Aspirations Of Women Research Articles

Intimate Desires: Dalit Women and Religious Conversions in Colonial India

Religious conversions by Dalits in colonial India have largely been examined as mass movements to Christianity, with an implicit focus on men. However, why did Dalit women convert? Were they just guided by their men, family, and community? This paper explores the interrelationship between caste and gender in Dalit conversions afresh through the use of popular print culture, vernacular missionary literature, writings of Hindu publicists and caste ideologues, cartoons, and police reports from colonial north India. It particularly looks at the two sites of clothing and romance to mark representations of mass and individual conversions to Christianity and Islam. Through them, it reads conversions by Dalit women as acts that embodied a language of intimate rights, and were accounts of resistant materialities. These simultaneously produced deep anxieties and everyday violence among ideologues of the Arya Samaj and other such groups, where there was both an erasure and a representational heightening of Dalit female desire. However, they also provide one with avenues to recover in part Dalit women's aspirations in this period.

Gender Social Relations and the Challenge of Women's Employment

Iran's government has tended to enforce gender social relations through both family and employment policies. Officially, women's employment is discouraged unless it is necessary for her family's survival, and the home is considered the best and the most suitable place for women. The state's discourse makes a sharp distinction between public and private spheres. Nonetheless, women's higher literacy rates and the increasing number of college educated women combined with high inflation, which has lowered both the purchasing power of middle and lower class households, and women's aspirations for financial independence and intellectual autonomy, have led them to seek paid employment. The most educated women target public administration or the private sector, while less educated women seek job opportunities in the informal sector of the economy. Decision-making authority within the family and the quest for gender equality in Iranian society are two of the outcomes of women's paid employment that is likely to alter gendered power relations.

Entrepreneurial growth strategies: the female touch

Purpose – Research on entrepreneurship has documented differences in male and female entrepreneurs' growth ambitions. It has sometimes been criticized for disregarding important questions and contributions and for favoring a purely economic perspective. This includes a tendency to compare female entrepreneurs with a male norm. In this article, the authors, therefore, apply a more constructive approach and ask how and why entrepreneurial strategies are gendered. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach – By analysing six cases, three female- and three male-dominated companies, the authors examined how men and women do business. The authors based the analysis on Miles and Snow's typology on product and market strategy and at the same time expanded it. Findings – The findings substantiated that women and men have similar qualities as entrepreneurs, but women's ambitions and values tend to be different to those espoused by men. This influences their growth strategies. The Miles and Snow typology was adjusted to encompass different growth strategies; staying small or expanding. The article discusses the implications of these findings for regional development and sustainability. Research limitations/implications – The research design in this article does not necessarily allow the authors to grasp the internal workings of a typical small- or medium-sized business. Neither does it provide generalizable information. Instead, the authors chose to focus on highly gendered sectors of industry to identify potential gender differences. Originality/value – This article contributes to theory on the motivation for entrepreneurship and to research on growth strategies. It also contributes to the literature on Miles and Snow's typology questioning the taken-for-granted goal of growth in economic theories and raising the question of advantages of the choice of staying small. The authors direct the focus to perspectives of embeddedness and intersectionality as a direction for future research.

Texts and tests of equality: The Women's Charters and the demand for equality in South African political history

abstractSouth African struggles for gender equality have been embodied in two charters produced in 1954 and 1994. To the extent that there is a manifesto of the South African women's movement, it may be found in these documents. The charters articulate a vision for a democratic society, and give content to the idea of gender equality as it may be achieved in the specific context of a postcolonial, post-apartheid future. This article argues that the charters are political signs that constitute the political community of women, lay out the agendas for collective action, and address the holders of power in society. The clauses of the two charters reflect continuities in the ambitions of women's organisations. Importantly, though, reading the charters from the perspective of two decades of democratic government it is also possible to detect how shifts in political and economic context have affected the possibilities for feminist ambitions to be realised. Thus the charters operate both as texts that form part of the democratic tradition, as well as tests for the ways in which the democratic State has advanced gender equality.

