Female Ambition Research Articles

Comparisons of Male and Female Student Aspirants to a Scientific Career: Perceptions of Promising Science Talents

Comparisons of Male and Female Student Aspirants to a Scientific Career: Perceptions of Promising Science Talents

Life in the Trenches: Female Administrative Aspirants' Perceptions of Affirmative Action

Life in the Trenches: Female Administrative Aspirants' Perceptions of Affirmative Action

Gender/Social Class, Family Environments and Adolescents' Aspirations

This study examined relationships between family environments and the aspirations of 516 South Australian adolescents from six gender/social-class groups. Family environments were assessed initially when the adolescents were 11 years old when measures were obtained of parents' aspirations for their children and of their instrumental and affective orientations to learning. When the adolescents were 16 years old, their perceptions of their parents' support for learning and of their own aspirations were assessed. Regression surfaces were constructed from models that included terms to account for possible linear, interaction and curvilinear relationships. The findings suggested the propositions that parents' aspirations have a direct impact (a) on female adolescents' educational aspirations and (b) on the educational and occupational aspirations of male working-class adolescents, after considering the effect on aspirations of the adolescents' perceptions of parents' support. The results also indicated gender/social-class differences in the relationships between family environments and adolescents' aspirations.

Rural — Urban Comparison of Female Educational Aspirations in South‐Western Nigeria

Rural — Urban Comparison of Female Educational Aspirations in South‐Western Nigeria

Schools and the Structure of Female Occupational Aspirations

The purpose of this paper is to clarify some popular misconceptions within the sociology of education about the mechanisms which maintain the position of women within the labour market. Sociologists have often argued that the experiences of young women within the educational system are largely responsible for maintaining the existing sexual division of labour. I will be suggesting here that the influence exerted within the educational system is limited, given the strength of parental, and particularly maternal, role models upon the development of female occupational aspirations.

Ecological correlates of adolescents' aspirations: Gender-related differences

The study examined to what extent the educational and occupational aspirations of adolescents were related to their perceptions of different learning contexts after taking into account associations between the aspirations and earlier measures of individual characteristics and family environments. Data were collected from 516 Australian 16-year-olds (266 females, 250 males) to assess their perceptions of family, teacher, peer, and school support for learning. Five years earlier data had been collected of their social status, ability, family environments, academic achievement, and attitudes to school. Blockwise selection and the calculation of sheaf coefficients were used in path models to examine the influences on aspirations. For educational aspirations, most of the effects of the measures from the initial survey were mediated by an ecological construct that gauged the adolescents' perceptions of parent-teacher support for learning. Occupational aspirations of females were influenced only by ecological variables while for males they were related either directly or indirectly to all the ecological and individual measures in the analysis. The findings indicated the significance for aspiration formation of an ecological construct defined by adolescents' perceptions of the support and encouragement for learning by fathers, mothers, and teachers. Further aspiration research is suggested to explore the possible implications of this ecological Construct.

Financial Support for Women in Arkansas State Legislative Campaigns

Following the 1982 elections women held 13 percent of the state legislative seats nationwide, and the figure for Arkansas stood at 5.2 percent. In fact, only four states currently have a lower percentage of women serving in their state legislatures. The question, "Why so few?" opens a Pandora's Box of possible explanations for the markedly low percentage of female members of the Arkansas Legislature. However, recent studies exploring the entrance of women into elective office tend to focus either on the self-perceptions of the involved elites of this group, on societal and political support or opposition arising from traditional sociopolitical constraints, or on sheer numbers of female candidates and their success rates relative to their male counterparts. Because political scientists have only recently begun to devote serious attention to the area, there exists only a modest literature exploring campaign strategy and voter choice where a female candidate enters competition. To date, discussions of mass public attitudes toward political women, as well as the candidates' own self-images, have neglected the relationship of the electorate, and the candidates themselves, to the level of financial support given female candidates. Yet, it is generally accepted that female aspirants find it difficult to raise campaign chests which equal or outweigh those of their male opponents, with an additional variation in the sources of financial support (Mandel, 1981: 184-5). This paper is addressed to the gender-based levels of campaign contribution receipts reported in 1982 by candidates for the Arkansas General Assembly, with the intent of ascertaining what pattern, if any, exists in the amounts and sources of legislative campaign contributions received by candidates according to gender.

The Sex Factor in Occupational Choice

This article first examines the extent to which a sex-differentiated dual labour market exists in Australia with males being concentrated in different types of occupations from those of females. Factors affecting women's occupational choices are reviewed and the article goes on to report findings on the differences between Western Australian male and female students' occupational aspirations and expectations. It shows that most male and female students clustered into occupations that are traditionally seen as sex stereotyped but there was significant overlap in the occupations chosen by both males and females. The three occupations chosen most often by females were teaching, nursing and therapy and those by males were teaching, accounting and engineering. Occupational features which females selected involved the characteristics of helping others and working with people while males more often selected features which would provide high income, prestige and freedom from close supervision. The findings suggest that although there is a slight movement away from sex stereotyped career choices by these students, the indication for the future is that a sex segregated labour market will persist in Western Australia.

