Confronting Career Double Binds Essay

Journal of Career Development http://jcd.sagepub.com Confronting Career Double Binds: Implications for Women,
Organizations, and Career Practitioners
Mary Shapiro, Cynthia Ingols and Stacy Blake-Beard
Journal of Career Development 2008; 34; 309
DOI: 10.1177/0894845307311250
The online version of this article can be found at: http://jcd.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/34/3/309 Published by: http://www.sagepublications.com On behalf of:

University of Missouri-Columbia

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Confronting Career
Double Binds
Implications for Women, Organizations, and Career Practitioners

Journal of Career Development
Volume 34 Number 3
March 2008 309-333
© 2008 Curators of the
University of Missouri
10.1177/0894845307311250
http://jcd.sagepub.com hosted at http://online.sagepub.com Mary Shapiro
Cynthia Ingols
Stacy Blake-Beard
Simmons School of Management

Over the past decade, practitioners and scholars have struggled to explain women’s career choices. The current language, including “opting out,” “on and off ramping,” and “mommy track,” is not only inadequate but assumes a deviation from an accepted norm. We challenge the relevance of the paradigm against which women are being judged, namely, the psychological contract that exchanged lifelong employment for “work is primary” commitment. Given organizations’ evolving need for agility, organizations no longer offer job security. We propose that, in response, women are rejecting the outdated career model based on stable employment and instead are enacting an updated “we are selfemployed” model. Being at the leading edge of career self-agency, women face a double bind that is exacerbated by persistent socialized gendered schemas. We explore the shift in career paradigms, what organizations and women have done to date, and the implications in addressing the double bind going forward.
Keywords: women; careers; gender; flexible work arrangements; opting out; off ramping

O

ver the past decade, a complicated story of women and their careers has been playing out in the public eye (Belkin, 2003; Hewlett, 2002; Tischler,
2004; Wallis, 2004). There has been widespread questioning of women executives who have made decisions that take their careers off the traditional linear

Authors’ Note: Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Mary Shapiro,
School of Management, Simmons College, 409 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, MA 02215; e-mail: [e-mail].
309
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career path (Yang, 2005). We need only examine the clamor accompanying the career decisions of high-profile women leaders, such as Brenda Barnes, of PepsiCo, and Ann Fudge, of Kraft Foods, when they stepped off the traditional linear career path that is associated with success and advancement in organizations. While there are a number of reasons given for women’s departures from top-level positions, an incendiary explanation for career decisions such as those chosen by Barnes and Fudge has emerged—women are stepping out of traditional career paths because they do not have the drive or desire to do the necessary work to reach the top. Tischler (2004) explains that they are not competing as hard so that they can focus on their families. Fels
(2004) questions their ambition. These women are said to be “opting out”
(Belkin, 2003; Wallis, 2004) or “off ramping” (Hewlett & Luce, 2005).
In this article, we challenge the use of those pejorative terms and the outdated paradigm against which women are being judged. The terms themselves (“opting out,” “off ramping,” “mommy track,” even “nonlinear”) assume a norm against which women’s career decisions are being compared. In that comparison, women’s career choices to work part-time put boundaries on workload, or not work for a time are seen as deficient, invalid, and wrong.
But their choices are deviant only because they are compared to a predominant
“work is primary” career model, demanding full-time, nonstop employment.
We propose that women are rejecting an outdated model and instead are enacting an updated one that has been evolving over the past decade. In the late
1980s and 1990s, as organizations needed to become more agile, their downsizing and outsourcing signaled the demise of the “psychological contract,” where total commitment on the part of the employee was rewarded with lifelong employment (Rousseau, 1990). As organizations reneged on their side of the contract, employees were forced to reevaluate the “work is primary” career paradigm on their side. We propose that women’s career choices reflect the responsive “we are self-employed” model and that women are no longer acting as employees working according to the mandates of their employer but as
“career self-agents,” setting their own terms of employment.
It is important to note that many women do not explicitly choose to be
“career self-agents.” Instead, life circumstances, such as the birth of children, the caretaking of aging parents, or a spouse who moves frequently, often make the “work is primary” model unworkable in their lives. For others, the
“work is primary” model simply does not permit time for their dedication to outside work interests, such as triathalon training, church ministry, or travel.
In either case, whether they are unconsciously responding to life conflicts or intentionally carving out space for outside-work passions, most likely women

