This paper is a critique of Hakim's theory of the gendered character of work with its key idea of the 'heterogeneity of women' centring on the distinction between those who are 'family oriented' and those who are 'career oriented'. Such patterns of work commitment are claimed to be developed by early adulthood and to steer women in one direction or the other.Our critique is based on interviews with two groups of young adult women generating rich data on their attitudes to employment, families and the relationship between the two. The first group ('single workers') when first interviewed were single, childless and employed full-time. The second ('early mothers') were partnered mothers with at most part-time employment.The substance of the critique is threefold:1. The single workers could not be clearly separated by 'career' or 'family' orientation. They wanted both, which then left them in Hakim's residual category as 'drifters', a wholly inappropriate characterization. 2. The early mothers were certainly homemakers but our data doubted that this was by choice and suggested that many were becoming more career oriented. Longitudinal data from the single workers show the importance of analysing 'orientation'or other aspects of agency in the context of social structure rather than as a prime mover in itself.

This paper is drawn from a study of the work and family experiences and aspirations of young adult women who were interviewed by either one or the other of the authors in 1992. A comparison can thus be drawn between interviews conducted by a man and those by a woman. This is attempted in a systematic and empirical way. The initial intention was to learn from the literature on gender and the interview to minimise the impact of the interviewer's gender on the data generated. In the first section this is reviewed and we put a case that this intention was achieved. This was, however, only to an extent, as we indicate with material on the revelation of abortion experience to the two interviewers. Whilst there was a similar pattern of response to our direct questions, there was a marked difference in the voluntary addition of further personal experience. The final evidence we deploy comes from re-interviews done in 1994 in which the interviewees were asked about their perception of the significance of the original interviewer's gender. This indicates the importance of interviewees' concepts of gender as well as the intentions of researchers.

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This paper is intended as a critique of the conventional understanding of Parsons's voluntarism. On the level of analytical theory. Parsons's scheme does not refer to the conscious choices of concrete individuals in concrete social situations, but is a system of abstract causal properties characterizing social action as a process of resolution of the inherent tension of normative and conditional aspects of reality through the mechanism of effort. The recent debate about Parsons's voluntarism misses this central dynamic.