18 Page Paper Topic: Gender Discrimination Against Women In The Workplace

A “MAJOR CAREER WOMAN”?
How Women Develop Early

Expectations about Work

SARAH DAMASKE
The Pennsylvania State University

Using data from 80 in-depth qualitative interviews with women randomly sampled from
New York City, I ask: how do women develop expectations about their future workforce
participation? Using an intersectional approach, I find that women’s expectations about
workforce participation stem from gendered, classed, and raced ideas of who works full-
time. Socioeconomic status, race, gender, and sexuality influenced early expectations
about work and the process through which these expectations developed. Women from
white and Latino working-class families were evenly divided in their expectations about
their future workforce participation, while the vast majority of white, Asian, African
American, and Latina middle-class women expected to work continually as adults. Unlike
their working-class white and Hispanic peers, all of the working-class Black respondents
developed expectations that they would work continuously as adults. The intersections of
race, class, and gender play a central role in shaping women’s expectations about their
participation in paid work.

Keywords: class/stratification; race; class; gender; work/family

Understanding why some women spend the majority of their adult lives in the paid labor market, while other women perform work largely
outside of the paid workforce, as homemakers and caregivers, long has
been a central topic of gender scholarship (Blair-Loy 2003; Gerson 1985).

AUTHOR’S NOTE: This research was supported by a National Science Foundation
Doctoral Dissertation Improvement grant, award no. SES-0703212, and a Woodrow Wilson
Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship in Women’s Studies. The author thanks Dana Britton and
the four anonymous reviewers for their exceptionally helpful and detailed comments and
critiques. Additional thanks go to Kathleen Gerson, Richard Arum, Jenifer Bratter, Adrianne
Frech, Lynne Haney, Heather Jacobson, Kristen Schultz Lee, and Gretchen Webber for their
insightful comments on prior drafts and to John Mollenkopf for his help with the NYC Voter
Registration Database. Please direct correspondence to Sarah Damaske at the Pennsylvania
State University, Department of Labor Studies and Employment Relations, 003 Keller
Building, University Park, PA 16802, [email protected].

GENDER & SOCIETY, Vol. 25 No. 4, August 2011 409-430
DOI: 10.1177/0891243211412050
© 2011 by The Author(s)

409

410 GENDER & SOCIETY / August 2011

Sociologists have investigated the determinants of paid labor force partici-
pation from several perspectives, including opportunities available in the
workforce (England 1992; Gerson 1985; Roth 2006), support that women
receive at home (Blair-Loy 2003; Hochschild 1989; Stone 2007), and
women’s gender ideologies, particularly expectations about work formed
during adolescence (Davis and Greenstein 2009; Moen, Erickson, and
Dempster-McClain 1997; Risman 1998). Young adulthood is a significant
transitional period in women’s work lives and early ideas about working
influence future paid workforce participation and potential earnings as
well as educational attainment and workforce skills (Goldin 2006; Risman,
Atkinson, and Blackwelder 1999; Stickney and Konrad 2007). Since early
expectations appear to influence a wide variety of outcomes, this article,
using an intersectional approach, returns to the question of how women
develop expectations about their future in the workforce.

Intersectional perspectives have greatly shaped the discussion of gender
and work in recent years, as scholars criticized earlier research that tended
to privilege white middle-class women (Collins 1990; Hansen 2005;
Higginbotham 2001). Despite the growing consensus that gender inter-
acts with class and race (Glauber 2008; McCall 2011), few studies have
explored how race and class shape women’s early work expectations or
their experiences with work across the life course (Bettie 2003; Vespa
2009). Since there are lifelong economic consequences to participating in
full-time versus part-time work (Spivey 2005) and working-class women,
as well as women of color, have greater gaps in full-time employment
during their lives than do their white middle-class counterparts, particu-
larly at crucial early workforce stages (Alon and Haberfeld 2007; England,
Ross, and Garcia-Beaulieu 2004), it is important to understand how gen-
der, class, and race intersect in women’s formation of their work expecta-
tions.