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do not regard themselves as “career self-agents.” Instead, they see themselves as overwhelmed with multiple demands on their finite time and energy, mostly unsupported inside and outside the office, and often alone in their efforts to negotiate solutions.
Regardless of how they got there, and their awareness of their position, being at the leading edge of career self-agency, women encounter a number of double binds as they drive their careers. Double binds (in relation to gender) are “contradictory frames or injunctions that signify neither traditional feminine behavior nor masculine behavior will be rewarded, and often these behaviors are penalized” (Brock, 2000, p. 40). Women are faced with a dilemma and a seeming paradox—female behavior is not valued and masculine behavior is not condoned. Regarding careers, women face a classic double bind with rewards and punishments associated with both choices: follow the outdated
“work is primary” model and be consistent with organizational and public expectations but be vulnerable to a chaotic labor marketplace, or follow the new “we are self-employed” model, and be labeled as unambitious and/or uncommitted, but be proactive in managing the larger life landscape. In their choice of flexible work arrangements (FWAs), such as part-time or flextime work), women are deciding their own work conditions but are penalized by the very organizations that created the conditions necessitating them to do so.
Penalties can be obvious, such as the denial of promotions, plum assignments, and formal mentoring relationships. Or penalties can be subtle, such as reduced influence and access to resources.
This double bind is exacerbated by persistent socialized gender expectations and schemas (Rapoport, Bailyn, Fletcher, & Pruitt, 2002; Valian, 1999).
Women who decide that they want to focus predominantly on their career face questions of their role as “good women” (Covering the Mommy Wars,
2006; Fels, 2004). Yet women who decide to focus on their families at the expense of their careers are also disparaged. Hirshman admonishes women to “stop wasting their expensive degrees in the nursery” (Tyre, 2006). Women face negative perceptions whether they choose to follow the “work is primary” model or make choices, such as staying at home with children, aligned with the “we are self-employed” model.
In this article, we contest the “work is primary” paradigm against which women’s career choices are being judged and discuss the double binds women face as they reject an outdated career model and enact a new one. To understand the context and structures that undergrid the discussion of women’s career choices, we examine the megatrends (a term coined in 1982 by Naisbitt to describe overarching structural shifts) that are driving the evolution of the

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current career model and review literature on evolving career definitions.
With this background, we explore the strategic choices that women are making today, including the use of FWAs.1 We close with a consideration of the implications of women’s strategic choices on a number of different levels, looking at the implications for organizations, for the women themselves, for practitioners of career counseling, and for those conducting research on careers.
While we acknowledge that men are affected by and increasingly involved in this shifting career paradigm, this article focuses on the implications for women. We will explore why only women have been accused in the press and in organizational practice of not being committed to work. There has not been a parallel accusation leveled at men.

Megatrends Affecting Today’s Career Definitions
How people structure and define their work lives have always been a confluence of macroeconomic, social, and political forces combined with individual needs and drives. Careers have moved through family farms; apprentice, journeymen and master craftsmen; “callings” for professions such as preachers or lawyers (Sonnenfeld & Ingols, 1986, p. 67); and skilled cogs in an assembly line to service providers. To understand what is affecting and shaping a career model for today, we first examine the major forces that are shaping employment patterns at the beginning of the 21st century. Because employment practices in the United States are complex and global, we focus on four visible forces driving women’s strategic choices: organizational upheaval, changing demographics, technology, and shifting family and work values.

