Handbook of Career Counseling for Women

W. Bruce Walsh, Mary Heppner, W. Bruce Walsh, Mary Heppner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN: 9780805848885
• eBook ISBN: 9781135614829
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The goal of this book is to give career counselors knowledge awareness, and skills to work with diverse girls and women to make their lives as authentic, meaningful, and rewarding as they can possibly be. It is designed to help career counselors work with diverse girls and women as they pursue the ever widening choices in their lives. In addition, the text:

*focuses on the history of the field and provides the social-historical context for its development;
*discusses basic issues and concepts in the career development and counseling of women;
*discusses the needs of women from different ethnic backgrounds, income levels, and sexual preferences;
*reviews critical gender issues in many forms of qualitative and quantitative assessment;
*describes the use of a critical feminist approach to career counseling;
*discusses dual career and dual earners' career needs;
*focuses on the rapid growth in science/technology/engineering and mathematical (STEM) occupational fields; and
*examines the career counseling needs of women in management positions.

Handbook of Career Counseling for Women, Second Edition appeals to anyone interested in their own career development and those of clients, students, daughters, and other important girls and women in their life.

Chapter 1

History of Career Counseling for Women

Helen S. Farmer

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

The theory and practice related to career counseling for women have gone through major changes in the past 50 years. During the 1950s and 1960s little attention in the literature was given to career counseling for women. However, with the advent of the amendments to civil rights and higher education legislation in 1972, including Title VII and Title IX related to sex equity in education and the workplace, there was a flowering of interest in career counseling for women and the literature exploded with theory, research, and practice applications.

Each decade from the 1980s to the present brought forward new priorities within the American Psychological Association (APA), Division 17 (Counseling Psychology), some of which were either directly or tangentially related to women's career counseling. In the 1980s new priorities directly affecting a woman's career development included a growing awareness of the effects of sexual orientation for lesbian and bisexual women on discrimination in the workplace as well as in school, especially high school. Other career—related issues that came to the fore in the 1980s included the need to help women with multiple role planning, and with wanting both a happy, healthy family and a challenging, satisfying career. The AIDS crisis, child sexual abuse, and violence against women were also critical issues for counselors in the 1980s that, although only indirectly related to women's career counseling, had debilitating effects on victims, who often neglected their career development.

In the 1990s professionals concerned with career counseling for women began to focus more on how career issues differed for different subgroups of women. Diversity issues such as poverty, aging, sexual orientation, and multiculturalism were and continue to be dominant themes for theory, research, and practice in counseling. These issues have a direct impact on career counseling for both women and men, and have thus brought women's and men's issues closer together.

WITHIN THE APA: RELEVANT GOALS, GUIDELINES, STANDARDS, AND PRINCIPLES

The recent plethora of APA—approved guidelines and principles in the 1990s and in the 21st century on ethnically, linguistically, and culturally diverse populations, lesbian and gay parenting, lesbian, gay, and bisexual clients, ethical principles, and multicultural education, training, research, practice, and organizational change for psychologists (APA, 1993, 1995, 2000, 2002, 2003a) has given direction to efforts to increase equity for multicultural persons, and lesbian, gay, and bisexual persons. The APA Council is currently reviewing Guidelines for Psychological Practice With Girls and Women (Hansen, 2005).

Measurement guidelines also provide important information related to gender—fair assessment practices in career counseling: The American Educational Research Association, APA, and the National Council on Measurement in Education's (1999) Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing as well as earlier versions of these standards, such as the National Institute of Education's Guidelines for Assessment of Sex Bias and Sex Fairness in Career Interest Inventories (Diamond, 1975), and Gump and Rivers’ (1975) guidelines for the use of interest tests with Black women and minorities.

Although these guidelines, standards, and principles have little to say directly to the practice of career counseling with women, they do indicate ways for career counselors to provide equitable services to women, persons of color, the poor, lesbian, gay, and bisexual persons, and the disabled. Guidelines for career counseling for women, if and when they are developed, could build on existing guidelines and standards, incorporating features found in the relevant literature of the past 50 years.

