Gender in Career Decision Making by Women: An Autoethnographic Account

Abstract

Career, work, job, vocation etc holds very significant meaning in one's life. The definition given by Cambridge Dictionary says that 'Career' is the 'the progress and actions taken by a person throughout a lifetime, especially those related to that person.' A career is often composed of 'the jobs held, titles earned and work accomplished over a long period of time, rather than just referring to one position' (British Online Dictionary 2014). Oxford Dictionary defines 'Career' as 'the job or series of jobs that you do during your working life. So it is an occupation undertaken for a significant period of a person's life and with opportunities for progress.' Through this paper, it is intended to present a collection of reflective narratives that, taken together, explore the varied dimensions of women, gender and career in the present moment. An effort is made to use autoethnography to help gender studies' researchers, answer questions that cannot be answered by traditional, empirical research methods and to reveal voices that are obscured by aggregations of data. How this is done, however, varies widely-from an autobiographic novel to speculative fiction to rigorous academic analysis.