Organizational Upheaval
Organizations are downsizing, rightsizing, off-shoring, outsourcing, merging, and declaring bankruptcy at record rates. To paint a picture of the new labor market, one only has to look at a few statistics.
In 2000, there were 1.3 million business bankruptcies, almost double the 1990 number (U.S. Census
Bureau, 2003a). Outsourcing, estimated at $301 billion in 2004, is up from
$125 billion in 2000 (Brainard & Litan, 2004). More than 587,000 jobs were projected to migrate overseas in 2005. By 2015, this figure is expected to be
3,320,000 (“America’s Newest Export,” 2004). DeBell (2001) offers a harrowing glimpse at the speed at which new organizations are emerging and old ones are dying: One third of the Fortune 500 companies that existed in 1980 no longer existed as independent entities in 1990 (p. 83). As a result of this

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organizational upheaval, the psychological contract between employee and employer has been disrupted, most likely permanently (Rousseau, 1990). In
1950, when the definition of career included an often lifetime commitment to one company, the average professional worked at no more than a few companies over the course of a career. Today, that worker holds nearly 10 different
jobs between the ages of 18 and 38 alone (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2004).
Organizational structures have also significantly changed since the bureaucratic hierarchies in which the “work is primary” career model was written.
Grzeda (1999) argues that structural shifts in organizations have been well documented and cites the evolution from the early functional structure of organizations through Miles and Snow’s (1986) network organizations (where independent firms, often suppliers, are linked together, so the sum total of firms cover all the activities necessary to produce the product); through
Allred, Snow, and Miles’ (1996) cellular organization (where the organizing firm acts like a professional association, facilitating information flow between fully autonomous businesses that could exist on their own); and Weick and
Berlinger’s (1989) self-designing organizations (that are structured for frequent, nearly continuous change in structure, processes, their goal being optimal responsiveness to the environment). With each shift, there have been attending career model shifts, such as the “boundaryless career” model (looking beyond the “boundaries” of a particular organization or department in which you are currently employed), in response to the networked organization
(Grzeda, 1999).

Changing Demographics
The demographics of American workers are constantly changing, and most notable is the influx of women into the workplace. In 1900, 25% of American women worked outside the home, constituting 20% of the labor force (DeBell,
2001, p. 80). By 1997, 60% of women were working and made up nearly half of the workforce (U.S. Census Bureau, 1999). Additionally, women’s participation in the labor market has broadened over those 100 years. In 1930, 75% of professional women were either teachers or nurses (Bruccoli & Layman,
2006). While those professions continue to be dominated by women, there are a number of traditionally male positions that are now predominantly held by women, including financial managers, accountants, auditors, and medical and health service managers (U.S.
Department of Labor, Women’s Bureau, 2005).
As women have moved into the world of work, the structure of the
American family has changed. Only 35% of American families today have the “traditional” structure of two parents with their own biological children

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under 18, whereas in the 1950s close to 49% of Americans did so (U.S.
Census Bureau, 2003b). The number of stay-at-home mothers has dramatically shrunk. In 1950, 24% of two-parent families saw both husband and wife in the workforce; by 2000, that rose to 72% (Bureau of Labor Statistics,
2000). In 1960, only 19% of married women with school-age children were in the labor market. In 1990, 71% of those mothers were employed outside the home (DeBell, 2001, p. 80; U.S. Census Bureau, 2006). The demographic foundation provided by stay-at-home mothers that permitted the
“work is primary” career model has dissolved. Working fathers could no longer ignore all the “secondary” aspects of their lives, namely, child care, dry cleaning, and housework.
Technology
It is cliché to note how technological inventions have changed the workplace in the last several decades. Just as significantly, the traditional notion of work as people gathering in buildings to work on projects is fast disappearing, replaced by virtual work structures and reporting relationships.
Scully (2002) reported that 75% of her survey respondents worked for companies that encouraged the use of e-mail, and 43% telecommuted and did their work virtually—some or all the time (p. 1).
While technology permits work to occur anywhere and anytime, so does much of the work itself. As the amount of knowledge-based work grows, so does the ability to conduct work from home or late at night. In 1950, virtual communication was limited to the telephone. Today, 72 million people use computers at work, and 2 out of every 5 employed persons are connected to the Internet and use e-mail on the job (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2005).
Telecommuting, an outgrowth of technology, has burgeoned. Today more than 18% of employed adult Americans, or nearly one fifth of the workforce, work at home at least 1 day per month (International Telework Association and Council Press Release, 2004).

