Career and family priorities of college students

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Career and family priorities of college students

This study was designed to observe the career and family priorities of college students. It was studied to determine whether men and women differ in feelings towards career and family. It was hypothesized that there would be an inverse relationship between career values and the importance of family life between men and women furthermore; female students would value the family life role, whereas male would prefer the occupational life role. It was tested with the help of Life Role Salience Scale (Amatea, Cross, Clark, & Bobby, 1986). Thirty female and thirty male college students rated the scale. Statistical analysis demonstrated that women valued family more than career and men valued career more than family.

INTRODUCTION:

Everyday decision can be related to the essence of human. In today’s society, individuals are trying to ”do it all”-to find life satisfaction through a combination of multiple roles (e.g., career, marriage, parenting, homecare). Super (1990) theorized that one’s life career is made up of many different roles occupied over the life span, including the roles of career person, home and family person, community member, student, and leisurite. However, if they are not spending their time in ways that are congruent with their values, they are unlikely to find the happiness they seek. Greehaus and Beutell (1985) theorized that the more important a role is to an individual, the more time and energy that person will invest in it, which will allow less time and energy for other roles. Super discussed participation, commitment and value expectations in relation to life roles. Participation is the amount of time spent in a role, whereas commitment and values expectations reflect the importance of the role to the individual, and the degree to which the individual can meet their needs through that role (Super & Neville, 1986). Satisfaction in life is related to role congruence, which is the amount of congruence between the level of participation in each life role and the level of commitment to and valuing of that role. For example, if an individual highly values and is highly committed to the family role, but only participates in this role 5% of the time, that individual will be less satisfied with life than an individual with greater congruence between valuing/commitment and participation. Research has demonstrated that inconsistency between role participation and role commitment may cause increased psychological distress and decreased marital quality (Voydanoff & Donnelly, 1999).Graduating senior women on the Berkeley campus overwhelmingly reported that they expected to be married, to have children and to have a career. Nearly nine-tenths are planning to earn graduate degrees in law, medicine, science, or business, and half expect to earn as much if not more, than their future husbands. Simultaneously, they hope to raise two or three children each and to interrupt their careers for extended amounts of time, (Six months to twelve years) in order to care for their children. Some researchers say that women place family before career and like to spend large amount of time at home, especially when their children are young. And women with children earn significantly less than either men or women without children. College women and men are quite similar in one respect they both want partners or spouses and they both want children. Ninety percent of the women and men in one of the research say that women hope to marry and have children. But one asks these students how they plan to combine their careers, marriages, and children, striking differences appear. They wanted their husbands to work continuously. It would be strange,” said one, echoing the sentiments of many,” if I was at work and he was at home”. But many of the men were tentative about their future wives employment. Several men stated they wanted there wives to stay home after she had children. Clearly, both women and men see the husband’s job as essential to the economic well-being and survival of their future families and the wife’s job as optional-a luxury they can choose to add on or take off at will. Most of the students come from fairly traditional homes-their mothers were responsible for cooking, doing the dishes, and cleaning the house while their fathers made money and fixed things around the house. Students say that mother took care of the kids and the house while father went out to work and earn money. Extensive research indicates that college men and women endorse both achievements goals such as career development and marital goals. Many researchers have found that college men and women are increasingly similar in their goals and value orientations. Scant information is available about how women and men with similarly strong and equal motivations toward the achievement of goals and the maintenance of affiliative relationships will prioritize, make decisions, and interact when achievement demands and personal relationships conflict. Students reveal ignorance of the career hazards of interruptions in employment, and lack of awareness of the family sacrifices and stresses attendant to career commitment (Catalyst, 1987; Phillips & Johnston, 1985; Zuckerman, 1980).

