Current career literature provides little insight into how women interpret career-relevant experiences, advice, or information, particularly when it is contradictory. This paper uses findings from interviews with 40 college women to provide empirical confirmation for the link between self-authorship and career decision making. Findings underscore the role of inter-connectivity in women's decision making, particularly involving parents, and distinguish ways that this can reflect self-authorship. Self-authorship provides the theoretical framework to understand how students respond to career advice and suggests that students may reject career advice when it requires the cognitive complexity to engage diverse viewpoints. Findings endorse educational activities that require students to juggle competing knowledge claims to make complex decisions.

Decisions that involve consideration of inconsistent or contradictory information provide a context for understanding and supporting intellectual development.

Research has supported the need to develop separate models for predicting men’s and women’s career interests. Women’s career interests, particularly in nontraditional fields in science, engineering, and technology (SET), are considerably more difficult to predict than are men’s (O’Brien & Fassinger, 1993). A number of factors have a significant impact on women’s career interests and choices but have little effect in predicting men’s career interests (O’Brien, Friedman, Tipton, & Linn, 2000). One of the most striking gender differences is that there is a much weaker connection for women than for men between interests, enjoyment, and career choice (O’Brien & Fassinger). The failure to make this connection is one explanation for the troubling finding that the majority of young women express interest in sex-typical careers that do not match their skills and are far below their ability (O’Brien & Fassinger). Gender differences in the factors that predict career interest apply to the field of information technology as well. There are significant gender differences in all aspects of the IT pipeline, from how women become interested in the computing field to how they enter and remain in it, as documented by Almstrum (2003).

She is the coordinator for the Science and Gender Equity Program at Virginia Tech. She is the founder and editor of the Journal of Women and Minorities in Science and Engineering, now in its 10th year of publication. She served as Senior Program Director, Program for Women and Girls, National Science Foundation in 1996. She has published over 50 immunology and SET equity research papers, book chapters, and monographs, and she is the co-investigator on several NSF-funded projects. Soyoung Lee, Virginia TechSoyoung Lee, Ph.D., Post-doctoral Fellow, Women in Information Technology project, Virginia Tech, USA. She has written and presented 13 papers and over 10 posters about Korean immigrants, women in information technology, decision making, community capacity, family life education, and parent-child relationships at national-and international-level conferences and symposia.

Although adolescents become progressively independent from their parents in the high-school years, they continue to depend heavily on parents in the area of career development (Peterson, Stivers, & Peters, 1986; Sebald, 1989). The role of parental support in children’s career choice has been demonstrated empirically in the career-development literature (Altman, 1997; Fisher & Griggs, 1994; Ketterson & Blustein, 1997; Kracke, 1997; Way & Rossman, 1996). Researchers have found that parents impact career choice more than counselors, teachers, friends, other relatives, or people working in the field of interest (Kotrlik & Harrison, 1989), but are not adequately informed about how to help (Young, Friesen, & Borycki, 1994). Although parents hold a powerful role in the career advising of both their male and female children, most of the reported studies use a male model and focus. Researchers are beginning to develop a knowledge base for the career development of girls and the unique issues they face in deciding on a career. Greater understanding of these issues is urgent, especially as females are recruited into nontraditional fields like information technology. This article will review research on parental support for female career choice, including the research findings from the Women and Information Technology (WIT, 2002-2005) project funded by the National Science Foundation.