Gender Differences in the Effect of Education on the Slope of Experience-Earnings Profiles

A bstract . TWO earnings models are estimated for men and women of the National Longitudinal Survey of Labor Market Experience of Youth (1979 to 1988). Model 1 (a standard human capital equation) indicates women receive a relatively higher earnings effect from another year of education and week of work, suggesting that narrowing of the wage gap can occur through increasing these. However, increases in female education of over 20%, or increases in weeks worked of over 100% are needed to bring female earnings to the level of white males. Model 2, which includes the interaction between education and work experience, shows that more educated men have steeper experience-earnings profiles while more educated women do not. This finding indicates different earnings growth patterns among similarly skilled and market attached men and women. Results imply that increasing female skills and work effort alone are insufficient in obtaining more equitable market outcomes and that the continuation of affirmative action policies are needed to achieve this goal.     

Chinese professional immigrants in Australia: a gendered pattern in (re)building their careers

Few studies have investigated contemporary professional migrant women from mainland China to developed economies like Australia to understand their motives of migration and the strategy they may adopt to advance their careers. This paper fills part of this important research gap by investigating the career rebuilding experience of Chinese professional immigrants in Australia. It examines the motives of their migration, their career aspirations, the strategies they adopt to rebuild their career and the types of career they are rebuilding. It explores how the compounded effect of gender, race, immigration and family commitment may be articulated in the family and social relations, and how these factors affect women's career aspirations and outcomes. This paper concludes that whilst social capital is important for Chinese migrant women professionals who already possess a high level of human capital, to restart their post-migration career, cultural capital is crucial for their managerial career advancement.     

The Effect of International Work Experience on the Career Success of Expatriates: A Comparison of Assigned and Self‐Initiated Expatriates

This article is one of the first to examine the long‐term effect of expatriation on careers, comparing the impact of international work experience on the career success of assigned and self‐initiated expatriates. Our sample consists of employees who were working abroad in 2004, and we examine their subjective and objective career success eight years later. Despite the “dark side of international careers” arguments associated with the repatriation literature, we find that the long‐term impacts of international work experience on career success are generally positive and mainly unrelated to whether the work experience was acquired as an assigned or self‐initiated expatriate. Companies recruit employees with international experience externally but are much more likely to offer further internal jobs to assigned expatriates. This reinforces the need for further research and for companies to see all those with international experience as important elements of the workforce. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Equal opportunity? Women's managerial careers in governmental organizations in China

There is very limited knowledge about women's management careers in China. This paper examines the opportunities for and barriers to women's careers in China, using governmental organizations as an example in which the State is not only the advocate of equal opportunity policies but also, in practice, the gatekeeper. One of the greatest disparities between male and female occupational patterns in China is in the sphere of government employment where only one in five employees is female. The aim of this paper is to understand the Chinese characteristics of gender inequality in management careers. In looking at the factors that influence women's upward mobility, the intention is to identify the barriers to the appointment of women to top jobs. Some barriers will be unique to governmental organizations and so will require special attention if they are to be eradicated. However, women also face more general barriers to success which transcend differences of occupational sector or society. It is hoped that this paper will lead to a greater understanding of how career barriers for women in China may resemble and differ from those faced by their counterparts in the West.     

The status of academic women in the 1990s No longer outsiders, but not yet equals

This paper reexamines the status of women in the academic labor market relative to men to determine how much progress has been made in achieving equity. Two questions will be addressed here: (1) do men and women have equal access to faculty employment in higher education, and (2) are they equally successful with regard to traditional career goals and compensation? Analyses are conducted on the educational attainment of women, their representation among faculty, their time allocation and research productivity, and their success in academia as represented by their rank attainment and earnings. While the results show that women have made considerable strides in entering the academic labor market, there is still an unexplained gap between men and women in terms of their earnings and career progression.     

Exploring the moderating effect of gender in the relationship between individuals' aspirations and career success among engineers in Peru

Purpose: The aim of this paper is to analyse the relationship between career success and individual career aspirations for engineers, and to test whether this differs according to gender. The primary hypothesis in this research is that gender does make a significant difference.

