Exploring Women's Career Development: Implications for Theory and Practice

With a few notable exceptions, most research into the occupational experiences of women is typicallymacro-social and based on large-scale, impersonal, aggregated, and static data. Whilst such data reveal theposition of women in the workforce relative to men, they do not provide sufficient processual insight intothe career development of women. Through a case study approach, this study aims to discern patterns in thecareer development of women managers , and to examine if these patterns conform to career models such asthose proposed by White, Cox, and Cooper (1992) and White (1995, 2000). The case data comprise of thecareer journeys of 20 women managers from a broad cross-section of occupational sectors in New Zealand.The data reveal that although the majority of women managers display high career centrality, they do notwork continuously as they have several years of interruptions for bearing and rearing children, and workpart-time and retrain themselves through further education before returning to the workplace. Interestingly,they do not seem to plan their careers.