Shifting Work and Family Values
Current research suggests that professionals entering today’s workforce have a very different set of values driving their careers. For example, the
American Medical Association (AMA) predicts a shortage of obstetricians and general practitioners in the near future, because today’s medical students, desiring a 9-to-5 workday, are selecting areas of medicine that permit them to put boundaries around their work lives (Richtel, 2004).

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What accounts for the shift toward a desire to have-a-life-not-just-a-job? In a 2000 survey by Radcliffe Public Policy Center (2000), 80% of Americans reported that “having a work schedule that enables them to spend time with their families” was a top priority (p. 1). Feyerherm and Vick (2005, p. 216) found that Generation X women connect professional success with personal fulfillment, which included family and relationships. Mainiero and Sullivan
(2005) point to the “latchkey children” who are now working, having families of their own, and not wanting to experience the same stress they saw their own working mothers had, or to pass on the latch key to their own children (p. 108).
The affluent generation that grew up with fun as their central activity does not want to change that lifestyle value even as they enter the workforce. Given the pressures from organizational upheavals, changing demographics and technology, and shifting values, an earlier model of careers has been buffeted and strained. What was that definition in the mid-20th century, and what does it look like today?

The Ever-Evolving Definition of Careers
From the 1950s through the 1980s, IBM exemplified corporate hegemony and commitment to lifelong employment and the concomitant “work is primary” psychological contract. Founder and CEO, Thomas Watson, Sr., having observed frustrated and inefficient workers who complained about segmented work, articulated basic beliefs that guided IBM’s human resource policies and actions from the company’s inception. His first value, “respect the individual,” led Watson to establish the practice of hiring people in the early stages of their careers and retaining them for life. This approach worked well for IBM and other large American corporations, as the economy changed slowly and the world exhibited relative stability.
By the early 1990s, the marketplace and economic, technological, and social changes required a different kind of organization. These organizations needed to be nimble and flexible to respond to market trends quickly. As organizations changed, so too did the relationship between employer and employed.
Morrow argued, “America has entered the age of the contingent or temporary worker, of the consultant and subcontractor, of the just-in-time work force [hire and fire as needed to meet current demands]—fluid, flexible, disposable. This is the future” (Bridges, 1994, p. 1). Even if one were employed, the view of career experts (Bridges, 1994; Hakim, 1995; Lassiter, 2002) is that everyone is a “contingent” worker, contingent on the organization achieving its needed results (Bridges, 1994, p. 50).

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Scholars have been hailing a new career paradigm for close to 20 years, a paradigm based on the individual taking control of their career and no longer relying on their employer to do so. Peters (1992, 1999) directed individuals to think of themselves as “self-employed” and to think of their career as a series of projects. Bridges (1994, p. 51) advised individuals to see themselves “in business for themselves” and to think that the organization had “outsourced” work to them. Hutchins (1999) declared there was no more “womb to tomb” employment, and employees are now “free agents.” A decade ago Handy
(1994) anticipated the off/on ramping by describing careers as more discontinuous than linear. Hall (1996) described career paths as becoming more
“expansive.”
Almost two decades ago, Kanter (1989) forecast the new skills necessary to succeed as “self-employed” career agents. In her writing, she suggested that in a “post corporate career,” firm-specific knowledge would be less important, and portability, or skills employees could take from job-to-job would be critical. Lassiter (2002) added skills, such as knowing how to effectively selfpromote and using social and professional networks successfully (see Table 1), to the “we are self-employed” skill set.

