Unemployed Women: When "Social Support" Is Not Supportive

Abstract

Despite major changes in the social and occupational position of women in the last two decades, resistance to women's employment endures. This paper reports on 89 unemployed women who were personally interviewed and asked about their job orientations, the nature of support they received from others while unemployed and their perceptions of the unemployment period. While the women reported close and extensive social support networks, the content of the messages from those networks about work was often not supportive. The nature and extent of this non-support is documented and the effect of a non-supportive social “support” network is analyzed. Our findings suggest that while some unemployed women suffer from a lack of close friends, a more common pattern may be for a woman to be surrounded by “caring others” who may undermine her by denying the legitimacy of an activity she regards as important.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 42 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.