Using data from 80 in-depth qualitative interviews with women ran-
domly sampled from New York City, I build on prior research on women’s
workforce participation by focusing on the intersection of gender, race, and
class in the formation of women’s early expectations about work. Specifically,
I consider how women develop expectations about their future workforce
participation. My primary goal is to understand women’s perceptions of the
labor market when they were at an age at which they first contemplated
entering it, the intersection of gender, race, and class in shaping these per-
ceptions, and how early experiences help form women’s expectations of
their own workforce participation.

Sarah Damaske / A “MAJOR CAREER WOMAN”? 411

CLASS AND RACE AND
EXPECTATIONS OF WOMEN’S WORK

The women who participated in this study came of age in the 1980s and
1990s, a time when the general public became more accepting of women’s
workforce participation (Bolzendahl and Myers 2004; Hochschild 1997).
But during the 1980s and 1990s, media coverage of working mothers
almost always portrayed them as white middle-class women (Kuperberg
and Stone 2008; Smith 2001), often depicted as a woman with a briefcase
in one hand and a baby in the other. Working-class white women were
almost entirely absent from this picture, and women of color were por-
trayed as workers without children or as mothers on welfare (Smith 2001;
Collins 1991). While the woman with the baby and briefcase may have
been emblematic of women’s hopes to “have it all,” this dream was spe-
cific to a particular race and class, as well as a particular type of employ-
ment. Although this image was a caricature that did not depict reality even
for the women it portrayed, its embeddedness in race, gender, and class
shapes both collective and individual expectations about which groups of
women might participate in paid labor.

Gender Ideologies and Expectations about Work

Gender ideologies are sets of beliefs that may guide marital decisions,
workforce participation, and family formation; they are not static, but flex-
ible and responsive to life changes, such as job opportunities and marital
and parenthood status (Fan and Marini 2000; Hochschild 1989; Risman
1998; Vespa 2009). Since gender ideologies change across the life course,
there is particular benefit in investigating gender ideologies at crucial
transitional periods (Moen, Erickson, and Dempster-McClain 1997; Moen
2001). The transition to young adulthood is one such pivotal moment dur-
ing which young adults make decisions (or anticipate making decisions)
about “continuation of education, movement into and out of the labor force,
entry into marriage, and becoming a parent” (Elder 1995; Fan and Marini
2000, 258).

Prevailing cultural gender schemas can bias people’s expectations about
women’s ability to participate in paid work and can negatively influence a
woman’s expectations about her own abilities (Ridgeway and Correll 2004,
518). Women’s expectations about the way that they will work may be
shaped by the opportunities that they perceive will be available to them (or
the constraints they expect to face) and their expectations about their own

412 GENDER & SOCIETY / August 2011

abilities (Baird 2007; Risman, Atkinson, and Blackwelder 1999). Interactions
with parents shape gender ideologies to an extent, but institutional context
and social experiences appear to play even greater roles (Gerson 1985;
Moen, Erickson, and Dempster-McClain 1997; Vespa 2009). Adolescents
spend a large portion of their days in school, for example, and their school
experiences shape their expectations about future work opportunities
(Bettie 2003). This relationship is also reciprocal; adolescent girls who hold
more egalitarian gender ideologies are more likely to aspire to higher levels of
education and ultimately employment (Davis and Pearce 2007). Understanding
experiences at home and in schools may help us see how women form an
understanding of their future opportunities at work, particularly since most
adolescents have not yet adopted statuses, such as full-time worker, parent,
or spouse, that might further influence these expectations.

