, so the senior men could promote their (male) friends without anyone noticing; the family friendly policies sound great on paper, but in practice, women were penalised for taking advantage of them, and men certainly don't feel that they are encouraged to take paternity leave or work part time. A culture shift is not easy to manage, but it would certainly make a difference.
Monday 23 December 2019
Tuesday 16 July 2019
Women in Engineering
The under-representation of women in engineering is well documented. 11% of the engineering workforce is female (WISE Campaign, 2017; Women in STEM Workforce) but only 5% of the registered engineers and technicians are female (Engineering UK, 2015). Women are less likely than men to join the profession and more likely than men to leave it, with half of female engineering graduates pursuing careers outside the discipline, and women engineers being more likely to leave the workforce and go elsewhere than men. And crucially, this is not changing. Despite decades of effort and hard work, nothing seems to have made much of a difference and the proportion of women studying and working in engineering has not materially increased in the last two decades.
So what's going on?
1. Women don't become engineers
The first problem is that women and girls don't enter the field of engineering.
Girls don't think they will be good at engineering, maths and physics, despite the clear evidence that girls are as talented in these quantitative subjects as boys. Girls also don't think they'll fit in within these fields. The stereotype of engineering is that it is dirty, physical, masculine and full of men. Girls just can't see themselves fitting in (Wang & Degol, 2013). Compounding the assumptions that girls make about themselves, are the assumptions that everyone else makes on their behalf, with teachers, parents and friends all echoing the same message, that girls and engineering don't mix, and not giving girls the same levels of encouragement to pursue these subjects (Tomorrow's Engineers' Week).
2. Female engineering students don't always become professional engineers
The second trouble spot comes after university. About 20% of engineering students in the UK are women, but these undergraduates are less likely than their male counterparts to look for jobs as engineers once they have graduated. Women and men studying engineering claim they are equally likely to look for jobs in engineering, but twice the proportion of male grads go into the field than female (Diversity in Engineering, WES, 2014; Xu, 2014). Seron, Silbey, Cech and Rubinean (2016) explored this in a bit more depth, tracking women engineering students from entry to graduation. They found that everyday sexism during informal interactions both at college and during internships makes women feel they won't fit.
3. Women engineers are more likely to leave the profession than men
Then finally, women who make it through to embarking on a career in engineering are more likely than men to leave the profession. Frehill, (2012) showed that female engineers were more likely than men to leave engineering for another career and Hunt (2015), showed that women leave engineering far more quickly that other areas of science, or other male dominated spheres such as economics or architecture.
A host of reasons, structural, cultural, individual and contextual reasons have been put forward to explain why women leave.
The engineering industry doesn't seem very family friendly there seems to be very little opportunity for flexible working and the hours are long, and some authors suggest this might explain why so many women leave (Buse, et al., 2013; Kahn & Ginther, 2015). There certainly does seem to be a dip in the number of women working in engineering after they have children, but other fields such as medicine and law also have similar working cultures and fewer women seem to exit these professions, so on its own this explanation isn't enough.
I have come across three studies which compare women who have stayed in engineering with those who have left. Buse et al., (2013) conducted a qualitative study of 10 ex-engineers and 20 current engineers and found that those who stayed tended to have higher levels of self-efficacy than those who left, although this finding has not been shown elsewhere (eg Fouad et al., 2016). Buse's study suggests another reason, that the women who leave are those who can't see how they can navigate their careers in the field. This issue was also spotted in two large-scale quantitative studies conducted in the US, comparing female engineers who left the profession with those who stayed. Fouad et al. (2015) and Hunt (2015) both found that the women who left engineering had a much less positive view about their career development within engineering, the opportunities for increased pay, promotion and general organisational support and didn't feel that their contributions were particularly valued.
