Women’s Attitudes towards Work

Abstract

While it has long been understood that women’s labor-force participation is responsive to such major life-cycle events as education, marriage, divorce, bereavement, childbearing, and geographic mobility, the study of the motivational side has been neglected. Thus, when we turn to the theoretical work on work aspiration in women, and the empirical literature it has spawned, we find it both stagnant and unimaginative. Work aspiration (or occupational choice, or career commitment — rarely are these concepts distinguished) is usually treated as a discrete event like the menarche, which occurs at some time in adolescence and never again.¹

Despite the recent growth of literature concerning post-war trends in female employment and the characteristics which differentiate male and female occupations, we remain remarkably ignorant about such issues as occupational choice and sources of work satisfaction among female employees. According to Judith Long Laws, much of the literature which is available in relation to these themes is theoretically obsolete and informed by a deficient methodology.² It also tends to display an uncritical acceptance of certain myths and assumptions concerning the character of women’s orientations towards paid employment.