Factors Affecting Women's Traditional or Non-Traditional Career Plans
Abstract
Women go through a complicated process when making their career decisions. The central issue of this research is to investigate some potentially powerful factors that might differentiate women who have chosen non-traditional occupations from the women who have made more traditional occupational plans. Participants included 45 women from traditional majors and 53 women from non-traditional majors randomly selected from the roster of all Junior and Senior women at Texas A&M University. The subjects filled out a questionnaire designed to assess their personal and family background information and four psychological variables of sex-role ideology, locus of control, authoritarianism, and self consciouness. Non-traditional women differed from traditional women in their desired family plans and in their aspired future salaries. They were also more likely to have mothers in non-traditional occupations, and more likely to come from single parent homes. Traditional women were found to be more satisfied with their majors, closer to their fathers, and higher in their feminine sex-role ideology than non-traditional women. In conclusion, there do appear to be many socio-psychological factors affecting women's perceptions of the world and influencing their traditional or non-traditional career plans.
Description
Program year: 1985-1986Digitized from print original stored in HDR
Subject
careerwomen
gender roles
traditional
non-traditional
authoritarianism
family dynamics
salary
Citation
Granberry, Lorraine (1986). Factors Affecting Women's Traditional or Non-Traditional Career Plans. University Undergraduate Fellows. Available electronically from https : / /hdl .handle .net /1969 .1 /CAPSTONE -GranberryL _1986.