Crossing over: gender and career at midlife

It has been claimed that many professional career women retire early because they are tired of fighting the male-dominated workplace culture for lesser rewards than their male colleagues. This essentialising view is contradicted by data collected in interviews with a group of professional men and women. In midlife, the women as a group are expanding their public activities, in contrast to the men as a group who have tended to remain in one occupational area. Yet it must also be noted that the career experiences of these people ranged across a spectrum, and that there were women whose careers approximated a "male" pattern, and men who shared the apparently "female" embracing of further challenge. Furthermore there appeared to be little relationship between the kind of career experience a woman had had and her desire to leave the workforce. I argue that to remain within the structuralist paradigm is limiting, and that an analysis of internalised discourses of masculinity and femininity provides a more helpful explanation of the outcomes discussed in this paper. In her discussion of working mothers, Professional Progress: Why Women (Still) Don't Have Wives, Terri Apter claims that many professional "career" women drop out because they are tired of fighting the male-dominated workplace culture for lesser rewards than their male colleagues. She argues that many women in managerial and professional occupations are immersed in "inhospitable conditions". The "trick" to spotting the importance of work atmosphere over domestic atmosphere is to look at women in rnidlife and beyond. Many women who have stuck at their careers throughout the most pressured domestic times when male partners were typically, working hardest, when their children were, typically, the most demanding, when their own jobs required extreme input, when their own commitment and perseverance were most likely to be challenged by their colleagues and employers, decide in rnidlife, when these demands are reduced, that the battles of surviving this "alien" culture are not worth the gains. (Apter, 1993:215) Anecdotal media evidence contradicts this essentialising view. In recent times there have been cases of very high profile women, such as the trade union official, Anna Booth, and federal cabinet minister Ros Kelly, who have drawn back from public life to spend more time with their family, but these cases have been balanced by similar cases of powerful men, such as John Dawkins and the very well-publicised case of Colin Powell's decision not to run for the American presidency. Eva Cox is quoted as pointing out the simplistic biologicaldeterminist assumption that "women who leave are seen as inevitable victims of their hormones, whereas men are seen as 'losing their masculinity as well as their marbles"'. The title of the newspaper article in which this appeared, "Women and children first", subtly implies that men forfeit their masculine status to join the camp of the women and children (Horsburgh, 1995). Apter's argument is partial, essentialising, and unconvincing when the lives of a group of professionals, whom I recently interviewed in the course of my doctoral work on the concept of career, are examined. In this group, men as well as women were found to be opting out. Furthermore, in the group there appeared to be little relationship between the kind of -::areer experience a woman had had and her desire to leave the workforce. This is not to deny journal of interdisciplinary gender studies vol 1 no 2 (1996): 159-170. 159 that ~orne women feel alienated by a male-dominated culture in their particular workplace, but an extrapolation of this as a typical female behaviour is to perpetuate an essentialist categorisation of "woman" who is by implication different to men. What came through very strongly in the stories of the men and women interviewed is in fact almost a reversal of Apter's thesis: in midlife, the women as a group are expanding their public activities, in contrast to the men as a group who have tended to remain in one occupational area. Yet it must also be noted that the career experiences of these people ranged across a spectrum, and that there were women whose careers approximated a "male" pattern, and men who shared the apparently "female" embracing of further challenge. There are in fact women who are "opting out", but there are also men who are "opting out", and their experiences and the reasons for their choices are varied. In taking issue with Apter's essentialism, which runs the risk of entrenching disadvantage by assuming a predictable female response and again placing women on the periphery as non-normative without questioning how men might react, this paper asks what midlife career patterns can be discerned and the extent to which such patterns are gendered.