4. Women don't progress as well in engineering -pay and seniority (Xu, 2015)
Women who stay in engineering report having to contend with an alien and unwelcoming masculine culture, putting up with what are described as micro-aggressions on a daily basis. These micro-aggressions include social undermining and workplace hostility, harassment, sexist behaviour, marginalisation and isolation (Ayre, Mills & Gill, 2013; Fouad, Fitzpatrick & Liu, 2011). Faulkner, through an observation study, notes that engineers are generally a respectful bunch, but saw many subtle examples of behaviour which just make it a little bit easier for men to build relationships and fit in, noting in particular the typically masculine conversation topics, and sexualised and sexist banter. Faulkner gives the example of greetings: men greet each other using male language (such as 'hey man') and shake hands with each other, but don't do either of these things with women. Those small subtle intimacies are not available for male / female relationships which just means that every day in tiny ways, women are not able to build up the relationships with their male colleagues that men can with each other. On top of this, women are judged more harshly than men, and their colleagues and managers undervalue their achievements and contribution (Hall & Sandler, 1982)
Female engineers develop certain strategies to help them cope with this chilly masculine climate. One of the most common is defeminisation (eg Faulkner, 2009; Powell et al., 2009; Rhoton, 2011), where women adopt masculine behaviours to fit in, distancing themselves from typical feminine behaviours and habits. Miller (2004) in the oil industry gives examples of women who have embraced the masculine culture - almost pretending not to be women in order to get on. Short term this strategy may work for the women involved, but long term this does women no favours, as it reinforces the idea that there is no place for femininity in engineering.
One other interesting response which is seem quite widely in the literature, is women denying that they are on the receiving end of any sexist behaviour. Fouad, Fitzpatrick and Liu, 2011 found that their participants all described gender discrimination but didn't see it as a gender inequity. Rhoton (2011) found that when they did see it, participants saw it as exceptional. Seron, Silbey, Cech and Rubineau (2018) cover similar ground but with engineering students. They found they whilst their female participants recognised that they were being marginalised, they found narratives to explain it away. They blamed themselves, believing in the meritocracy of the industry (I haven't been recognised for my work because it's not good enough, or because I haven't shouted loudly enough), and felt that it was down to them to sort it out.
One thing that women don't seem to want is more female only opportunities; their achievements are undervalued as it is, this just makes it worse. Seron et al., 2018 found that engineering students were quite anti-feminist because they wanted to make it on their own merit.
So, it seems that we know quite a lot about the career experiences of women in engineering. We know that they don't join, and why they don't join; we know that they leave and why they leave. But whilst we know that one key reason that they leave is because they feel that they are not progressing, we don't know why they don't progress. I wonder if that's the next thing to explore?
References
Amon, M. J. (2017). Looking through the glass ceiling: A qualitative study of STEM women’s career narratives. Frontiers in psychology, 8, 236.
Buse, K., Bilimoria, D., & Perelli, S. (2013). Why they stay: Women persisting in US engineering careers. Career Development International, 18(2), 139-154.
Dinella, L. M., Fulcher, M., & Weisgram, E. S. (2014). Sex-typed personality traits and gender identity as predictors of young adults’ career interests. Archives of sexual behavior, 43(3), 493-504.
Elsesser, K., & Peplau, L. A. (2006). The glass partition: Obstacles to cross-sex friendships at work. Human Relations, 59(8), 1077-1100.
Faulkner, W. (2009). Doing gender in engineering workplace cultures. I. Observations from the field. Engineering Studies, 1(1), 3-18.
Fouad, N., Fitzpatrick, M., & Liu, J. P. (2011). Persistence of women in engineering careers: A qualitative study of current and former female engineers. Journal of Women and Minorities in Science and Engineering, 17(1).
Fouad, N. A., Singh, R., Cappaert, K., Chang, W. H., & Wan, M. (2016). Comparison of women engineers who persist in or depart from engineering. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 92, 79-93.
Gale, A. W. (1994). Women in non-traditional occupations: The construction industry. Women in Management Review, 9(2), 3-14.