Design/methodological/approach: The sample consists of 1011 engineers who graduated from a prestigious Peruvian college between 1998 and 2005. Female graduates constituted only 4% of the sample, which is similar to the national statistics for engineers in Peru during this period. The relationships were primarily tested using multiple regression and structural equation modelling analyses.

Findings: Findings show a positive relationship between individual career aspirations and career success for men, but not necessarily for women; this supports the hypothesis that gender moderates this relationship. Females seek more secure career orientation than their male counterparts. In addition, females have shown that their career success is more related to feminine themes such as achieving ‘work–family balance’. The findings are in line with previously published results in other countries in which female engineers have career orientations with a preference for a balance between work and family as well as work stability.

Research limitations/implications: The sample is limited to graduates from a single Peruvian college of engineering. Although the sample has similar demographic characteristic to a national population, a more heterogeneous sample is called for in a future research. Moreover, additional moderators should be incorporated, such as family background, residency (large urban cities vs. small villages) and perhaps other variables.

Practical implications: Results can help Human Resource Managers to design better career plans, which consider gender in defining policies for the attraction and retention of competent female engineers.     

Contextualizing the career success of Arab women entrepreneurs

ABSTRACT

Drawing on institutional theory, this study gives voice to Arab women entrepreneurs. Through contextualization and in-depth, semi-structured interviews, I examine Lebanese women entrepreneurs’ conceptualizations of career success, the mechanisms they use to realize it and their overall awareness of it. According to the findings, the entrepreneurs experience career success as an act of disobedience against socially imposed cultural and gender mandates. Furthermore, career success evolves as a contextual, dynamic process that is culturally dependent but individually negotiated, interpreted and constructed using external and internal conceptualizations. In turn, these conceptualizations are intertwined with agency and unfold as a process at the intersection of gender, patriarchy and cultural values. Accordingly, I argue against reducing career success to static, objective and subjective criteria. Doing so undermines the complexity and processual nature of the construct and neglects the importance of cultural values in shaping the understanding and experience of career success in different societies. I also stress the importance of contextualizing women’s entrepreneurial experiences and demonstrate that Lebanese women entrepreneurs’ conceptualizations of career success reflect both Arab social-cognitive and normative institutions and their own agency.     

The impact of boundaryless careers on organizational decision making: an analysis from the perspective of Luhmann's theory of social systems

Research on careers has recently discovered the growing relevance of inter-organizational, boundaryless careers. The new paradigm of career studies that goes hand in hand with the concept of boundaryless careers, though, has not yet paid very much attention to the impact of new career patterns on how organizations function. To fill this gap, the paper analyses the effects of boundaryless careers on organizational decision making. Drawing on Niklas Luhmann's theory of social systems, we elaborate how observing a (potential) employee's life in terms of career generally facilitates organizational decision making by what we call the evaluative capacity of career. Further, the paper shows in what respect employing this mode of observation is rendered more difficult by the emergence of boundaryless careers. Based on the theoretical framework developed, we finally deduce and apply a scheme of classification of possible reactions to the organizational problems caused by boundaryless careers. In sum, the paper provides a new theoretical approach to analysing different ways of how organizations can cope with the challenges of new career patterns.     

The Return on Women''s Human Capital and the Role of Male Attitudes Toward Working Wives

A BSTRACT . This study empirically investigates women's work interruption behavior in Taiwan and this behavior's influence on women's earnings. The most striking finding from our analysis of women's work history patterns is that a husband's negative attitude toward a working wife will more greatly discourage his wife from attaching to the labor market than will the presence of young children in the family. Thus, it is critical to educate men to give up their traditional attitudes toward gender roles in order to raise the female labor force participation rate in Taiwan. As to the effect of work interruption on earnings, a depreciation rate of 2.8% is found for women with at least a high-school level of education, while no penalty of foregone experience is shown for less-educated women. Since this depreciation effect may discourage women from re-entering the labor market, government programs encouraging self-employment should be helpful, as self-employed women find it easier to overcome the conflict between family obligations and work needs.     