As men and women in college today think about their future and plan for work and family, they are exposed to a variety of mixed messages relating to gender. Gender socialization continues to influence young people’s identities and stereotypes from the past frame choices (e.g., Angrist & Almquist, 1975; Komarovsky, 1985; Machung, 1989) for students as they move into a society which, at least theoretically, permits equality of opportunities regardless of gender. Yet, participation of women in the work force has increased significantly and attitude surveys indicate that we are much more accepting of women taking active roles in our society (e.g. Mason & Lu, 1988). Nevertheless, women still face considerable occupational segregation (Blau & Ferber, 1985). Research suggests that women continue to oversee management of home, children and social activities of the family, while men “help” with household tasks (Hochschild et al., 1989) since discrimination results in women earning less money for equal time at work, men can justify their non-involvement in household chores because they must “provide” for the family. Thus, despite many changes, today’s college students have grown up in traditional families where women have had to assume the majority of household tasks, whether they worked outside of the home or not. Consequently, many traditional gender expectations are maintained by the structural inequality in our society. According to Eccles, women’s career choices will differ from men’s because they place more value on family and relationships. Machung’s (1989) interviews with 30 graduating Berkeley seniors, illustrates the contradictions which occur between the changing role of women in society and the traditional roles we still hold for women and men in the family. The women whom Machung interviewed wanted careers, but recognized that their career paths would be interrupted by family and children. The men researcher spoke to, on the other hand, planned their career with the expectation of having a support system (wives) to care for their homes and families. The women in other studies (e.g., Komarovsky, 1985; Maines & Hardesty, 1987; Angrist & Almquist, 1975) also express tentativeness of plans for their work life, in which career planning becomes contingency planning or planning around husbands and children. Women in these studies expect to be working most of their adult life, but also expect that their family will take priority over work as needed. Sociological functionalists saw employment and family in an earlier and family life in an earlier historical period as well-integrated (Parsons and Smelser 1956; Goode 1960). Only one person, the male breadwinner, participated in the labour force; the wife/mother met childcare, house-hold upkeep, and other pattern maintenance needs. Husbands and wives were thus “specialists” in their roles. Societal restrictions on employment for women of childbearing age reduced work/family conflict and stress. Today in our society there is almost universal support in principle for equal opportunity however; traditional attitudes regarding women’s family roles persist. Employed women thus experience conflict between work outside the home and family responsibilities (Mortimer and London, 1984; Mortimer and Sorensen, 1984). Pleck (1984) finds that traditional norms promote “asymmetrically permeable boundaries” in the roles of men and women. For men, the work role dominates; the family is expected to accommodate to its requirements. To support their work involvement, men spend relatively little time on family work. Because the male family role inextricably entails being a good breadwinner (Bernard, 1984), male workplace success simultaneously fulfills both work and family role responsibilities. On the other hand, women are expected to stress family obligations over activities related to employment. Women’s work roles often “give” to accommodate the family (e.g., women with young children often work part-time or intermittently). Thus, employment doesn’t radically disrupt the traditional core wife/ mother responsibilities. In essence, employed married women have two jobs, one in the workplace, the second in the family; this normative pattern has negative implications for their socio economic attainment (Marini, 1989). Therefore what normative controls used to accomplish (i.e., a women was expected to quit work when she married or had children).

Adolescence is widely recognized as a critical life stage for vocational development (Erickson 1963) and crystallization of future plans. Adolescent work and family orientations are therefore expected both to reflect changing work/ family linkages and to contribute to them in the future. Public opinion trends (McLaughlin, 1988) show that widespread behavioral change (e. g., wives’ employment) often precedes attitudinal change (e.g., approval of wives working). Moreover, status attainment researchers have demonstrated that educational and occupational aspirations influence attainments (Sewell and Hauser, 1975). Given these reciprocal relations of work – and family structures, it is important to continually monitor trends in young peoples work attitudes and behaviors. Recent research shows that future work (Farmer, 1983; Shapiro and Crowley, 1982) and family (Affleck, Morgan, and Hays, 1989; Machung 1989; Joss Elson, Greenberger and McConchie, 1977a, 1977b; Maines and Hardest, 1987) continue to be central life interests for adolescent boys and girls, with both planning to spend significant portions of their lives in the labor force and in families. A major gender difference persists in that girls more often plan to work part-time and intermittently rather than full-time to accommodate competing work and family role demands (Machung, 1989; O’Connell, Betz, and Kurth, 1989).Young women often anticipate that career and family life will be problematic if perused simultaneously (Machung 1989; Ward and Rubin1989; Archer1985; Crowley and shapiro1982). Tangri and Jenkins’s (1986)1980 survey of 1967 college female graduates showed a dramatic increase in reported conflict between career and marriage in the post graduate years. Adolescent males ,in contrast ,see their adult work and family roles as more congruent; they see few problems in wanting both careers and families(archer1985).This is to be expected since families do not impede adult men’s career(Mortimer and Sorensen 1984 ).Maines and Hardesy (1987)conclude, “young men and women anticipate participating in basically the same categories of activity(education, work, family),butaˆ¦differ in their assumptions about the nature and extent of that participation.” Men expect ability and labour market opportunities to determine their futures, while women face the problem of how to integrate these various dimensions of their lives (Maines and Hardesty, 1987). Regan and Roland (1982) investigated marginal shifts in university seniors’ life goals and vocational aspirations, finding that they had changed over the decade of the 1970’s. Women graduating in1979 expected careers to be the primary source of future satisfaction but also indicated that family relationships were still very important. Van Maanem and associates (1977) argue that an understanding of careers should focus on the interaction among individual aspirations, family concerns, and work demands. We therefore, build a measure of lifestyle commitment, constructed from individuals ordering of life goals, to investigate relationships.

