Career development of women of color and White women: assumptions, conceptualization, and interventions from an ecological perspective. (Special Section).parts 2

 

  
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Career Development Quarterly| June 01, 2002 | Cook, Ellen P.; Heppner, Mary J.; O'Brien, Karen M. | Copyright

Moreover, it is important to note that not all individuals have the luxury of making career choices. For many low-income people, having a paid job is a necessity that does not often involve choices about a career path. In these situations, the oppressive nature of pervasive poverty becomes the salient influence on career development.
Career Counseling Today: Examination of Basic Assumptions
Career counseling, as widely practiced today, continues to follow a brief, three-step model that includes an intake interview, administration of assessment measures, and test interpretation (Gysbers et al., 1998). The client's role in this model is to obtain and synthesize information about self and the world of work. The subsequent job and educational decisions are expected to initiate a potentially rewarding career trajectory over time. The counselor's role is to provide the client access to sufficient information about self and work and, if necessary, to improve independent decision making skills.
This model of career counseling is based on a number of implicit assumptions about clients and the career development process itself, which can be described as follows. Work plays a central and pivotal role in people's lives. Individuals are responsible for making independent decisions that actualize their career potential. The focus on individual assessment reflects an assumption that knowledge about individual traits and preferences is the most important factor in optimal career decision making. Career counseling also typically refers to counseling for work roles with little exploration of other life roles that are commonly assumed by adults (e.g., family, community). These rational job decisions initiate or maintain an orderly, linear progression of career development in terms of continuous, increasingly skilled, and rewarding involvement over time. Finally, career counseling perpetuates the optimistic belief that any individual, if she or he works hard enough, will be able to realize her or his occupational dreams. The world of work is seen as facilitating individual autonomy and rewarding hard work with economic security and success.
There is nothing inherently wrong with this vision of career development. It is consistent with an American ethos of individual self-sufficiency and freedom of choice, officially mandated since the birth of the United States as a sovereign nation. More than a political philosophy, the emphasis on individual autonomy is a worldview that permeates our psychological conceptualizations of the nature of human functioning. This vision of career development has never reflected the needs of everyone, however, and is not consistent with the general life priorities and specific role commitments of many women of color and White women.
First, the reverence for individualism and autonomy implicit in this widely practiced model of career development reflects only one among numerous possibilities for viewing the world. Contrary to this model, many women and people of color experience human life as defined, sustained, and responsible to others within a nexus of community. For many racial and ethnic minority members, membership in a collective group is far more important than individual accomplishments (Helms & Cook, 1999; Landrine, 1995). Career choices may thus be weighed in light of the potential contributions such choices would make to the group as opposed to the autonomous choices made for individual self-actualization (e.g., Heppner & Duan, 1995). For many people, the priority placed on roles outside of work may positively affirm the greater psychological salience of these commitments, rather than represent compensation for what is missing at work. This possibility is particularly likely when these extrawork commitments are rooted in nondominant cultural values (e.g., Morgan, Guy, & Cellini, 1986). Proponents of the relational perspective in women's career development have also argued for interdependence rather than independence as a defining principle for many women (e.g., Forrest & Mikolaitis, 1986; Gallos, 1989).
Patterns of life role enactment that commonly characterize many women's lives also do not fit a singular focus on career success. Across cultures and over time, with few exceptions, women retain major responsibility for home and family regardless of involvement in paid and unpaid work outside of the home (Betz, 1994). In a comprehensive review, Shelton (1999) concluded that
women continue to spend more time than men on housework, whether they are employed or not; they continue to do more of the work involved in caring for children and to take more responsibility for that work; and finally, …