The Importance of an Intersectional Perspective

For women, the decision to stay at home is only available to those who
have another adult in the household who can fulfill the breadwinning role,
typically a division of labor found only in heteronormative family formations
in which a husband is the primary breadwinner and the wife the primary
caregiver (Hansen 2005; Townsend 2002). Historically, gay and lesbian,
working-class, and African American or Latino households have had less
access to this gendered division of private and public spheres (Collins
1991; Garey 1999; Williams 2010). Lesbians have been excluded from
such family forms as they did not have access to legal marriage nor to a male
breadwinner wage. More recently, even when leaving work may have been
possible, lesbian families have not tended to adopt the breadwinner/caregiver
family model (Dunne 2000; Patterson 2000).1 Since the possibility of exit-
ing the labor market has been traditionally only available to heterosexual
women, asking about women’s orientations towards work is, in itself, a
heteronormative question dependent on women’s ability to anticipate leaving
the workforce.

Structural inequalities that prevented men from earning family wages
excluded many working-class families of all racial groups from this family
norm (Hansen 2005; Higginbotham 2001). Historically, class has inter-
sected with race in complicated ways to shape women’s expectations of
paid work. Since Black men historically earned much less than their white
counterparts, African American communities depended on working mothers
and never embraced motherhood as an acceptable alternative to full-time
paid employment (Collins 1991; Landry 2000). As Black men’s employment

Sarah Damaske / A “MAJOR CAREER WOMAN”? 413

continues to be less well rewarded than the paid work of white and Latino
men (Glauber 2008), deciding to leave work may be a less realistic option
for Black women. Although working-class and middle-class Black women
may hold different expectations about types of workforce participation, both
groups expect to work full-time (Higginbotham 2001). Research consistently
finds that Black women grow up expecting to work and to support them-
selves through their own employment (Higginbotham 2001; Taylor 2000).

Although many white and Latino working-class families have not had
access to the traditional breadwinner/homemaker family (Coontz 1992;
Garey 1999), other working-class white and Latino men with unionized or
more highly paid jobs were able to earn breadwinning wages for their
families (Hansen 2005; Hochschild 1989). Today, working-class white
and Latino men are more likely to be viewed by employers as potential
breadwinners and working fathers than their Black counterparts (Hamer
2001). Both married whites and Latinos receive a larger wage premium for
fatherhood than Blacks; for white and Latino men, only, this fatherhood
wage premium is associated with their wives working less (Glauber 2008).
While Black women’s overall employment rates have dropped in recent
years, they continue to enter the workforce at rates similar to their white
counterparts’ (Reid 2002). The historic rates of high employment among
Black women compared to whites and Latinas (Reid 2002; Winkler, McBride,
and Andrews 2005) may further influence women’s expectations about
their own participation.

Working-class white women also live in households in which women
are expected to work and to weave workforce participation with caring for
family (Garey 1999). Yet women’s paid work often occupies a contradic-
tory space in white working-class households, which often consider wives’
workforce participation secondary to their husbands’ (Legerski and Cornwall
2010). In fact, working-class white women often deliberately reduce the
significance of their own workforce participation in order to maintain peace
in the home, in particular by adhering to more traditional gender divisions
(Hochschild 1989; Legerski and Cornwall 2010; Rosen 1987). Moreover,
although working-class white women were historically more likely to work
than white middle-class women (Garey 1999), this trend has changed in
recent years (England, Ross, and Garcia-Beaulieu 2004). Women’s earnings
polarized during the 1980s when some women, particularly well-educated
women, were able to move into high-end, traditionally “male,” professional
jobs and middle-class women are now more likely to be employed than
working-class women (Bernhardt, Morris, and Handcock 1995; England 2010).
These changing trends may mean that middle-class women have higher

414 GENDER & SOCIETY / August 2011

expectations about the opportunities available to them in the paid workforce
and raised occupational aspirations as a result (Baird 2007; Bettie 2003).