Gender differences in work and family experiences have been a consistently important theme in work-family research (Lewis & Cooper, 1999). On the basis of Greenhaus and Beutell’s argument about the importance of role salience to the work-family conflict (Greenhaus & Beutell, 1985), many scholars have hypothesized that women experience more work-family conflict than men because of their typically greater home responsibilities and their allocation of more importance to family roles. However, more recent researchers have discovered that men and women do not differ on their level of work- family conflict (Blanchard-Fields, 1997). In those studies where gender differences were found. The unanticipated results regarding gender and the work-family conflict raise the possibility that researchers’ emphasis on between-gender differences may mask important within-gender variation in work- family conflict. Within-gender variation may be as critical as between-gender differences in explaining work-family conflict. Gender identity does not stand separate from other identity issues. Rather, it is part of a complex psychological and social process whereby men and women adopt varying degrees of traditionally masculine and feminine roles and responsibilities (Anderson & Leslie, 1991). Social and cultural factors, as well as the individual’s abilities and personality characteristics, mediate the relationship between gender and work-family conflict (Farmer, 1985). Thus, individual variation within gender can provide valuable information beyond the mere knowledge of gender in order to explain differences among persons regarding work-family conflict. The range of findings in the literature highlights the need to attend to the variation in men’s and women’s beliefs about the importance of work and family roles, rather than to generalize to all men and to all women (Kerpelman & Schvaneveldt, 1999). Understanding this variation may contribute to a more coherent and comprehensive explanation of work-family conflict.

The aim of this study is to explore gender differences in work-family conflict while attending to both between- and within-gender variation in perceptions of importance of work and family life roles. In the study we considered the importance attributed simultaneously to both work and family roles by both men and women. This approach should facilitate more precise understandings and may clarify some of the mixed findings of previous research concerning gender differences in work-family conflict. Role salience was typically determined by examining commitment and values regarding work or family roles (Neville & Super, 1986). It is important to note that these researchers investigated work salience or home salience without simultaneously considering the relative importance of both roles in an individual’s life. Much of the research on career and family orientation has disregarded the perceived relative importance of both work and family roles. As a result, these studies do not reflect the growing recognition that work and family are interdependent spheres of life (Rapport & Rapport, 1971; Westman & Piotrkowski, 1999). Despite the increase in women’s involvement in demanding occupations and the substantial rise of women’s vocational aspirations over recent decades (Gerstein, Lichtman, & Barokas,1988), men’s occupational goals and aspirations frequently exceed those of women. For example, Leung, Conoley, and Schell (1994) found that women generally have lower career aspirations than do comparably talented men. During socialization to work and family roles, men are traditionally raised to pursue the “provider role” and women the marital/ family role (Major, 1989). Many women in the West continue to be socialized to believe that being a wife and raising a family is the first priority in life and that financial independence and career advancement is secondary (Gilbert, 1993) by this findings we can anticipate that more women than men will fit the Family profile that comprises individuals who assign high importance to the family and relatively low importance to work. Similarly, if young men are raised to adopt the provider role more than young women, it is likely that more men than women fit the Work profile, and assign high levels of importance to the work role and relatively low importance to family roles. By this we can say that women will be represented most often in the Family profile and least in the Work profile. Men were expected to most frequently fit the Work profile and least frequently the Family profile. In research we assumed that women’s values and commitment regarding parent and spouse roles would be higher than men’s. In addition, following most research findings (Major, 1993; Schwartzberg & Dytell, 1996), we anticipated that men’s values and commitment to the work role would be higher than that of women. Many women are expected to feel primary obligation to the family role (Schwartzberg & Dytell, 1996; Tompson & Walker, 1989). Many researchers have found that college men and women are increasingly similar in their goals and value orientations. Scant information is available about how women and men with similarly strong and equal motivations toward the achievement of goals and the maintenance of affiliative relationships will prioritize, make decisions, and interact when achievement demands and personal relationships conflict. Students reveal ignorance of the career hazards of interruptions in employment, and lack of awareness of the family sacrifices and stresses attendant to career commitment (Catalyst, 1987; Phillips & Johnston, 1985; Zuckerman, 1980).

