A Comparison of Women's and Men's Career Transitions

Abstract

The term &dquo;career&dquo; has been defined in a number of ways in the literature. Van Maanen (1977) uses a broad definition of career: a series of distinct experiences which may be related and which comprise an individual life. Following from this definition, then, is the notion of career as a series of one's working experiences. As Super (1963Super ( , 1976 has well-documented, men's careers have often followed a linear trajectory. Men establish themselves in a particular field and, with time, progress upward within that field in a hierarchical, stepby-step fashion to increased responsibility and compensation; thus men attain career success.Whether or not this same pattern applies to women's career development is uncertain. Women's careers have been found to differ in substantial ways from men's. In general, it has been found that women emphasize salary less and job satisfaction more than men do (McGowen & Hart, 1992), indicating that the rewards of working are different for many women. Cook (1993) suggests that the competitive orientation of the career ladder may not be attractive to many women.A focus on the workplace compounds home-career interaction problems for many women. Sacrifices demanded by organizations of those on a fast-track career exact a toll on personal lives, sacrifices which many women may be unwilling to make. Hardesty and Jacobs (1986) discovered that many successful women feel betrayed and disillusioned with the career success they attained from upward linear mobility. Powell and Mainiero (1992) theorize that women measure their caat UNIV OF FLORIDA Smathers Libraries on June 5, 2016 jcd.sagepub.com Downloaded from

Career Wellbeing, The Challenging Role of Working Mothers

“…A career in working mothers cannot be understood separately with family relations [7]. The fact that family clearly shown from the research conducted by O'Neil, Hopkins and Bilimonial [8], affects mother's career, in the course of mother's career indicates an interruption tendency in career comparing to men, especially with regard to having children.…”

Lifelong career mobility and change options in knowledge occupations: career pathway implications of initial degree choices

“…Although gender was not a primary focus of the present research, the quantitative and qualitative results add some nuanced support to the apparent consensus that men and women tend to enact their careers in accordance with societal norms and role expectations (Sterret, 1999;Sullivan & Arthur, 2006). The broad-field nature of the changes males and females made suggests different expectations of career trajectories.…”

“…The role of changes in organisations in influencing mobility has been proposed (Arthur, 1994;Arthur & Rousseau, 1996a;Clarke, 2013) 2.2.2 Organisational change. Delayering, downsizing and outsourcing in response to global economic realities (Betz, 2003) is seen by some to have diminished the opportunity for the traditional, upwardly mobile careers defined within organisations (Baruch, 2004;Clarke, 2007;Defillippi & Arthur, 1994;Sterret, 1999). Therefore it is predicted that greater inter-organisational mobility will increasingly become a feature of career patterns in the future (Arthur, Khapova, & Wilderom, 2005;Valcour & Tolbert, 2003), though there is some evidence against this vision (Chudzikowski, 2012;Clarke, 2009;Kovalenko & Mortelmans, 2016).…”

“…There appears to be a consensus in the literature that men and women tend to enact their careers in accordance with societal norms and role expectations, which brings about less linearity and more radical changes in women's careers (Sterret, 1999;Sullivan & Arthur, 2006). Women tend to take on lower level jobs, and their engagement with the world of work tends to stop and start related to family responsibilities and geographic movements following a spouse's job change (Sterret, 1999;Sullivan & Arthur, 2006), revealing the "propensity of women to make sacrifices in their careers for the sake of their husbands" (Valcour & Tolbert, 2003, p. 771).…”

“…Professionals forced out of organisations via restructuring and redundancies are more likely to become independent contractors (Sterret, 1999), where they are basically self-employed and tender for packages of work. The term continuity-in-change has been used to describe a move from employment in a public utility to performing the same tasks from a contract type position, where the change is not in occupational field but in the method of delivery (Dries, Pepermans, & Carlier, 2008).…”