Even though there is evidence that work and family experiences differ
across race and class, there is a less well developed understanding of how
differences in gender ideologies about work emerge. Citing Ronald Burt
(1982), Barbara Risman (2004, 432) notes that part of the structural power
of gender stems from the fact that “norms develop when actors occupy
similar network positions in the social structure and evaluate their own
options vis-à-vis the alternatives of similarly situated others.” Because
women and men consider themselves different, women are unlikely to
wonder why their lives are not more like men’s (Risman 2004). Building
an intersectional perspective into this question, we must also ask how
working-class women and women of color develop frames to evaluate
what their own workforce options will be and whom they consider simi-
larly situated others.

METHODS

From 2006 to 2007, I conducted in-depth qualitative interviews with
80 women selected in New York City (NYC) from the NYC Voter Registration
database (NYCVRD). The NYCVRD is updated several times a year and
includes contact and demographic information, including age, sex, and
race. Eighty-seven percent of the eligible population in NYC is registered
to vote (Current Population Survey 2006). I used data from the 2000 U.S.
Census to identify tracts most similar to the national population in terms of
several key factors including race, gender, and women’s workforce par-
ticipation. I then used a combined ranking of income and education level
to identify the tracts by class quartile, selecting one tract per quartile.
Finally, I randomly selected women born between 1966 and 1976 living
in the four tracts from the NYCVRD, using an electronic copy available
for purchase.

I sent letters describing the study and inviting participation in the study
and followed this with a phone call that screened for ineligible participants.
I then made appointments with those who agreed to participate; there was
a 70 percent response rate and respondents received $50 for their participa-
tion. On average, the interviews lasted two to three hours, with the shortest
at one hour and the longest at six. The vast majority of the interviews were
conducted in the women’s homes, allowing for the collection of some
observational data.2 All interviews were digitally recorded and transcribed
and then entered into the Atlas.ti software package.

Sarah Damaske / A “MAJOR CAREER WOMAN”? 415

The interview schedule was carefully constructed to facilitate systematic
comparisons among the subjects. The schedule contained sections on family
history, educational background, work history, current work circumstances,
dating and marriage, childbearing and rearing, gender and family ideologies,
work–family conflict, household responsibilities, and future plans. Since
most women now incorporate both work and family in their lives, I avoided
questions that constructed these as diametrically opposed options. There are
important consequences to different types of workforce participation, how-
ever, and I needed a language to explore women’s expectations about
paid work that did not privilege work over family. To distinguish between
early expectations about their future workforce participation, I discuss
how the women developed expectations about continual or occasional work.
Women who anticipated full-time work for the majority of their adult lives
held continual work expectations. Women who thought they would work
part-time or not work once married with children held occasional work
expectations.

The women were a diverse group: nine were African American, nine
were Latina, five were Asian, and 57 were white. While 23 percent had
never married, just fewer than 10 percent were currently divorced and 68
percent were currently married; 75 percent had at least one child. At the
time of the interviews, half of the sample lived in middle-class households
and the remaining half lived in working-class households.3 The women
ranged in age from 32 to 42 and the average age was 38. Seventy-
nine of the 80 participants identified as heterosexual.

This article focuses on the women’s class of origin, defined as their fam-
ily’s class position when they were forming their expectations about paid
work at the cusp of adulthood. Other studies have similarly relied on wom-
en’s recollections of their early expectations about workforce participa-
tion (see Gerson 1985; Stone 2007). The interview schedule was formatted
chronologically to reduce the likelihood that respondents would attempt
to match their recollections of the past with their current circumstances. The
majority of participants, 74 percent of the women, grew up in working-class
families. The remaining 26 percent grew up in middle-class families.
Throughout this article, when women’s class position is noted it refers to
their class of origin.

Using a life history approach, I examined women’s perception of struc-
tural constraints and opportunities and the ways that they formed their expec-
tations about future workforce participation. This method made it possible to
place women’s narratives about their expected future workforce participa-
tion in a social context. I coded field notes, interview transcripts, and other

416 GENDER & SOCIETY / August 2011

pieces of data according to categories such as entrance into the workforce,
unpaid labor, marital status, and gender ideology. As unexpected patterns
emerged, I developed new coding schemas by comparing data across groups
and examining unexpected patterns.