WOMEN and JOBS:THE CANADIAN CASE

In recent years, Canadian women have been flooding into the labour market, into employment and unemployment. While the steadily rising participation rate of women has been carefully documented and discussed, the more dramatic increase in the female unemployment rate has been largely ignored or dismissed as unimportant. To the extent that these patterns have been analysed, the growing number of women searching for paid work has been explained primarily in terms of changing female aspirations and preferences and has been viewed by some as dangerous, as a threat to male employment. Too many women choosing to work (and, as a corollory, choosing not to have babies) is often seen to be the main cause of the increase in both male and female unemployment. More effort has been directed toward dismissing women's unemployment as insignificant — because they do not need to work, because they are secondary workers, and because they claim unemployment primarily to gain eligibility for benefits, toward explaining away women's unemployment, than toward investigating the economic conditions which give rise to these massive changes in women's labour force behaviour.

Delinquency, Opportunity, and Gender

The role of blocked or limited opportunity has commanded considerable attention in the sociological analysis of juvenile delinquency. The typical stance taken is that many juveniles are pushed into delinquency because they lack access to those opportunities which are defined as legitimate avenues for the realization of a relatively universal set of success goals. Those who are denied the opportunity to implement these socially approved means often turn to delinquency as an alternative or more expedient way of reaching desired goals or as a means of striking back at what is defined as an unfair system.' For the most part, the importance of adolescent aspirations and expectations, as well as the relative availability of the institutionalized means for realizing personal goals, has been developed mainly with reference to their etiological role in male delinquency. The potential utility of such variables in accounting for female misbehavior, by contrast, has been largely ignored. Primarily, this appears to be a function of the view that the aspirations and expectations of adolescent females, in comparison to those of their male counterparts, are quite circumscribed, not only in quantity, but also in content. That is, while males are conceived as strivers, preoccupied with short and long-term status and economic success, the female adolescent is more often viewed as possessing no such aspirations and, instead, is satisfied to occupy a role dependent to the male, basking in whatever attendant status her partner's relative success confers. Coleman2 presented the most popular and classic conception of this with his contention that the greatest status enhancement for girls is in dating the right boys. The implication is that while boys have a variety of actual and potential roles as sources of achievement and status, girls have relatively little in the way of alternatives to the popularity with the opposite sex role.3 As a result, and to the extent that female aspirations and expectations have been examined at all in connection with

Vocational role choice in second- and sixth-grade children

In a replication of two investigations reported by Looft (1971a, 1971b), 40 second- and sixth-grade male and female students were interviewed concerning their desired and expected vocational aspirations. In contrast to Looft's findings, no significant sex differences were found for either grade level in (a) the number of different (nonoverlapping) vocations nominated or (b) the number of subjects changing initial vocational role choices. When the issue of traditionality of vocational choice (i.e., vocations socially identified with the sex of the subject) was examined, it was found that half of the sixth-grade females interviewed nominated nontraditional vocations (e.g., basketball player, police officer). It was observed further that males in both the second- and sixth-grade samples overwhelmingly nominated traditional vocations. Contrary to Looft's interpretation, the findings suggest that although goals associated with the women's liberation movement (e.g., changes in sex-role expectations) are not demonstrated clearly in the vocational aspirations or expectations of young children, they may be reflected in the aspirations of adolescent females.

The relationship of parental education and maternal work and occupational status to Occupational Aspiration in adolescent females

This study investigated the relationship of parental education and maternal work and occupational status to the Occupational Aspirations (classified as Innovative, Moderate, and Traditional) of adolescent females. Innovative occupations are those in which fewer than 30% of the workers are women; Moderate occupations are those in which 30–50% of the workers are women; and Traditional occupations are those in which more than 50% of the workers are women. Innovative choices were made significantly more often as an Ideal aspiration than as a Real aspiration, and, reciprocally, Traditional occupations were chosen less often as an Ideal aspiration than as a Real aspiration. Significant association was found between Occupational Aspiration and father's education and between Occupational Aspiration and mother's occupational status (traditional or nontraditional).

Locus of control and female occupational aspiration.

Locus of control and female occupational aspiration.

Marriage Plans and Educational Aspirations

Data from a national sample of 4,000 high school students indicate that aptitude, socioeconomic background, and marital plans each exert an independent influence on the educational aspirations of both males and females. The direct effect of marriage intentions on educational aspirations is shown to be especially marked for girls. Plans for future research employing a longitudinal design to explore the effects of marriage on educational aspirations and on educational attainment are briefly noted.

Social class, parental encouragement, and educational aspirations.

In this study of a randomly selected cohort of 10,318 Wisconsin high school seniors, correlational, path, and cross-tabular analyses show that socioeconomic status, intelligence, and parental encouragement all have substantial independent relationships to college plans of males as well as of females and that neither intelligence nor parental encouragement-individually or jointly-can completely account for social class differences in college plans. It substantiates, however, the claim made by other investigators using less rigorous methods and less representative samples that parental encouragement is a powerful intervening variable between socioeconomic class background and intelligence of the child and his educational aspirations. Parental encouragement appears to have its strongest effect on the college plans of males and females who score relatively high on intelligence and come from families occupying relatively high socioeconomic position. Also, ability continues to accentuate the social class differences in aspirations of both males and females regardless of parental encouragement.