Due to pressures to balance work and family, high-level professional women often decide to take a less demanding position or seek new career options following childbirth. Work-based factors play a primary role, with characteristics of husbands playing an important secondary role. By virtue of their occupational status and class membership,
professional women are caught in a double bind between the competing models of the ideal worker and ideal parent.
Regardless of changes in workforce participation, women still identify much more with their family role than do men. A broad range of other factors may impact a mother’s ability to succeed and advance in the workplace. These include spousal involvement, gender stereotypes, employer policies and cultural norms, childcare issues, family support, economic status and personal career choices.
Overall, mothers usually had to make a choice as competing life interests are too stressful.
The most famous study at the Center for WorkLife found that when subjects were given identical resumes, one but not the other a mother, the mother was 79% less likely to be hired, 100% less likely to be promoted, offered an average of $11,000 less in salary, and held to higher performance and punctuality standards.
Motherhood, hence, remains a huge barrier in the attainment of the aspirations and ambitions of women. With babies come career breaks, part-time options, work from home assignments, move to lower level job profiles and the like.
A sense of balance is about the choices we make in terms of the time we spend at work and life domains. It includes balance of one’s work, personal and spiritual life and the amount of time allocated to oneself and to others. Some women opt for a “career tree” rather than the “career ladder” which allows for breaks from career as well as changing jobs compared to following a largely linear career path.
In early career life stage, achievement and challenge are predominant. In mid-career, balance and family demands dominate and, finally, in the late career stage, authenticity moves to the forefront. It is argued that the careers of women, in contrast to men, are more “relational” in that women make decisions about their career options after they have considered the impact of their decision on others, e.g. their family.
The boundary-less career is one of the most recently proposed career models that challenge the traditional definition of career as a series of hierarchical moves within a single organization.