EARLY EXPECTATIONS ABOUT WORK

Most women now expect to spend at least some part of their adult lives
in the paid workforce (Gerson 2010). This was true for all of the women
I interviewed. On the verge of adulthood, 64 percent expected they would
work full-time throughout their adult lives, while the remaining 36 percent
expected that they would work more occasionally in the paid labor market.
Women’s perceptions of the opportunities available to them influenced the
development of these early ideas about work. While the factors that moti-
vated women to be continual workers were shared across class and race,
the factors that motivated women to be occasional workers were far more
likely to be found in white and Latino working-class families. African American
working-class women were quite distinct from their white and Latino working-
class counterparts and developed expectations in a manner that was much
more similar to white, Asian and African American middle-class women –
they expected to work continuously.

EXPECTING CONTINUAL WORK

Middle-Class Privileges

The white, Asian, African American and Latino women raised in middle-
class families almost unanimously reported that their parents promoted
the importance of education and future professional employment to their
daughters.4 Eighty-one percent of women from middle-class homes expected
continual work, including all but one of the six middle-class women of color
and 12 of the 15 white women; the only exceptions were three white women
and one Asian woman from families with religious objections towards
women’s paid work. Women raised in middle-class families are often brought
up to achieve excellence in the classroom and the workforce (Goldin 2006;
Stone 2007), and often hold high expectations about future labor market
participation, regardless of their mothers’ workforce participation (see Moen,
Erickson, and Dempster-McClain 1997; Gerson 1985).

Parents’ expectations created an atmosphere in which the middle-class
women believed long-term employment was the normative experience for

Sarah Damaske / A “MAJOR CAREER WOMAN”? 417

all women. Lila,5 an Asian American middle-class woman, recalled that
her parents:

Wanted [their children] to get the most education that we possibly could in
order to do what we wanted. And, of course, they stressed thing like—what
most families would stress—like, try to get into the medical field or go into
something that’s going to land you a job that’s going to provide for you, in
medical field or engineering.6

Jodi, a white middle-class woman, felt her parents were not explicit
about their expectations that she would excel in school and enter the work-
force, but this was because they took both steps for granted: “[the expecta-
tions] weren’t vocalized, but I was expected to go to school and do well in
school. And it was just a given that I would be going to college and then to
work. There was nothing more to it than that.” Sheila, a white middle-class
woman, agreed: “Oh, it was just—it was without question.”

Middle-class families stressed the connection between paid work and
financial independence. Both of Lucille’s white middle-class parents worked
outside the home; she explained that for them “the arts wouldn’t be accept-
able because you can’t earn money in the arts.” Lucille’s parents high-
lighted her need to find a job that would be financially rewarding, not a job
that could leave her financially vulnerable. Aisha, a middle-class African
American woman, said that not only was continued workforce participation
assumed, but success in the workplace was as well: “I think for the most
part, success wasn’t an option for me or for any of us, it was more some-
thing that we knew was tangible, that we would just work for, that we
would get.” Indeed, for most of the middle-class women, there was sim-
ply the expectation that they would excel in school, enter the workforce,
and work continually.

There were some exceptions to the general focus on continued education
and work in middle-class families. The only women from middle-class ori-
gins to expect occasional work lived in homes in which their parents held
more traditional religious and cultural beliefs. Regina, a white middle-class
woman, explained that her Catholic father made it clear that “they were not
paying for college” for a daughter. Her parents had helped her older broth-
ers, but expected Regina to marry. Gurneet, an Asian middle-class woman,
expected to work rarely. Her family’s expectation that she would marry and
raise a family were very clear: “No, I was not expected to work, no. Just to
get an education, that was the expectation . . . my parents only wanted me
to get married. And then it’s your husband’s responsibility.” Strong family
objections to workforce participation made it difficult for Gurneet to imagine

418 GENDER & SOCIETY / August 2011

continual work. Both Regina and Gurneet were encouraged to focus on
marriage and starting families—an expectation of a traditional family form
that depended on their heterosexuality (and ability to find a spouse).

