The key research question for this thesis is: How do women make choices about their professional development and growth during different life stages? It is possible that women of different life stages and even generations have made different choices because the barriers reduced as they moved into senior roles and also the legislation has changed and
consequently provided opportunity for greater choice. It is also possible that women understand or conceptualise their career differently than they once did and that provides opportunity for greater choice. There is substantial evidence to suggest that careers are now defined more broadly and in a more complex way than the previous linear models (Forret et al 2010). There is a decade of research from scholars preoccupied with questions about boundaries and the boundless career concept (De Fillippi and Arthur 1994; Guest et al 1996; Weick 1995; Bagdadli et al 2003; Sullivan and Arthur 2006). Quesenbury and Trauth (2012) suggest that more flexible organisational interventions that account for diversity and variation among women, and move away from stereotypes about ‘one size fits all’ are more likely to be effective.
Mainiero and Sullivan (2005) provide a way to understand the working lives of people that ‘juggle’ multiple roles and who are required to make choices about balancing competing demands; they suggest a kaleidoscope model of career development as opposed to a lifecycle approach. Kaleidoscope models fit workers’ concerns for authenticity, balance and challenge, vis a vis the demands of their careers in this new millennium. This kaleidoscope model may
31 be useful in this research as generational and gender differences and similarities are
considered to encompass a range of complexities in professionals’ lives.
‘Like a kaleidoscope that produces changing patterns when the tube is rotated and its glass chips fall into new arrangements, women shift the patterns of their careers by rotating different aspects in their lives to arrange their roles and relationships in new ways’ (Mainiero and Sullivan 2005: 1).
Women’s careers may be characterised not only by diffusion and empowerment but also by flexibility (Inkson 2008). Varied organisational mechanisms have been identified that discriminate against women these include lack of flexibility, opportunity for career
development and child care facilities (Powell and Mainiero 1992; Calas and Smircich 1996). Wetlesen (2013) explored the work values of second generation equity; she asked whether people who had grown up in families that made a choice to share family responsibility and paid work also practiced gender equity and shared responsibilities. Wetlesen (2013) found that the equity pattern was rarely reproduced. Instead, a number of factors influenced the choice to share paid work and family responsibilities.
There is empirical evidence that, despite changes in organisational cultures and concepts of career, women often choose to sacrifice their career in preference for family (Lovejoy and Stone 2012; Cahusac and Kanji 2013). Cahusac and Kanji (2013) explored the experiences of mothers in professional and managerial roles and found that organisational cultures that do not have flexible working arrangements tend to push this group out of the workforce. Lovejoy and Stone (2011) interviewed women to identify career experiences after having children. Their study was based on 54 in-depth interviews with stay-at-home mothers and found that after women took time out of their careers (so-called ‘opting out’) to look after children their workplace aspirations often changed. Women who ‘opted out’ were often drawn towards new, lower paid and lower status roles so they could continue to manage family responsibilities whilst working in some capacity.
Kolb et al (2010) used interviews and discussions with more than 100 women across a wide spectrum of leadership positions to examine the key challenges and probable traps along career pathways, and the strategic moves required to achieve success. A key finding was that:
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‘a woman seeking to establish herself at the leadership table … must negotiate her way through a number of tests that her male colleagues often bypass’ (Kolb et al 2010: 3).
Kolb et al (2010) highlight that understanding these gender hurdles forms the important context for understanding strategies for negotiation. In other words, the way a woman understands her choices and negotiates these is important to the way she develops in her profession.
Further research into the way in which women make sense of their experiences and of their choices about their career may focus more on how they understand their development and growth as opposed to how they understand their career because this may address the existing gaps in theoretical understanding between professional choice, professional identity and how women believe they are recognised and constrained in their professional work cultures. Sullivan and Arthur (2006) proposed that psychological mobility, that is an individual’s capacity for movement as perceived through the mind of the career actor, is influenced by gender. It is possible that psychological mobility is gendered and it may also be influence by phase of career or stage of life, the degree to which these features impact may be explored through narrative theory concerning identity development. The relational features that may impact on psychological mobility are discussed below by drawing on research that provide insight into development of a professional identity, a narrative identity and gender workplace identity.