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Open Access Thesis

Keywords

Women--Employment--United States; Occupations--United States; Occupations; Vocational interests; Women--Employment; United States;

Abstract

There were two parts of this study. The first part involved a determination of the status of women. Occupation, education and income criterion were used and it was concluded that educationally and occupationally, women were increasing their status relative to men. But the income of working women in contrast to men employed in the same fields was at an all time low. The central locus of the low occupational status of women was seen to be in women's continual choice of pursuing traditional female jobs. This leads to the second part of this study which was concerned with why women continually make the occupational choices they do. A theory was evolved to explain female occupational choice patterns. Briefly it states that certain factors, i.e. the socialization process, significant others, role playing and the "generalized other" have led females to develop a self concept which is best implemented in a traditional female occupation. That is, those occupations which mirror back to a woman an image of herself which is congruent with her own self concept, are the occupations most often chosen by women. It was theorized that a change in these factors in the form of increased numbers of working mothers in the last thirty years, increasing public concern with inequities in the labor market, increasing similarity of the socialization of boys and girls in schools and the decreasing importance of motherhood would be causing young women to form a more competent, independent, career oriented self concept. This in turn should be reflected in greater numbers of young women entering non-traditional occupations. This proposition plus several others which are similar to it, were tested on high school seniors in the Waterloo school district and Price Lab School of Cedar Falls. There were guarded conclusions reached from this empirical test. It seems that the employment status of the mother and the father's occupation and education have little effect on the traditionality of the occupational choices or the work orientation of their offspring. What was found to be significant in influencing the traditionality of the daughter's occupational choice was the maternal educational level and occupational category. The traditionality of the son's occupational choice was influenced by the mother's occupational category and the traditionality of her occupation. The nature of the mothers occupation as well as her education also seem to be significantly related to the male and female sexual stereotypes as seen by her offspring. Mothers with higher education and/or professional or managerial occupations have offspring who see women as more competent, independent and less emotional. These same women are more likely to have offspring who prefer non-traditional iv occupations. It was also found that women's occupational preferences were about as dispersed as the male occupational preferences, although there was little overlap in the occupations preferred by the two sexes. However, the occupations women expect to actually enter are far less diverse than the occupations men expect to enter. Not a single woman named housewife as her preferred occupation, but 14 indicated that as the occupation they expect to be in ten years from now. It was concluded also that there was no significant difference between the value of work in the lives of men and women when socio-economic class was held constant. Very generally it can be said that this study demonstrates that what affects female occupational choice is not the mere fact of the mother's working, but the kind of job the mother has and her educational level. The father's occupation and education seem to have little influence on the traditionality of the daughter's or son's occupational choice. Paid employment seems to be as important in the lives of young women as it is in the lives of young men of the same socio-economic class.

Year of Submission

1975

Degree Name

Master of Arts

Department

Department of History

First Advisor

Glenda Riley

Second Advisor

Robert Claus

Comments

If you are the rightful copyright holder of this thesis and wish to have it removed from the Open Access Collection, please submit a request to scholarworks@uni.edu and include clear identification of the work, preferably with URL.

Date Original

1975

Object Description

1 PDF file (155 leaves)

Language

en

File Format

application/pdf

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