Working-Class Women Who Look to Full-Time Work

I found the working-class white and Latina women evenly divided in
their expectations about work. As table 1 shows, 58 percent of the women
from working-class backgrounds expected continual work, including half of
the white and Latina women. The African American working-class women,
on the other hand, were united in their expectation that they would work
continually. Working-class white and Latina women formed hopes for good
paid work when their parents encouraged it as the best way to be financially
secure. Working-class African American women grew up in households in
which women’s work was taken for granted.

Many working-class women’s parents encouraged them to focus on
continual workforce participation. Some women from working-class ori-
gins were inspired by their mother’s work. Maria, a Latina from a working-
class family, felt she should match her mother’s continued workforce
participation:

It was nice to see that my mother works. It gave me the inspiration to work
myself as a kid. I have always worked because I saw it as important for a
woman to work and have their own bank account.

Like half of the working-class Latina women, Maria expected to work
continually. Financial insecurity during childhood led some women to focus

TABLE 1: Early Work Expectations by Class of Origin and Race

Continual (%) Occasional (%) Total (n)

Working-class origins 58 42 59
White 50 50 42
Asian 100 0 1
African American 100 0 8
Latina 50 50 8
Middle-class origins 81 19 21
White 80 20 15
Asian 75 25 4
African American 100 0 1
Latina 100 0 1
Total 64 36 80

Sarah Damaske / A “MAJOR CAREER WOMAN”? 419

on full-time work. Amy grew up the daughter of Asian, working-class
immigrants who owned a corner store. There were a lot of “ups and downs”
for her family and this financial instability led Amy to want to never “worry
about money. To be able to make sure that my kids have everything they
needed.” Ambitions for upward mobility may drive women’s expectations
of continual work and encourage them to gain greater skills to enter the
workforce (Goldin 2006).

Although only half of the white and Latina working-class women I inter-
viewed held expectations of continuous work, all of the working-class African
American women did. These women described growing up in households in
which women worked full-time and in which they were expected to as well.
All of the African American women grew up in homes in which their moth-
ers and the other mothers that they knew worked full-time. Cameron, an
African American woman, was puzzled when I asked her if her mother had
ever considered leaving the workforce:

I don’t know, not work at all? I don’t know; that’s sort of complicated. She
liked her job. [Might she have wanted to] do something different? I’m not
sure; she just said she liked her job because it fit the needs of the family.

Her mother’s job inspired Cameron’s own work pathway: “it influenced
me to do what I am now, an occupational therapist, and she works in the
rehab department, so that’s how I was introduced to it.” Tina, an African
American woman, discussed her mother’s continued workforce participation:
“I mean, everyone around me, their parents worked; so it wasn’t like there
were people who had stay-home mom’s they were—generally everybody
worked. . . . It was normal.”

Partly because there were few Black homemaker mothers, African American
women’s continued workforce participation was presumed. Tina, an African
American woman from a military family, explained that even though her
family moved frequently from base to base following her father’s job, her
mother worked “all the time.” Tina felt that her mother enjoyed her work and
would not have wanted to do anything else: “she’s always worked . . . she
liked working. I mean I don’t think that my mom’s the type of person to
stay with something that she doesn’t like to do. She likes what she does.”
Not all working-class Black women had mothers who enjoyed their work.
Lauren, a working-class Black woman, explained about her mother’s job,
“Working in a factory is like a slave job, so I definitely did not want that.”
Her mother’s experience led Lauren to recognize that she wanted a better
job than her mother had had, but not that she did not want to work. A strong
community orientation toward women’s paid work meant that negative

420 GENDER & SOCIETY / August 2011

images of women’s work in the larger …