Factors Hindering Women’s Aspiration for Tertiary Education in South-West Nigeria

The study is a survey of factors that hindered married women who had secondary education from aspiring for tertiary education in South-West Nigeria. The population for the study comprised all married woman that finished secondary schools but did not embark on tertiary education in the geo-political zone. Findings revealed that women’s aspirations for tertiary education in South-West Nigeria were hindered by marital factors such as; marriage, childbearing and family financial needs. On the other hand, factors such as; religious belief and gender discrimination were found to be insignificant in hindering women aspiration for tertiary education in the zone. It was also found out that the effects of most of the factors were more potent on the aspirations of older women than on those of younger women. Based on this it was recommended that women aspirations for higher education should be aided by functioning policies from government and non-governmental organizations.

2. CONSTRUCTIONS OF “HOME,”“FRONT,” AND WOMEN'S MILITARY EMPLOYMENT IN FIRST‐WORLD‐WAR BRITAIN: A SPATIAL INTERPRETATION

ABSTRACTIn First‐World‐War Britain, women's ambition to perform noncombatant duties for the military faced considerable public opposition. Nevertheless, by late 1916 up to 10,000 members of the female volunteer corps were working for the army, laying the foundation for some 90,000 auxiliaries of the official Women's Services, who filled support positions in the armed forces in the second half of the war. This essay focuses on the public debate in which the volunteers overcame their critics to understand how they obtained sufficient popular consent for their martial work. I explain the process in terms of shifting hegemonic understandings of space. As critics' arguments in the debate indicate, the gender attribution of war participation was organized and represented spatially, assigning men to the warlike “front” as warriors and women to the peaceful “home” as civilians. To redefine the meaning of these gendered wartime spaces, women volunteers deployed rival spatial discourses and practices in their campaign for martial employment. The essay explores the progress of these competing definitions through feminist and spatial theories, including gender performativity, discursively constructed and constructive spaces, and heterotopias. I argue that the upheaval caused by the war in gender and spatial norms undermined absolute conceptualizations of space with dichotomous binary areas on which critics drew for their arguments and reinforced more recent, relative spatialities, including the cultural construction of militarized heterotopic sites in between and paralleling both “home” and “front” for soldiers in training or recovery. The volunteers' efforts to gain access to military employment both contributed to and were supported by this shift. Heterotopic sites offered ideal discursive locations for constructing the new gender role of auxiliary soldiering through the performance of martial training and work, and competing spatial definitions provided arguments through which they could justify their activities to both critics and supporters.

Aspirations and Human Development Interventions

What role can aspirations play in small-scale human development interventions? In this paper, we contribute to answering that question with both conceptual and empirical work. Aspirations can play at least two roles in small-scale human development interventions: the capabilities-selecting role and the agency-unlocking role. While aspirations also face the challenge of adaptation to adverse circumstances and unjust social structures, we argue that this challenge can be met by embedding the formulation and expression of aspirations within a setting of public discussion and awareness-raising activities, and that adaptation can be further countered by including a commitment to action. We then report on field research done in Khayelitsha, a township in Cape Town, South Africa, where a group of women went through a process of voicing, examining, and then realizing their aspirations. The action research confirms our theoretical hypotheses. We also do not find any evidence of adaptation of the women's aspirations, and argue that the absence of such adaptation might be a result of active capability selection, reflection, deliberation, and the exercise of agency throughout the action research programme.

Understanding of Women in Indonesia: Motivation to Lead, Work-Family Conflict, and Ambition

There is a positive relationship between the high woman representation in public and the success of corruption and poverty eradication. This means that the role of women becomes very strategic along with the increase of woman representation in public region. In Indonesia, the problem is that woman represen­tation is very low in public region, and from time to time it tends to decline. The low woman representation indicates that the motivation of women to lead is lower than men. It is estimated that work-family conflicts and ambition of women are the significant factors which is cause the low motivation of women to lead in Indonesia. The population consists of the civil servants of local governement in “Gerbangkertasusila” East Java. The data were collected by distributing questionares to respondents. Four relationship hypotheses were signifincantly proven. These are : 1) the motivation of women to lead is lower than man; 2) the higher of women’s work family conflict, the weaker the motivation of women to lead ; 3) the stronger motivation of women to lead, the stronger of women’s work family conflicts; 4) the stronger the interaction between women’s ambition and work-family conflict, the weaker the motivation of women to lead.