A crucial goal of career counseling for women is to improve the quality of life for women as individuals, and for groups of women such as women of color, lesbian and bisexual women, disabled women, poor women, and aging women. Another goal is to improve the quality of our society by increasing the opportunities for all women to contribute to pressing societal needs. Each new emphasis within the field of career counseling for women as it emerges seizes our attention because of the urgent need to change attitudes, behaviors, and social policies among individuals and institutions in our society. This book addresses many serious concerns related to career counseling for women that still remain. The Appendix provides a chronological list of events that contributed directly and indirectly to the evolution of career counseling for women.

SOCIAL EVENTS IMPACTING WOMEN'S CAREERS

Some of the positive events in America affecting the career development of women during the past century include: (a) developments in technology that simplified homemaking chores, (b) the contraceptive pill and related prochoice advances, (c) the civil rights movement and related legislation, (d) the War on Poverty, (e) the Cold War stimulating a race to beat the Russians in space and increase our scientific competence, (f) the women's rights movement, and (g) the gay rights movement. In combination with these changes, legalization of contraceptives, growth of labor unions, and civil rights legislation increased the opportunities for women in poverty and women of color to choose employment that paid better and to be less burdened by heavy family responsibilities. The 1950s were a time when technological advances were easing the workload of running a home. Dishwashers, duomatic laundry machines that combined washing and drying in one machine, disposable diapers, and frozen foods—all reduced the time and energy required for homemaking tasks, leaving time for at least part—time employment.

The Right to Choose: Contraception, Abortion, and the Pill

The right of women to choose whether or when to have babies evolved slowly during the 20th century. The use of contraception was still controversial in the 1950s and in some states, such as Connecticut, it was illegal. Margaret Sanger was jailed in the 1930s for her support of women's reproductive rights. Sanger worked in the slums of New York City and found many destitute women who lacked the resources to care for their large families. During that same period, women of affluence were able to obtain both contraceptives and abortions. Lack of access to birth control procedures prevented many women from working and pursuing professional—level careers. The establishment of the Planned Parenthood Federation in the 1930s and the repeal of anticontraception laws in many states by the end of the 1950s were positive steps for women who wished to have both a career and a family. With the development of the contraceptive pill in the 1960s, the foundation was laid for women to more easily plan the timing of conception, and limit the number of children they had.

Prochoice initiatives supporting abortion rights received a boost in the 1970s when the Supreme Court voted in favor of Roe v. Wade (1973). This choice is, however, still controversial, and forbidden by many religious institutions except when there is a clear health threat to either the mother or the fetus, or conception is the result of rape.

The Women's Movement: Impact on Career Counseling

Several important events related to the women's movement early in the 20th century impacted women's career development opportunities. In the 1920s following World War I, there was the passage of legislation giving women the vote in federal and state elections. As early as the 1920s, within the field of psychoanalysis, Karen Horney (1926) took a stand critical of Freud's theories of women's sexuality (Quinn, 1987). Hall and Lindzey (1978) classified Horney's theory along with those of Adler, Fromm, and Sullivan, as a social—psychological theory. Horney's theories predate the feminist emphases on the effect of context and of sex—role socialization on personality. Her theory contrasted with Freud's biological determinism and the idea that for women biology is destiny. Horney's theories were popular in academic psychology departments in the 1950s, but later came under criticism from feminists during the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, which was strongly critical of psychoanalytic concepts (Unger & Crawford, 1992). However, Hall and Lindzey's classification of Horney within the social—psychological theoretical school cast a more positive light on Horney's contributions. Horney also emphasized the importance of empowering women and encouraging them to be self—reliant, and less dependent on men and mothering for their economic and emotional needs. Horney (1945) described her goals for counseling women as follows:

The woman must acquire the capacity to assume responsibility for herself, in the sense of feeling herself the active responsible force in her life, capable of making decisions and of taking the consequences. With this goes an acceptance of responsibility toward others, a readiness to recognize obligations in whose value she believes, whether they relate to her children, parents, friends, employees, colleagues, community, or country. (p. 241)

In the 1950s and early 1960s, two other writers stimulated the women's movement that erupted in the latter half of the 1960s. Simone de Beauvoir, a French economist and longtime companion of the French writer Jean—Paul Sartre, wrote a book which appeared in English translation in 1953 entitled The Second Sex (1949/1953). In this book she made a compelling argument for women to achieve economic independence from men. Betty Friedan wrote The Feminine Mystique (1963), urging middle—class housewives to return to work in order to give meaning to their lives. The 1960s was the decade during which the women's movement reached its apex, with many civil rights marches for the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), bra burnings, and the establishment of both the National Organization for Women (NOW) and the Women's Bureau within the U.S. Department of Labor.

