Is there a female career? Unmasking perceptions of women's careers

This study responds to the call for more research on the under-studied topic of women's careers (White, 1995, 2000; Sullivan, 1999; Gallos, 1996; Belghiti-Mahut, 2004; Laufer, 2004, Yarnall, 2008) and the growing interest for developing new perspectives on careers and career development (Arthur et al. 1996; Dyke and Murphy, 2006). This call for research corresponds to the needs of enterprises today to attract, retain and develop female talent notably in typically male dominant industries (Fielden et al. 2001; Cromer and Lemaire, 2007). Responding to these calls, we explore the three following major research questions on women's careers, career advancement today, and new approaches to investigating careers: Is there a female career? How has the notion of career development evolved in recent years? If so, how do women today picture their careers? We conducted a research using a questionnaire with 98 French managers participating in a women's networking event. The first results show that there are multiple perceptions of women's careers as well as several dominant families. Moreover, certain perceptions of women's careers concord with emerging notions of career advancement shared by both women and men. Inciting women and men to capture and describe their career by way of pictures may offer an answer to going beyond gender stereotypes in the workplace and creating a dialogue between key stakeholders.