Women, choice and promotion or why women are still a minority in the professoriate

Women remain a minority in the Australian professoriate despite decades of equal opportunity policy. This article discusses the findings of an intensive case study that investigates why women's representation declines at the most senior academic levels. Through in-depth interviews with 24 women, the study explores the extent to which women's choices and aspirations are shaped by academic employment conditions that are ambiguous in their effects on women's capacity to reach senior academic roles. Responses suggest that women are slowed down, in ways that men often are not, by multiple conditions. The findings draw attention to the need for equity policies that support women to reach the professoriate before retirement becomes the preferred option.

A Modern History of Women Taekwondo in Korea since the Second World War

The founding of the Korean Women Taekwondo Federation means the fetal movement of women taekwondo in Korea and it can be said to have been quite significant in that it increased women's confidence in their statuses and activities in the environments of the times when women's social activities were increasing. The development of women taekwondo competitions began in earnest when the first women taekwondo hall in the world was opened as a result of passionate activities of early female taekwondo practitioners and the first taekwondo club was established in Ehwa Woman's University. Women's aspiration towards the challenge to the Olympic Games as well as international competitions is gradually increasing through the expansion of the base of women taekwondo. The status of women taekwondo in Korea that has been enhanced through challenges to various international competitions thus far beginning with the single taekwondo championship of foreigners in Korea in 1968 can be said to have contributed to the enhancement of the status of Korea as the birthplace of taekwondo and it is considered that women taekwondo could have continuously developed through diverse taekwondo championships by age held with women's steady effort and the expansion of the base of women taekwondo instructors.

The intellectual frameworks and theoretical limits of Arab feminist thought

This is a critical assessment of the intellectual and theoretical underpinnings of Feminism in the Arab world across the different phases in its evolution. The paper notes what has been achieved in respect of some specific issues but takes the view that overall the movement has failed to transform the views, consciousness and situation of most Arab women. Attempts to incorporate and/or redefine women's aspirations and roles in Islamic terms are seen as having taken over from earlier feminist voices. Where these voices do remain they are confined to a narrow intellectual elite and have failed to galvanize or inform women across the socio-economic spectrum. The article concludes that the contemporary feminist movement is repeating the same errors as in the past by adopting intellectual perspectives that do not suit the intellectual, ideological and value foundations of Arab culture. There is a need, therefore, to revise the intellectual foundations of the movement and make a rapprochement between this current and the reality of Arab societies.

The Gendered Division of Labor in Assignments to Political Committees: Discrimination or Self-Selection in Danish Local Politics?

The literature on the descriptive representation of women in parliaments is voluminous, and most studies focus on different levels of women's representation across legislatures (e.g., Krook 2010; Matland 1998; Paxton 1997; Reynolds 1999; Siaroff 2000). The number of women in parliaments is counted across the globe, and explanations as to what facilitates and hinders the election of female politicians are sought. At a macro level, PR systems, high district magnitudes, and, of course, gender quotas are some of the institutional mechanisms that have been identified as advantageous for women's ambitions to conquer seats in legislatures. These aspects of the electoral system have also drawn widespread attention among electoral engineers, since they can be manipulated, far more so than can socioeconomic factors (such as women's educational level or participation in the labor market) or cultural factors (such as dominant religion or the cultural perception of women's societal role), both of which have also been identified as important to women's descriptive representation at the parliamentary level (see, e.g., Christmas-Best and Kjaer 2007).

Sex, gender, and aspirations to top management: Who's opting out? Who's opting in?