Goldin, C. (2014). A pollution theory of discrimination: male and female differences in occupations and earnings. In L.P. Boustanm, C. Frydman & R.A. Margo (eds) Human capital in history: The American record. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.(pp. 313-348).
Hunt, J. (2016). Why do women leave science and engineering?. ILR Review, 69(1), 199-226.
Meiksins, P., Layne, P., Beddoes, K., Martini, G., McCusker, M., Rideau, R., & Shah, Y. (2016). Women in engineering: A review of the 2015 literature. SWE Magazine, 44-65.
Miller, G. E. (2004). Frontier masculinity in the oil industry: The experience of women engineers. Gender, Work & Organization, 11(1), 47-73.
Peers, S. (2018). Statistics on women in engineering. Women’s Engineering Society.
Powell, A., Bagilhole, B., & Dainty, A. (2009). How women engineers do and undo gender: Consequences for gender equality. Gender, work & organization, 16(4), 411-428.
Ranson, G. (2005). No longer “one of the boys”: Negotiations with motherhood, as prospect or reality, among women in engineering. Canadian Review of Sociology/Revue canadienne de sociologie, 42(2), 145-166.
Rhoton, L. A. (2011). Distancing as a gendered barrier: Understanding women scientists’ gender practices. Gender & Society, 25(6), 696-716.
Seron, C., Silbey, S. S., Cech, E., & Rubineau, B. (2016). Persistence is cultural: Professional socialization and the reproduction of sex segregation. Work and Occupations, 43(2), 178-214.
Seron, C., Silbey, S., Cech, E., & Rubineau, B. (2018). “I am Not a Feminist, but...”: Hegemony of a Meritocratic Ideology and the Limits of Critique Among Women in Engineering. Work and Occupations, 45(2), 131-167.
Singh, S., & Peers, S. M. C. (2019). Where are the Women in the Engineering Labour Market? A Cross-Sectional Study. International Journal of Gender, Science and Technology, 11(1), 203-231.
Smith, K., & Gayles, J. (2018). “Girl Power”: Gendered Academic and Workplace Experiences of College Women in Engineering. Social Sciences, 7(1), 11.
Vantieghem, W., Vermeersch, H., & Van Houtte, M. (2014). Why “Gender” disappeared from the gender gap:(re-) introducing gender identity theory to educational gender gap research. Social Psychology of Education, 17(3), 357-381.
Walker, M. (2001). Engineering identities. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 22(1), 75-89.
So what's going on?
1. Women don't become engineers
The first problem is that women and girls don't enter the field of engineering.
Girls don't think they will be good at engineering, maths and physics, despite the clear evidence that girls are as talented in these quantitative subjects as boys. Girls also don't think they'll fit in within these fields. The stereotype of engineering is that it is dirty, physical, masculine and full of men. Girls just can't see themselves fitting in (Wang & Degol, 2013). Compounding the assumptions that girls make about themselves, are the assumptions that everyone else makes on their behalf, with teachers, parents and friends all echoing the same message, that girls and engineering don't mix, and not giving girls the same levels of encouragement to pursue these subjects (Tomorrow's Engineers' Week).
2. Female engineering students don't always become professional engineers
The second trouble spot comes after university. About 20% of engineering students in the UK are women, but these undergraduates are less likely than their male counterparts to look for jobs as engineers once they have graduated. Women and men studying engineering claim they are equally likely to look for jobs in engineering, but twice the proportion of male grads go into the field than female (Diversity in Engineering, WES, 2014; Xu, 2014). Seron, Silbey, Cech and Rubinean (2016) explored this in a bit more depth, tracking women engineering students from entry to graduation. They found that everyday sexism during informal interactions both at college and during internships makes women feel they won't fit.
3. Women engineers are more likely to leave the profession than men
A host of reasons, structural, cultural, individual and contextual reasons have been put forward to explain why women leave.