Methods

Participants

In the present study there were two groups consisting of total 60 subjects of which there were thirty female students and thirty male students in the age group 17-22 years. The samples were selected randomly from different colleges.

Material

The instrument used for the study was life role salience scale. The scale had four different sub-scales dealing with occupational, parental, martial and homecare. Life role salience scale was assed on five point Likert scale ranging from a score of (disagree-1, somewhatdisagree-2, neitheragreenordisagree-3, somewhatagree-4, and agree-5). The purpose of this research was to find reliable information. The first section of the survey consisted of a small section of demographics, including age, gender, major, ethnicity, and academic classification. The second part of the survey contained the Life Role Salience Scales (LRSS), which measured variables of gender, career goals, and family priorities (Amatea, Cross, Clark, & Bobby, 1986). The LRSS contained forty value statements regarding feelings about work and family roles. In addition, the LRSS was assessed on a five point Likert scale, ranging from a score of one (disagree) to five (agree). The scale is geared toward role reward value and role commitment level (Amatea et. al., 1986). It also identifies four major life roles as occupational, marital, parental, and homecare. The purpose of this scale is to obtain reliable information pertaining to future career and family expectations of male and female college students (Amatea et. al., 1986).

Design:

The present study was quasi-experimental design. The subject variable was the gender of the participant, and the dependent variable was whether or not the participant rated his or her career role or family role as more important. This is determined by the participant’s score on the two Occupational subsets of the LRSS and the participant’s score on the Parental, Marital, and Homecare subsets. The age group of 20-25 was taken for the study. This particular age group was taken so as to see where this age is where people take decisions regarding career and family.

Procedure:

The students who volunteered where given consent form and the instructions were read aloud and were also mentioned in the questionnaire. The participants were debriefed on the true nature of the study. Specifically, they were told that the experiment was not about the social opinions about men and women, but on the priorities of male and female career and family values. Once again, all the questions were addressed and students received contact information for any further questions that they may have.

Results

The data analyzed for this experiment was based on the LRSS which measured family as a combination of homecare, parental and marital roles and assessed career values through occupational role expectations (Amatea al., 1986). Means and standard deviation for all the scales, by gender are shown in Table1. The data displayed variability between males and females in regard to parental role expectations. Overall, the means between genders exhibited significance, and were detected in levels of an independent samples t-test shown in Table 1.According to the data, their was large difference between both men and women in terms of parental role scale. (t=2.45*). As a result the difference between the results of both genders on LRSS reveals that females assessed a higher value towards the parental role than males. Furthermore, the differences between gender in relation to homecare expectation was significant (t=3.17*) which suggests that female preferred homecare role more than males. These results support our hypothesis, which stated that there is an inverse relationship between gender, career and family values. Table 2 presents the paired samples t-test; comparisons of the means between the occupational and parental roles were significant. (t=2.63*).table3 shows the paired samples statistics of life role expectation between males. By comparing the means, their was a significant difference (t=2.15*) between male occupational and marital views.