The “opt-out revolution” has become a much-discussed phenomenon over the last decade. According to media reports, highly educated women are increasingly opting out of careers that would place them on the fast track to top management levels. However, little attention has been devoted to whether the opt-out revolution may also apply to highly educated men. The present study examined individuals' aspirations to top management, which provide an indication of the extent to which they are opting in or opting out of careers that might lead to top management. Participants were drawn from two populations, undergraduate business students and part-time (evening) MBA students. Part-time MBA students were found to be significantly less likely to aspire to top management (i.e., more likely to “opt out” of careers aimed at the highest managerial level) than undergraduate business students, especially male part-time MBAs compared with male undergraduates; male part-time MBAs were least likely to aspire to top management of the four combinations of sex and population. However, contrary to prior research, women's and men's aspirations to top management did not significantly differ. Also, individuals with a gender identity of high masculinity were significantly more likely to aspire to top management (i.e., “opt in”) than individuals with a low-masculinity gender identity. These results suggest that further study of the opt-out revolution should incorporate gender-related constructs such as gender identity and devote attention to men's as well as women's aspirations to top management.

Not Worth the Sacrifice? Women's Aspirations and Career Progression in Law Firms

Although there has been a dramatic rise in the numbers of women entering the legal profession, women are far less likely than men to work as law firm partners. While there is evidence to suggest that women experience barriers to career progression,Hakim (2006) contends that not all women wish to advance to higher levels in their organizations and those who do may choose to remain childless and therefore not be interested in work–family/life policies. Against the backdrop of this debate, this article examines women's career aspirations and perceptions of their opportunities for promotion among a large sample of lawyers (N = 384). It was found that women with strong aspirations for advancement to partnership did not necessarily eschew the need for a balanced life‐style. All female lawyers, however, including those with strong aspirations for partnership, perceived that their opportunities for promotion were relatively constrained. It was the nature of a law firm's work–family/life culture, as well as the availability of flexible working, that exerted the most important influences on female lawyers' perceptions of their ability to progress in their careers.

Women's aspirations for graduate education in Taiwan

This study investigates female undergraduates’ aspirations for master's and doctoral degree programs in Taiwan's universalized and stratified higher education system. It considers the potential effects of economic prospects, parental attitudes, and gender values. First, graduate education is perceived as a means to enhance one's comparative advantages in the competitive labour market. Secondly, parental expectations and women's aspirations seem to decline with education level. They are higher for a master's education and much lower for a doctoral education, implying the influence of family background and traditional gender values, despite some improvements. Finally, specialization and university ranking also substantially affect women's aspirations for graduate education.

Women's Ambition: From ‘Voodoo‘ to the Presidency

Women's Ambition: From ‘Voodoo‘ to the Presidency

Flexible work: ambitious parents' recipe for career success in The Netherlands

PurposeThis study sets out to examine how gender and ambition are related to work hours and the utilization of other flexible work‐home arrangements, and how this use is – in turn – associated with career‐related outcomes (i.e. job level, and career satisfaction).Design/methodology/approachIn total, 212 Dutch working parents from different organizations participated in a questionnaire survey. Underpinned by an inter‐disciplinary theoretical framework, hypotheses were developed on the associations of gender, ambition, work‐home arrangements and career‐related outcomes.FindingsIt was found that ambitious parents made more use of flexible work‐home arrangements and worked more hours per week than less ambitious parents. This relationship was especially strong for mothers. Furthermore, parents' work hours and utilization of flexible arrangements were positively related to their job level and career satisfaction. Finally, the association of ambition with career‐related outcomes was mediated by work hours.Practical implicationsEmployers should support their working parents in using flexible work‐home arrangements, thereby simultaneously assisting them in balancing work with care‐giving responsibilities, preventing them from losing their ambition, and promoting their career success.Originality/valueThe study made a pioneering effort to conceptualise and operationalise career‐related ambition. By showing that utilization of flexible work‐home arrangements is positively related to career success, the study also adds to the business case for these arrangements. Moreover, the study challenges the popular assumption that Dutch women's ambition vanishes into thin air once they become mothers.