The experience of burnout and work/non-work success in male and female engineers: A matched-pairs comparison

This paper explores the experience of burnout and success in the professional and private lives of people in technical careers. Participants in the study were 51 male and 51 female engineers, who were matched as pairs on a variety of personal and job-related variables. An analysis of the data shows that the sampling design worked: the two groups are very similar in their organizational positions, share a similar outlook on their jobs, and have similar orientations towards their careers and lives. However, gender differences were revealed in the interrelationship between work and private life and its effect on measures of well-being such as feelings of burnout, satisfaction, enjoyment, and perceived success. Results indicate that male engineers are better able to integrate work success with private life than their female counterparts. For men, work and non-work success are compatible, while for women they seem to conflict. The results are discussed in the light of a theoretical proposition to view burnout in a person/environment-fit framework. Implications are drawn for career consultants and human resource managers in organizations that rely on technical expertise.     

Managerial career success in Canadian organizations: is gender a determinant?

The purpose of this research is to examine which of the following approaches - human capital, family context, socio-economic origin, work investment and reward expectations and structural factors - can eliminate the influence of gender on career success of 3,060 Canadian managers. Taken individually, these different approaches did not counter the effect of gender on career success of managers. However, the use of an overall regression model containing all the approaches countered the effect of gender on the number and speed of promotion, but not on salary and hierarchical level. Finally, the results suggest that the career success of male and female managers is predicted by different variables.     

Women Managers’ Careers in China: Theorizing the Influence of Gender and Collectivism

This article is concerned with developing an understanding of the careers of women managers in China. Existing literature suggests that while women in China are comparatively well represented in management roles, they face distinctive pressures and barriers to their progress arising from entrenched patriarchal and collectivist aspects of the Chinese cultural tradition. However, little is known about how these aspects impact on women's orientations towards their careers and to what extent influential Western career theories are adequate in interpreting their experience. Drawing on interviews with 20 women managers in China, the article interprets women's orientations towards their careers in relation to their adherence to traditional gender roles and collectivist values. Using this framework, a fourfold taxonomy is developed which identifies “conformist,” “revolutionary,” “soloist,” and “dissident” orientations. The article suggests that Western career theories fail to capture the collective dimension, and thus do not account fully for the range of experience and orientations of Chinese women managers that are captured in the taxonomy. Implications, both practical and theoretical, are discussed. Recommendations are also made as to how management and career development policies might be developed in organizations in China in order to address the diverse needs and preferences of women managers. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Approaches to career success: An exploration of surreptitious career‐success strategies

Theorists have forwarded a vast range of career‐success determinants, including sociodemographic, social capital, personality, and other behavioral factors. We suggest that existing studies have overconcentrated on the overt behavioral determinants of career success to the detriment of the covert, clandestine, and concealed. Our analysis of two detailed qualitative case studies involving 112 indepth interviews with executives, managers, supervisors, and front‐line staff in a large financial services organization and a medium‐sized fashionable restaurant group uncovered five main strategies of surreptitious career success.These strategies are obligation creation and exploitation, personal‐status enhancement, information acquisition and control, similarity exploitation, and proactive vertical alignment. Our findings indicate that just over 79% of those interviewed (88 of 112) referred to, at some point in their careers, premeditated strategies to enhance their careers that they concealed from coworkers. Consequently, we argue that surreptitious actions are central to employee career‐focused activities and fundamental to a more complete understanding of the complexities of career‐oriented employee behavior. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Gender gaps across the earnings distribution for full-time employees in Britain: Allowing for sample selection

This paper investigates gender differences across the log wage distributions of British employees working full-time in 2005. The raw gender wage gap shows a tendency to increase across the distribution with a glass ceiling effect indicated. A strong relationship between high skilled, white-collar occupations and carrying out managerial duties with the glass ceiling effect is indicated in the data. After allowing for positive selection into full-time employment by British women, a substantially larger gender earning gap is found: the selection corrected gender wage gap is close to twice the raw gap across most of the earnings distribution. This selection corrected gap is found to be predominantly related to women receiving lower rewards for their characteristics than men. Indeed, the results suggest the gender earnings gap would all but disappear across the earnings distribution if women working full-time received the same returns to their characteristics as men working full-time in Britain do.     