The Double Bind Women Face
As women enact the “we are self-employed” career model, they take responsibility for their work lives, making critical decisions such as length of workweek, amount of travel, and leaves of absence. Being an independent career agent, however, has earned women the label of opting out and not being committed to work. These labels place women in a double bind: Either play by rules that career scholars have pronounced outdated, or establish one’s own rules and support the popular myth of opting out.
A central question is, “Why is the discourse on women’s career choices so heated?”
One reason is that women’s careers have always been seen as deviant. In the past, men were often the focus of researchers who generated reports of normative behavior. “When one group—in this case men—is the norm, the other group’s behavior—in this case women—is seen as the deviant pattern that required explanation” (Valian, 1999). As recent as 1992, Powell and
Mainiero commented that “the state of literature on women’s careers is somewhat dismal” (p. 215). Many career scholars have developed models for men’s careers and seen women’s careers as anomalies (Powell, 1988) or

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Employment stability; often considered lifetime employment; employees were asked for and gave their loyalty
Primarily the corporation to assess and move employees through career paths
Competence is technical skills and commitment is number of hours seen in the workplace. (There is the importance of face time.) Work had to be done at the office and people had to be seen
“working” (Rapoport et al., 2002)

Length of employees’ service Definitions of competence and commitment Career responsibility

Workers viewed as long-term, career-oriented community-members Employers’ perception of employees

Career Human Resources System, 1945 through 1980s
(Sonnenfeld & Ingols, 1986)

All “Self-Employed,” 1990s to Present
(Bridges, 1994)

Primarily the individual who must remain marketable, skilled, self-motivated and forward moving
Competence includes technical and relational skills, and commitment is defined as getting the work done, where or when ever

Everything is a market, including work. The term
“de-jobbing” was coined to describe work in organizations Project-oriented work; just-in-time workforce

Table 1
Evolving Definitions of Careers

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women as developmentally deficient (Gallos, 1989). Even with women comprising 46% of the workforce in 2005 (U.S. Department of Labor, Women’s
Bureau, 2005), the norm is still to dismiss women’s behavior as deviant from the majority.
A second issue is commitment. Being perceived as committed, an essential component in the “work is primary” model, has always been gendered and is now the most basic accusation leveled against women. Rapoport et al. (2002) argued that “the definition of commitment remains rooted in a traditional concept of the ideal worker as someone for whom work is primary, time to spend at work is unlimited, and the demands of family, community and personal life are secondary” (p. 29). Artificial signs of productivity, such as whose cars are in the parking lot at 7 a.m., become key indicators of commitment that disproportionately affect women (Valian,
1999). A stark example of this conflation is the legal profession’s focus on billable hours, which objectively measures the time a person puts in at work, but does not measure productivity or efficiency (Valian, 1999, p. 258). If perceived commitment is synonymous with long hours, anyone, male or female, who has responsibilities outside work is disadvantaged (Rapoport et al., 2002, p. 30).
Given that the career model has shifted in a rational response to organizational, demographic, technological, and attitudinal megatrends, and women are enacting this new “we are self-employed” model, questions quickly arise:
What options do women have for managing this double bind? What are the implications for organizations? Clearly, negotiating these tough career and employment issues should be a two-way street, navigated jointly by women and organizational leaders. To date, we have seen many women leading organizational responses to megatrends and the new model. Faced with the double bind of either acting as a career agent or following conventional norms, many women are making strategic, often difficult and contested choices.

