It is necessary to consider what it is about girls-or about counselors -that has contributed to this constant deficiency in planning. It is important for counselors to develop programs and practices that can assist girls in making plans consistent with today's (and tomorrow's) world.
Evidence supporting the limited vocational planning of girls has long been available. The early pioneer work in vocational development theory showed that girls do not choose college majors with vocational implications. Douvan and Kaye showed that girls typically do not engage in reality planning and do not understand the vocational-instrumental functions of their education.
The dearth of recent research on women's career development makes it difficult to discover significant shifts toward more effective planning. Astin and Myint studied Project TALENT data bank information and found that the women's career choices showed great instability between the 12th grade and the five-year period after high school. Nearly half of the studied female population had changed career plans during that period.
There are six significant reasons why vocational counseling seems to have so little impact on girls:
- By the time girls reach secondary schools, where most vocational counseling begins, they have usually become predisposed by enculturation to express the "feminine core" of personality, at the expense of effective planning encompassing both the sex role and the competitive achievement role.
- Some counselors, unfortunately, are as unaware as their clients of the societal changes that have made career planning for girls more necessary. They still operate within the old stereotype of the girl having a career "to fall back on." Some counselors do not know that 40 per cent of all married women are currently employed and that a girl who marries and has two children can still anticipate a 22-year period of employment during her life.
- Counselors generally do not directly confront the issues of sex identity and vocational identity as an interrelated package. Therefore they fail to deal with the intra-psychic conflict experienced by the adolescent girl client.
- Vocational counselors rarely use the full power of the vocational development theories in their work. Instead of concentrating on the life style, life space, and life stage of the client, they focus on those client attributes that can more easily be codified for trait-factor matching.
- Counselors often do not face job discrimination and do not prepare female clients to meet the challenge of finding career satisfaction in spite of discrimination.
- Time limitations on contact between counselor and client often reduce the likelihood of significant impact.
The most important limitation on effective counseling is the adolescent girl herself-the uninterested vocational counseling client. In a sense, such girls are victims of a cultural lag, where home and school have conditioned them to accept a role definition that is no longer valid. They have been encouraged to see the homemaker and mother role as the primary female role, while boys know from an early age that they will be expected to seek employment.
The Women's Liberation Movement has made a contribution by highlighting this lag and discounting outdated stereotypes regarding sex-determined roles. It is significant that in a study of achieving women, three-fourths had mothers who had worked at some time, and 84 per cent reported that their parents had expressed attitudes supporting career planning.
Steffi re-suggests that career is most "psychologically central" for the masculine sex, the middle class, and Western culture. Thus, being female seems automatically to delete one impetus for career centrality, and being female and a member of either the disadvantaged or the advantaged social class would relegate career to a comparatively insignificant part of the psyche.
Douvan and Kaye reported that much of what appears to be reality planning in girls masks their real interest in marriage. This apparent reality planning does not initiate a long-term investment of psychic energy necessary to effective career development. Without such investment, it is the chance factors in life that determine whether or not a girl will work and what work she will do. Unfortunately, vocational counselors rarely spend much time talking with girls about marriage, despite the finding that sex-role fantasy and planning marriage are important factors in limiting girls' other reality planning.
Two Identity Issues
To assist girls ably in developing career plans, counselors must understand the typical girl's priorities in the expenditure of psychic energies. There are elements of intra-psychic conflict in the vocational development of a girl, derived from two aspects of her identity which are often contradictory in her mind and in the collective mind of society. The two identity issues are:
- The acceptance of her sex role, including selecting a partner and probably establishing a home and caring for children. Accepting this role provides substantial outlets for nurturance.
- The acceptance of her assets and liabilities as they pertain to vocational and economic patterns of the society in which he lives. Accepting the vocational role provides substantial outlets for competitive achievement.
Girls can resolve the conflict imposed by the two potential identities and can seek fulfillment in several ways:
Accept the sex role, being exclusively a wife and mother.
Accept the sex role, perhaps also taking employment but with no career implications.
Accept the competitive achievement role (career) without marriage.
Accept the competitive achievement role (career) with marriage but with little expenditure of psychic energy on the nurturant aspects of marriage.
Attempt to balance both roles so as to gain fulfillment through both nurturant and competitive achievement activities.
Some girls face both identity crises simultaneously in adolescence, whereas others choose one or the other role with permanence. Some seek fulfillment in the sex role and face the career crisis only when they pass what they think is a marriageable age without a husband. Others choose the sex role at adolescence and face the career crisis later in life. It is likely that the career crisis is qualitatively different when faced at different life stages.
It is only the girl who accepts the sex role exclusively and with permanence who does not face choices about employment, and even she may experience intra-psychic conflict in the choice making process and in living with her choice.
At the time vocational counseling becomes available (usually in junior high school) girls are deeply involved in realizing their sexuality and related sex role, which in American culture has not typically included vocation as an integral element. Their thoughts about career remain indefinite and unrealistic. The evidence suggests that it is difficult for the adolescent girl to relate to typical vocational counseling approaches. Steinmann says:
Counselors must now be able to grasp the nature of intra-psychic conflicts of students... This task is particularly urgent in counseling young women, and since role conflicts are so prevalent, the need for early counseling in school is especially urgent.
