Diversity and Women's Career Development: From Adolescence to Adulthood, and: Who Supports the Family?: Gender and Breadwinning in Dual-Earner Marriages (review)

Diversity and Women's Career Development: From Adolescence to Adulthood. Helen S. Farmer and Associates. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1997, 344 pp., $64.95 hardcover, $29.95 paper.

Who Supports the Family? Gender and Breadwinning in Dual-Earner Marriages. Jean L. Potuchek. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997, 249 pp., $49.50 hardcover, $16.95 paper.

How do women balance career and family values, and with what consequences for the well-being of individual women and their families? Working from quite different vantage points toward divergent goals, each of these books illuminates a distinct facet of the larger question of women's experiences with paid employment. Farmer, et al., and Potuchek, respectively, have addressed young women's career choices and married women's interpretation of their employment in the family context. The two books are interesting not only for their content, but also for their innovative blending of quantitative and qualitative research methods.

Helen Farmer's study arose out of concern that women have remained underrepresented in the sciences and in technical fields decades after affirmative action requirements were established for educational institutions. Diversity and Women's Career Development presents findings from a study of young men and women who had aspired to careers in science or technology in high school or who had entered these fields after graduation. An extension of an earlier quantitative study, this research seeks to clarify the complexity of the career development and decision making processes of young adults in order to strengthen career planning assistance provided by schools and universities. Participants in the study were invited to describe their career development, and to discuss the relationship of their work roles to other parts of their lives. Using a grounded theory approach, researchers identified important themes inductively and only later related them to concepts in existing research.

Diversity and Women's Career Development is a loosely organized collection of papers written by Farmer and nine research associates. She begins with a presentation of the broad theoretical framework that guides the research and a discussion of the survey methodology. The next five chapters report findings on the central issue of women's career achievements in scientific and technical fields compared with men's. Section III addresses issues of race, ethnicity, and class in career development by examining the experiences of various subgroups of study participants. In Section IV, two of Farmer's associates examine the influence of families of origin and current adult families on career development. She closes the book with two chapters that discuss implications of the research for counseling, social policy, and career development theory.

This work makes important contributions to the theory of career development. The study complements the "classic" models of Donald Super and John Holland, and especially the social learning theory of Albert Bandura, by incorporating the effects of gender on career development and choice. Diversity and Women's Career Development also has practical applications for education and counseling. Farmer, et al. provide additional evidence of schools' "chilly climate" for women students and its discouraging effect on women aspiring to non-traditional careers. Their major contribution to this area is a description of women who overcame discriminatory environments. Farmer has culled the best practices of her field to assemble an array of concrete suggestions for strengthening women's career planning. She emphasizes the benefits of developing a sense of "self efficacy"--confidence in one's own abilities and decision-making skills--and suggests specific techniques for helping male and female students prepare for possible career-family role conflict. If Farmer's expectations for empowerment through career education seem a bit unrealistic, she does recognize implications of her findings for policy beyond school counseling programs. Most notably, she calls for commitment to discouraging behaviors that are hostile to women's...