The Strategic Choices Women Are Making
Historically, women have been forced to choose work or family. In 1989,
Felice Schwartz, founder and president of Catalyst, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to women’s advancement, argued for two career tracks for women: one “career primary” and the other “career-and-family” managers.
This second track was later dubbed the “mommy track” (Schwartz, 1989,
p. 68). Powell and Mainiero (1992) argued that women still faced either-or

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choices, using opposing riverbanks as a metaphor for the difficulty in succeeding in both career and family spheres at the same time.
Clearly many women continue to make an either–or choice. Hewlett and
Luce (2005) found that of the women that they studied who left work, 44% did so to take care of family responsibilities. Mainiero and Sullivan (2005) found that women taking an “off ramp,” particularly when those decisions were made mid-career, were driven by the need for balance in their lives (p. 114).
But the “we are self-employed” model allows us to think of the work– family choice differently. If employment is a “temporary state, or the current manifestation of long-term employability” and a career is “the unfolding sequence of any person’s work experiences over time” (Arthur & Rousseau,
1996, p. 29), then are sabbaticals or part-time work (whether because of family reasons or others) just part of the lifelong career continuum? And is the act of making those decisions evidence of career self-agency: deciding what is primary, deciding when to work, and negotiating the terms of employment? In addition, what about the woman who is making a work–life choice? What if children or family are not the driving issues for career selfagency, but instead life passions and commitments? Often those women face even more challenges in defining their careers: leaving work at 3 p.m. to go horseback riding has less legitimacy inside organizations than leaving to meet preschoolers at the bus.
What are some of the other choices women are making as they enact the
“we are self-employed” model? There are several options women are selecting.
One option is to negotiate who will stay in the workforce and who will stay at home. In 2002, one third of the women on Fortune Magazine’s 50 Most
Powerful Women list have stay-at-home husbands (Sellers, 2003, p. 80).
Another option is to leave and come back. Some of the women who became symbols for the opt out revolution have reentered the workplace. Brenda
Barnes, CEO of PepsiCo North America, took a 6-year hiatus to focus on her family in Illinois before becoming the CEO of Sara Lee Corp in 2004. Ann
Fudge, a prominent African American executive, relinquished her position as president of a $5 billion unit of Kraft Foods to take a 2 year sabbatical; she returned to corporate life as CEO of ad giant Young and Rubicam in 2003
(Brady, 2004; Yang, 2005).
Another strategic choice women are making is to become self-employed.
Today there are 10.6 million firms that are at least half-owned by a woman or women, employing one out of 7 U.S. workers (19.1 million people) and generating $2.5 trillion in sales (Center for Women’s Business Research,
2006). Women-owned businesses are growing at nearly two times the rate of

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all privately held firms (17% vs. 9%). In the United States, 1 in 11 adult women is an entrepreneur, and 2 out of 3 entrepreneurs are women (Center for Women’s Business Research, 2006; Hymowitz, 2005). eBay, for example, has enabled a new class of workers to flourish (Conlin, 2004). Of the 430,000 people who are estimated to earn a full-time or part-time living from eBay, approximately 48% of them are women, “who have found in eBay a way to tap into the marketplace from their kitchen tables and finesse a saner worklife balance” (p. 70). Finally, in some instances, women are not pushing against the work-family choice dictated by the outdated “work is primary” model alone. Some corporate leaders are positioning their organizations in the labor marketplace to lead the dialogue on work-life balance.

Strategic Positioning by Organizations
There are two compelling reasons why organizational leaders should shape organizations to enable career self-agency: the predicted labor shortage and research that shows a correlation between a strong bottom line and the number of women in management. Experts are forecasting a coming labor shortage of 10 million workers in the United States by 2010 as 76 million baby boomers retire en masse (Dychtwald, Erickson, & Morrison,
2004; Tischler, 2004). At the same time, Hewlett (2002) found that in 2000, more than 22% of women holding professional degrees, such as MBAs,
PhDs, and MDs, were not currently in the workforce (p. 66). Clearly, savvy organizational leaders who are aware of these parallel trends will see advantages to reaching out to highly trained women who are not currently in the labor market.
The more compelling reason organizations will want to keep their talented women is provided by a 2004 Catalyst study. Looking at 353 of the Fortune
500 companies from 1996 to 2000, Catalyst found that companies with a higher percentage of women in top management reaped, on average, a return on equity 15.7% higher than those that did not (Catalyst, 2004). On the expense side of the ledger, organizations only need to look at the “measurable cost of developing individuals who then choose to [leave] . . . and the immeasurable cost of the loss of talent” (Rapoport et al., 2002, p. 7). Some organizations are actively working to reverse the “brain drain” of talented women and men. To be successful, the strategies they employ must touch all aspects of human resources planning and practices. In this article, we will focus on recruiting, retaining, and reengaging talent.