Sex differentials in the earnings of Ph.D.s.

Using a survey of two cohorts of men and women who received Ph.D.s in the years 1958-63 and 1967-72, the authors test two hypotheses: (1) that the relatively lower earnings of highly educated women can be explained largely by their career interruptions and by their lesser willingness to accumulate human capital in anticipation of such interruptions, and (2) that the differential in earnings between men and women increases with age because of career interruptions and that the gap narrows once women reenter the labor force on a permanent basis The findings do not lend support to either of these hypotheses, leading the authors to reject the proposition that the lower rewards of women Ph.D.s are primarily caused by their own voluntary decisions.     

Career Management Strategies of People With Disabilities

People with disabilities (PWD) tend to experience less career success than their counterparts without a disability, and their talent and skill remain underutilized. Disability literature also outlines various barriers to careers of PWD. Yet there are those who successfully manage their careers. Our aim in the present interview‐based study was to understand which strategies PWD engage in to manage their careers proactively. Findings indicate that strategies include maintaining a positive mind‐set; trouncing competence stereotypes by sensitizing people to their ability through learning and applying new skills, and by seeking feedback; engaging in disability advocacy to remove performance myths; and building, leveraging, and contributing to disability networks. We noted gender and tenure differences with regard to strategies employed. Findings imply that career objectives of PWD are not those traditionally expected or lauded by organizations, and motivations for career self‐management are unique to PWD as compared to those without a disability. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Cultural values and definitions of career success

This paper examines how national culture relates to the ways that individuals define career success. Data are drawn from interviews with 269 professional services employees in 15 countries. Interviews are content coded and linked with country‐level Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness measures of cultural values. We test our hypotheses using a multilevel multinomial logit model. The results demonstrate that the ways in which employees define career success vary across countries, due in part to differences in cultural values after controlling for gender, occupation, job level, and national economic development. We find that employees from countries high in future orientation, uncertainty avoidance, and performance orientation are more likely to define career success in terms of interpersonal outcomes, and those from countries high in collectivism (institutional and in‐group), humane orientation, and gender egalitarianism are more likely to prefer intrapersonal outcomes. We find that employees from countries that are high in assertiveness, uncertainty avoidance, and performance orientation are more likely to define career success in terms of achievement‐oriented outcomes. Finally, we find that employees from countries high in power distance report career success definitions in terms of safety and security outcomes. We discuss the implications of these findings for theories of cultural differences in careers across countries.     

Women at workequality versus inequality: barriers for advancing in the workplace

This study aimed at identifying the factors that working women in Cyprus are faced with which lead to experience discrimination, examining possible barriers that affect women's advancement and identifying organizational practices that assist them in achieving work–life balance. The data were collected by the distribution of a questionnaire, which was on a voluntary, anonymous and confidential basis and targeted women of four different occupational levels. Several barriers were identified, preventing them from advancement such as stereotypes, conflicting work and family obligations, lack of women role models and low levels of self-confidence. This research enhances women's awareness of the existence of gender discrimination at work and the barriers in their career advancement. It highlights the creation of company programs such as mentoring programs, refresher courses, flexible work hours and on-site childcare, which could help women in developing and advancing their careers as well as achieving work–life balance.     

The effect of match quality and specific experience on career decisions and wage growth

This paper constructs and estimates a career decision model where individuals search for both careers and firms that are a good match for their idiosyncratic skills using the NLSY79. It departs from previous papers in that career mobility decisions and participation decisions are explicitly modeled. I find substantial returns to career-specific experience. However, college graduates' wage grows little through career-match upgrading, which results in a lower incidence of career changes than high school graduates. The finding suggests that college graduates learn about their suitable careers before they enter a labor market.