Table 1- Gender Life Role Descriptive and Independent Samples Statistics

Male

Female

mean

Occupational

39.93

3.28

37.93

3.43

2.30

Parental

37.97

4.01

40.77

4.80

2.45

Martial

34.63

4.00

40.75

4.76

5.39

Homecare

37.63

2.16

40.47

4.39

3.17

P<0.05

Table 2- Female Life Role Paired Samples Statistics

mean

Occupational

Parental

37.93

3.43

2.67

40.77

4.80

Occupational

Martial

37.93

3.43

2.63

40.75

4.29

Occupational

Homecare

37.93

3.43

2.49

40.47

4.39

P<0.05

Table 3- Male Life Role Paired Samples Statistics

mean

Occupational

Parental

39.93

3.28

2.0722

37.97

4.01

Occupational

Martial

39.93

3.28

5.6119

34.63

4.00

Occupational

Homecare

39.93

3.28

3.2077

37.63

2.16

P<0.05

Discussion

This study investigated career and family values of college students. The first purpose of this study was to identify whether or not males and females had different priorities concerning family life and occupational roles. In the present sample of thirty males and thirty females, significant differences were observed between family and career expectations. According to our analysis, females appeared to value the parental role greater than males. This finding suggests that women assess a larger significance towards family priorities than men who value career. These findings supported our hypothesis, which said that there would be a difference in career and family priorities between genders. As hypothesized, females appeared to value the parental role greater than the occupational role. Thus, females held higher expectations for having a family, rather than a career. Likewise, males showed a preference for occupation, as opposed to marriage. Consequently, males viewed having a career as a greater importance than having a family. Overall, the results of this study highlight the tendency for females to value family priorities, as opposed to males who value career. This finding is also different from gender-role traditionalism research, which suggests that both male and female attitudes change correspondingly during college (Bryant, 2003). Furthermore, results of the present study also indicated that among females, women were more likely to value family, as opposed to career. Past research, such as the Valedictorian Project, obtained results congruent with our findings. Arnold (1993) attributed these outcomes to lowered career aspirations possibly due to female beliefs regarding family-work conflict. In other words, women lowered their career goals to avoid future work conflict and experience fewer family life demands (Arnold, 1993). This finding suggested that external factors (such as occupational stress) tend to lower women’s desire to achieve career goals. On the other hand, additional research indicated that universal work expectations were common between genders, in that both males and females contained aspirations in regard to high education, work, and family values (Maines & Hardesty, 1987). Similar studies also suggested that women, who pursued “high-level” careers and contained greater occupational aspirations, appeared to value high quality career roles over family roles (Faver, 1982). These findings, although they were incongruent with our results, suggested that women and men valued career equally. Many studies have emphasized that women’s career and domestic choices are situational and change over time, that women negotiate their positions and form ideologies in accordance with various circumstances encountered over their life courses (Gerson 1985; Hochschild with Machung 1989; Jacobs 1989). While not denying the validity of this position, the study suggests that many women students, even before they have had any experience with marriage, motherhood and extra domestic work are incompatible and that husbands are reliable lifelong providers -that help to shape their core identities we suggest that these ideologies influence the choices and decisions, students make as they go through college and enter the world of work, which in turn condition and limit other choices they may wish to make as the circumstances of their lives change. Ultimately, an individual’s priorities navigate that person throughout life. A person’s values guide him or her in attaining future goals. The very nature of human beings is dependent on critical decisions based on their priorities, which result in life roles. Thus, value lies in identifying gender priorities, in which future human behavior may be predicted. Consequently, future research on the career and family values of college undergraduates is needed to investigate how males and females of different ethnic backgrounds value career and family role expectations, whether or not an increased sample size would affect the results of the present study, and the influence of college environmental factors (size, religious affiliation, and location) on gender values. Finally, eliminating media tactics geared toward unrealistic gender stereotypes would decrease the gender-role social pressures exerted on males and females. By projecting realistic and non-traditional attitudes, both men and women would expand their life role opportunities.

Women’s achievement orientations are clearly not less than males. But women do not feel they must sacrifice their family roles to achieve the arenas of education and work. They anticipate that future family roles will be more important to them than males. Males see their future educational and work as more important than family. Although women expect to earn less than men, they have similarly high expectations for income as their male peers. However, we also find many differences between males and females which imply that traditional gender roles may be influencing plans for their futures. Of particular interest is the gender difference in self-perception. Although females perform well in academics than male they are likely to see themselves as less able than their male.

The difference in self-perception is particularly perplexing. These findings support a traditional gender socialization model in which males and all things masculine are valued and females and all things feminine are devalued. Women may be socialized to devalue their own achievements whereas males, despite lower abilities would be pressured to overestimate their abilities. Therefore, responses such as these may be appropriate for both young men and women of marriageable age if they live in a world where men are expected to be superior (Eccles, 1987). We also find that men and women have very different expectations form roles in the home and work place. Although both sexes feel that a good marriage and family are important, men do not feel it is important for them to maintain household activities. Furthermore, males hold more traditional values about women combining work and family, and are more likely to wan their wives to remain at home. Likewise, women place more importance on household roles, expect to be employed for fewer hours, and are more likely than male

Career and family priorities of college students

Career and family priorities of college students

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