Within the APA, the Committee on Women in Psychology (CWP) and the Women's Program Office were formed in 1972. APA, Division 17 established an ad hoc committee on women in 1970, formalized as the Committee on Women in 1982 and as the present Section for the Advancement of Women (SAW) in 1996. The history of the accomplishments and challenges faced by SAW and its parent committees were described in Farmer (2002) and are not repeated here. However, it is important to note some contributions of the ad hoc committee during the 1970s. This committee sponsored the publication of three special issues of The Counseling Psychologist: Fitzgerald and Harmon (1973), Birk and Tanney (1976), and Hill et al. (1979). The Fitzgerald and Harmon issue contained an article focused on women's career counseling (Vetter, 1973). The Hill et al. issue contained the principles concerning the counseling and therapy of women. These principles were later approved by several APA divisions, including Division 17, and in 1986 Fitzgerald and Nutt published a rationale and implementation statement related to these principles. In 1984 the Committee on Women, Division 17 sponsored a special edition of The Counseling Psychologist on the career development of women (Whiteley, 1984). The major contribution in this issue was by Helen Astin (1984). Other landmark articles by psychologists during this period include Broverman, Vogel, Broverman, Carlson, and Rosenkranz’ (1972) article on sex—role stereotypes and Gilligan's (1977) article on women's moral development.

Brooks and Forrest (1994) provided a helpful description of the impact of feminism on counseling in general, and suggested that career counseling for women would do well to adopt many of the feminist emphases in both research and clinical practice. Brooks and Forrest noted that the feminist emphasis on social action has been adopted by many career counselors for women and that it would be desirable for more career counselors to adopt the feminist concept of a nonhierarchical client—therapist relationship. These authors lamented the lack of attention to feminist recommendations for conducting research, such as those that encourage input from participants.

The guidelines for psychological practice with girls and women mentioned earlier and currently under review by the APA Council, if and when adopted officially, should provide further guidance for provision of feminist career—counseling practice. These guidelines are commendable on several counts. First, the application of these guidelines to adolescent as well as adult women recognizes that socializing experiences that occur early in a woman's life contribute significantly to career problems or lack thereof later on. Second, the inclusion in these guidelines of multicultural and lesbian and bisexual women's concerns and how to address them is consistent with the current efforts to integrate these women's needs into the theory and practice of career counseling for women. Other career—counseling practices that owe a debt to the feminist movement are described later in this chapter in the section on practices.

Sex Equity for Women: Participation in the Labor Market

Ferment in American society during the 1960s raised women's career aspirations and determination to reduce gender bias in education, employment, and society in general. By 1970 the groundwork had been laid for the 1972 amendments to both the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the Higher Education Act (Association of American Colleges, 1972) that addressed equity in education and employment for girls and women. In addition, affirmative action legislation was amended to include women and government sanctions for ensuring enforcement of this legislation. This sex equity legislation required test publishers to follow federal guidelines to reduce sex bias. Measures used frequently by career counselors, such as career interest inventories, were su...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Contemporary Topics in Vocational Psychology
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 History of Career Counseling for Women
• 2 Basic Issues and Concepts in the Career Development and Counseling of Women
• 3 Women and Poverty: A Holistic Approach to Vocational Interventions
• 4 Career Assessment and Counseling for Women
• 5 A Critical Feminist Approach to Career Counseling With Women
• 6 Sex, Gender, and Dual-Earner Families: Implications and Applications for Career Counseling for Women
• 7 Career Counseling With African American Women
• 8 Career Counseling for Asian Women
• 9 Career Counseling With Latinas
• 10 A Culturally Oriented Approach for Career Counseling With Native American Women
• 11 Career Counseling With Lesbian Clients
• 12 Career Concerns of Immigrant Women: Issues and Implications for Career Counseling
• 13 Career Counseling for Women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) Fields
• 14 Career Counseling for Women in Management
• Author Index
• Subject Index