- Title
- Crossing over: gender and career at midlife
- Creator
- Warner-Smith, Penny
- Relation
- Journal of Interdisciplinary Gender Studies: JIGS Vol. 1, Issue 2, p. 159-170
- Relation
- http://www.newcastle.edu.au/school/hss/research/publications/jigs/volume-1-2-sept-1996.html
- Publisher
- University of Newcastle, Faculty of Education and Arts
- Resource Type
- journal article
- Date
- 1996
- Description
- It has been claimed that many professional career women retire early because they are tired of fighting the male-dominated workplace culture for lesser rewards than their male colleagues. This essentialising view is contradicted by data collected in interviews with a group of professional men and women. In midlife, the women as a group are expanding their public activities, in contrast to the men as a group who have tended to remain in one occupational area. Yet it must also be noted that the career experiences of these people ranged across a spectrum, and that there were women whose careers approximated a "male" pattern, and men who shared the apparently "female" embracing of further challenge. Furthermore there appeared to be little relationship between the kind of career experience a woman had had and her desire to leave the workforce. I argue that to remain within the structuralist paradigm is limiting, and that an analysis of internalised discourses of masculinity and femininity provides a more helpful explanation of the outcomes discussed in this paper.
- Subject
- careers; women; men; masculinity; femininity; midlife
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1046336
- Identifier
- uon:14621
- Identifier
- ISSN:1325-1848
- Language
- eng
- Full Text
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