The engineering industry doesn't seem very family friendly there seems to be very little opportunity for flexible working and the hours are long, and some authors suggest this might explain why so many women leave (Buse, et al., 2013; Kahn & Ginther, 2015). There certainly does seem to be a dip in the number of women working in engineering after they have children, but other fields such as medicine and law also have similar working cultures and fewer women seem to exit these professions, so on its own this explanation isn't enough.
I have come across three studies which compare women who have stayed in engineering with those who have left. Buse et al., (2013) conducted a qualitative study of 10 ex-engineers and 20 current engineers and found that those who stayed tended to have higher levels of self-efficacy than those who left, although this finding has not been shown elsewhere (eg Fouad et al., 2016). Buse's study suggests another reason, that the women who leave are those who can't see how they can navigate their careers in the field. This issue was also spotted in two large-scale quantitative studies conducted in the US, comparing female engineers who left the profession with those who stayed. Fouad et al. (2015) and Hunt (2015) both found that the women who left engineering had a much less positive view about their career development within engineering, the opportunities for increased pay, promotion and general organisational support and didn't feel that their contributions were particularly valued.
4. Women don't progress as well in engineering -pay and seniority (Xu, 2015)
Women who stay in engineering report having to contend with an alien and unwelcoming masculine culture, putting up with what are described as micro-aggressions on a daily basis. These micro-aggressions include social undermining and workplace hostility, harassment, sexist behaviour, marginalisation and isolation (Ayre, Mills & Gill, 2013; Fouad, Fitzpatrick & Liu, 2011). Faulkner, through an observation study, notes that engineers are generally a respectful bunch, but saw many subtle examples of behaviour which just make it a little bit easier for men to build relationships and fit in, noting in particular the typically masculine conversation topics, and sexualised and sexist banter. Faulkner gives the example of greetings: men greet each other using male language (such as 'hey man') and shake hands with each other, but don't do either of these things with women. Those small subtle intimacies are not available for male / female relationships which just means that every day in tiny ways, women are not able to build up the relationships with their male colleagues that men can with each other. On top of this, women are judged more harshly than men, and their colleagues and managers undervalue their achievements and contribution (Hall & Sandler, 1982)
Female engineers develop certain strategies to help them cope with this chilly masculine climate. One of the most common is defeminisation (eg Faulkner, 2009; Powell et al., 2009; Rhoton, 2011), where women adopt masculine behaviours to fit in, distancing themselves from typical feminine behaviours and habits. Miller (2004) in the oil industry gives examples of women who have embraced the masculine culture - almost pretending not to be women in order to get on. Short term this strategy may work for the women involved, but long term this does women no favours, as it reinforces the idea that there is no place for femininity in engineering.
One other interesting response which is seem quite widely in the literature, is women denying that they are on the receiving end of any sexist behaviour. Fouad, Fitzpatrick and Liu, 2011 found that their participants all described gender discrimination but didn't see it as a gender inequity. Rhoton (2011) found that when they did see it, participants saw it as exceptional. Seron, Silbey, Cech and Rubineau (2018) cover similar ground but with engineering students. They found they whilst their female participants recognised that they were being marginalised, they found narratives to explain it away. They blamed themselves, believing in the meritocracy of the industry (I haven't been recognised for my work because it's not good enough, or because I haven't shouted loudly enough), and felt that it was down to them to sort it out.
One thing that women don't seem to want is more female only opportunities; their achievements are undervalued as it is, this just makes it worse. Seron et al., 2018 found that engineering students were quite anti-feminist because they wanted to make it on their own merit.
So, it seems that we know quite a lot about the career experiences of women in engineering. We know that they don't join, and why they don't join; we know that they leave and why they leave. But whilst we know that one key reason that they leave is because they feel that they are not progressing, we don't know why they don't progress. I wonder if that's the next thing to explore?
