Women's career interruptions: an integrative review

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this integrative literature review was three-fold: to explore the phenomenon of women’s career interruptions as revealed by publications in the past two decades, to propose a new career decision tree model (CDTM) and to outline an agenda for future research. Design/methodology/approach The authors adopted the integrative literature review approach proposed by Torraco (2005, 2016) and used a mind mapping application called MindMeister to synthesize 64 identified articles. Findings The proposed CDTM can assist those who are interested in exploring individuals’ career decisions to think systematically about career influencers at different levels. Originality/value The CDTM is significantly different from existing career models and theories in that it explains women’s career interruptions in a context-sensitive manner. This model can assist human resource development professionals in analyzing the influencers of women’s career decisions and tackling individual problems level by level.

Maternal Employment Shapes Daughters’ Employment Stability in Egypt: Evidence for the Intergenerational Transmission of Labor Force Attachment

“…Previous research on the intergenerational transmission of employment has focused primarily on women's employment at a single point in time (Sieverding, 2015;Van Putten et al, 2008) rather than on women's ability to sustain their employment over extended periods. Research has established that women's employment is more easily interrupted than that of men by life-course events, such as marriage and childbirth (Bian & Wang, 2019;Sieverding, 2015), and spousal career changes (Bian & Wang, 2019). Compared with men, women's employment stability is more often negatively affected by the unequal distribution of household tasks and care responsibilities (Carlson & Lynch, 2017;Cunningham, 2008).…”

Engagement, inclusion, knowledge sharing, and talent development: is reverse mentoring a panacea to all? Findings from literature review

“…Borrowing from the integrative literature review done by Bian and Wang (2019), we recommend future research in three specific areas, namely, research scope including both content and context, theory development and research design. It should be noted that the recommendations proposed by us are by no means all-encompassing rather an honest attempt to brainstorm ideas that might be worth investigating for future research.…”

“…In our current review, less than 40% of the studies used some kind of theory, the rest did not. Given that the field of Human resource development (HRD) is often considered to be confusing and elusive, it is all the more important that an Human resource development (HRD) intervention like reverse mentoring should use well-developed theories for any kind of analysis (Bian and Wang, 2019; Chalofsky, 2004). Additionally, for future research, theories related to co-worker support, job resources, inter-generational learning, knowledge transfer, motivation to learn, fear of negative evaluation, shame and embarrassment should be further investigated to expand the current theory base.…”

The impact of gender-role-orientations on subjective career success: A multilevel study of 36 societies

“…It has long served as a proxy for gender roles -the consensual roles of women and men (Eagly & Karau, 2002). As such, women's preference for communal roles were attributed to be an underlying reason for: (1) the persistent underrepresentation of women in managerial and leadership positions in societies (Eagly & Karau, 2002;World Economic Forum, 2022); (2) lower pay for women in the workplace (Cook et al, 2019); (3) the perceptual and structural barriers to career advancement for women (Ramaswami et al, 2010); and (4) the wage penalty experienced by married women after career interruptions, such as child rearing (Bian & Wang, 2019).…”