Objective Spectral-Spatial Analysis of Random Periareolar Fine Needle Aspiration of Women at High Risk for Contralateral Breast Cancer.

Abstract Background: Random periareolar fine needle aspiration (RPFNA) cytology coupled with the Gail risk model has been used to predict the short-term risk of breast cancer in high risk women. The cytomorphologic features of atypical epithelial cells obtained by RPFNA can be subtle and result in inter-observer diagnostic variability and decreased sensitivity. Spectral-spatial analysis (SSA) is a method for objective image analysis that uses both color and spatial information to classify features into user-defined groups. We use SSA to classify cell clusters from RPFNA specimens into objective categories and compare that result to the cytopathology interpretation, which is the current standard.Design:Cell clusters on Papanicolau stained cytology Thin Prep slides from 7 benign and 7 malignant (14 total) breast RPFNA specimen were used to generate image stacks with the CRI Nuance platform. The specimens were processed and stained in three separate cytopathology laboratories. To build the algorithmic model, image stacks were analyzed using a neural network-based artificial intelligence system now distributed commercially as the Inform system. We manually painted green and red indicating feature (malignant) versus non-feature/background (benign) cells, respectively. A diagnostic algorithmic solution was created to stratify the new images as percent pixels correctly assigned as “malignant”. The solution was tested against cell clusters from 53 high-risk RPFNA specimen stratified by an expert pathologist (CZ) into the 5 categories of benign, epithelial hyperplasia, borderline, atypical and malignant. The specimens were collected from the contra lateral breast of patients with mastectomies for invasive carcinoma. Although 14 of the 67 cases were reused, no cellular clusters used in the training set were included in the validation set. The cytopathologist diagnosis was used as the gold standard and binarized to designate malignant cases as 1 and benign 0. These were compared to the green pixel (malignant) percentage in each case processed by INform.Results: The SSA algorithm classified all 7 malignant cases concordantly with the pathologist. The remaining 60 cases were classified as benign. The ROC curve generated from the cases had an AUC of 0.974 and an accuracy of 79.1%. The sensitivity was 100% and the specificity 76.7%.Conclusions: Spectral-spatial analysis can objectively classify benign and malignant cell clusters in excellent concordance to an expert pathologist. The epithelial hyperplasia, borderline, and atypical categories were all classified as benign by this solution representing a weakness in the solution. However, since these classes are not definitive with respect to biological behavior, the algorithm was binarized as above. In the future, algorithms will be based on biologically proven classes toward the goal of more definitive classification. A mature version of this technology could allow much broader usage of RPFNA since it would no longer be solely dependent on expert cytopathology interpretation. Citation Information: Cancer Res 2009;69(24 Suppl):Abstract nr 6001.

Charlotte's Transvestites

Patricia Beer's view of the significance of costume in Charlotte Brontë's novels points the way to a further analysis of the representations of ambivalent gender identity, and even of the staging of a recurring masquerade, in which woman's aspirations to develop a masculine persona are projected; but while the masks allow the secret dream of androgyny to surface, they also confirm its limited, if not altogether delusory nature.

Renewing Class Analysis in Studies of the Workplace: A Comparison of Working-class and Middle-class Women's Aspirations and Identities

A renewed class analysis has shown the importance of culture, emotions and identity in conceptualizing and understanding how class is lived. However, proponents of the new sociology of class rarely explore these issues in an occupational setting. This article argues that the insights developed in the new cultural approaches to class can be used fruitfully to analyse contemporary experiences of work. Using a comparative study of women working in working-class and middle-class occupations, the article illustrates the implicit and emotional dimensions of the classed experience of work through a study of the women's aspirations and their class identities. Rather than equating class with economic resources and constraints, the article shows how class `thinking and feelings' (Reay, 2005) also shape the experiences of work.