References
Amon, M. J. (2017). Looking through the glass ceiling: A qualitative study of STEM women’s career narratives. Frontiers in psychology, 8, 236.
Buse, K., Bilimoria, D., & Perelli, S. (2013). Why they stay: Women persisting in US engineering careers. Career Development International, 18(2), 139-154.
Dinella, L. M., Fulcher, M., & Weisgram, E. S. (2014). Sex-typed personality traits and gender identity as predictors of young adults’ career interests. Archives of sexual behavior, 43(3), 493-504.
Elsesser, K., & Peplau, L. A. (2006). The glass partition: Obstacles to cross-sex friendships at work. Human Relations, 59(8), 1077-1100.
Faulkner, W. (2009). Doing gender in engineering workplace cultures. I. Observations from the field. Engineering Studies, 1(1), 3-18.
Fouad, N., Fitzpatrick, M., & Liu, J. P. (2011). Persistence of women in engineering careers: A qualitative study of current and former female engineers. Journal of Women and Minorities in Science and Engineering, 17(1).
Fouad, N. A., Singh, R., Cappaert, K., Chang, W. H., & Wan, M. (2016). Comparison of women engineers who persist in or depart from engineering. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 92, 79-93.
Gale, A. W. (1994). Women in non-traditional occupations: The construction industry. Women in Management Review, 9(2), 3-14.
Goldin, C. (2014). A pollution theory of discrimination: male and female differences in occupations and earnings. In L.P. Boustanm, C. Frydman & R.A. Margo (eds) Human capital in history: The American record. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.(pp. 313-348).
Hunt, J. (2016). Why do women leave science and engineering?. ILR Review, 69(1), 199-226.
Meiksins, P., Layne, P., Beddoes, K., Martini, G., McCusker, M., Rideau, R., & Shah, Y. (2016). Women in engineering: A review of the 2015 literature. SWE Magazine, 44-65.
Miller, G. E. (2004). Frontier masculinity in the oil industry: The experience of women engineers. Gender, Work & Organization, 11(1), 47-73.
Peers, S. (2018). Statistics on women in engineering. Women’s Engineering Society.
Powell, A., Bagilhole, B., & Dainty, A. (2009). How women engineers do and undo gender: Consequences for gender equality. Gender, work & organization, 16(4), 411-428.
Ranson, G. (2005). No longer “one of the boys”: Negotiations with motherhood, as prospect or reality, among women in engineering. Canadian Review of Sociology/Revue canadienne de sociologie, 42(2), 145-166.
Rhoton, L. A. (2011). Distancing as a gendered barrier: Understanding women scientists’ gender practices. Gender & Society, 25(6), 696-716.
Seron, C., Silbey, S. S., Cech, E., & Rubineau, B. (2016). Persistence is cultural: Professional socialization and the reproduction of sex segregation. Work and Occupations, 43(2), 178-214.
Seron, C., Silbey, S., Cech, E., & Rubineau, B. (2018). “I am Not a Feminist, but...”: Hegemony of a Meritocratic Ideology and the Limits of Critique Among Women in Engineering. Work and Occupations, 45(2), 131-167.
Singh, S., & Peers, S. M. C. (2019). Where are the Women in the Engineering Labour Market? A Cross-Sectional Study. International Journal of Gender, Science and Technology, 11(1), 203-231.
Smith, K., & Gayles, J. (2018). “Girl Power”: Gendered Academic and Workplace Experiences of College Women in Engineering. Social Sciences, 7(1), 11.
Vantieghem, W., Vermeersch, H., & Van Houtte, M. (2014). Why “Gender” disappeared from the gender gap:(re-) introducing gender identity theory to educational gender gap research. Social Psychology of Education, 17(3), 357-381.
Walker, M. (2001). Engineering identities. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 22(1), 75-89.
Sunday 30 June 2019
Ultimately they just think you're dumb: the experiences of female computer scientists in the UK
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?
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?
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.
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