Why Aren’t We There Yet? The Status of Research in Women’s Career Development

Abstract

The career development of women has been a longstanding topic of inquiry in vocational psychology. Two previous major reviews in this area consistently identified that women tend to experience more career barriers than men. This major contribution sought to extend this work by providing a third systematic review of the literature on women’s career development. We focused our review explicitly on the experiences of women rather than women compared to men. We seek to answer the question that has been asked for 50 years: Do we need a separate theory of women’s career development? Our findings suggest that women experience several barriers at various stages during the trajectory of their careers. We make the case that perceptions of career barriers are an integral construct to women’s career experiences and theoretical prepositions in vocational psychology should explicitly capture this construct in future investigations. We discuss implications for practice, training, and education.

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