To Follow the Prescribed Pathway? Aspiring Professional Women and Anticipations of Work–Family Conflict1

Abstract

Women have made rapid progress in the professional arena yet numerous studies document how issues of work–family conflict continue to disproportionately affect women’s careers. This paper asks if and how anticipations of work–family conflict emerge in aspiring professional women’s career decision‐making processes before they enter the labor market and further, how these anticipations shape career‐relevant decisions. Using interview data with 43 women students at two universities in MBA, JD, and PhD programs as a case study of aspiring professional women, I find that students in graduate programs feel channeled toward “prescribed pathways,” or normalized, high‐status career paths. At the same time, women students come to view these pathways as the most susceptible to work–family conflict while they frame other, less institutionally normalized pathways as more suitable for balancing with family life. Using data on interviewees’ real job decisions, I then outline three distinct ways in which women’s views regarding future work–family conflict translate into career choices, arguing that seemingly gender‐neutral professionalization contexts such as graduate school impact how women come to view certain career paths as more or less family‐friendly and relatedly, their subsequent short and long‐term career‐relevant decisions.