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Recruitment
If organizational Web sites accurately reflect organizations’ actual recruitment policy and practices, then few organizations use FWAs as a recruitment tool. One exception is that of Partners HealthCare Inc., a large, Boston-based umbrella organization of multiple health care units. Job seekers can select openings by “Job Type,” such as “JobShare, Regular, or Temporary,” and by “Employment Type,” such as “Full Time, Part Time, or Per Diem” (www
.partners.org).

Retention
As competition for top talent grows, organizations will continue to expand their offerings of FWAs. While many organizations offer the usual menu of
FWA options: job sharing, quality part-time work, compressed workweeks and telecommuting, others have gone further. Deloitte offers its partners a
2-month paid sabbatical for rejuvenation every 5 years. Employees at Wells
Fargo can take up to a 6-month unpaid time-off for volunteer work. Other options include offering vacation hours instead of vacation days, or offering services to employees such as on-site child care and elder care, or “concierge services” such as dry cleaning and dinner take-out.

Reengagement
Organizations are rethinking their attitudes around employee disposability as the labor pool shrinks. “Skills, knowledge, experience and relationships walk out the door every time somebody retires, and they take time and money to replace,” states Dychtwald et al. (2004, p. 48).
Hewlett and Luce (2005) found that only 5% of the women they surveyed who had taken an “off ramp” were interested in returning to the companies they had left.
To lure ex-employees back, companies are getting creative. Managers at
Monsanto are encouraged to contact retirees for job sharing and other temporary vacancies (Dychtwald et al., 2004). Firms such as Booz Allen
Hamilton are holding lunches and workshops for women who have left the workforce, helping to reduce the barriers to reentry through flexible schedules, retraining and updating out-of-date skills, and reviving professional networks. The goal of these firms is to make it easy for professional women to return to work in these large organizations. Deloitte and Touche’s

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“Personal Pursuits” program, launched in 2004, provides top performers who have exited with mentoring, training, and project work for up to
5 years. Lehman Brothers offers “Encore” luncheons for former employees and a short course to bring them up to speed on industry developments
(Shellenbarger, 2006).

Implications for Women
While organizations wrestle with making changes that create the structure and culture to support women and men in FWAs, women who are spearheading the transition can use the following strategies to be more effective in being career self-agents.

Framing Decisions
To prevent getting structurally sidelined (i.e., put on the mommy track) or becoming lame ducks with a loss of power and influence, women must, when proposing a FWA, focus on how their decision benefits the organization, not on how it benefits them personally.
For example, Michelle,2 a very senior-level interviewee, declined a significant promotion that would have moved her away from her passion: technology innovation. When declining the offer (to an extremely surprised president), she outlined the technology challenges and opportunities she would tackle by remaining in her present position, and the benefits to the organization. She also left the window open for future opportunities by stating a time frame or condition for when she would be ready to move (e.g., “once I get this service launched”). Challenging Norms Regarding “Commitment”
This strategy involves naming a problematic practice and pointing out its counterproductivity (Fletcher, 1999). Naming allows the norm to be explicitly examined and alternatives to be considered. For example, Dorthea2 works for a large telecommunications company. She inherited a department with a crises culture—a sense of urgency pervaded every task, resulting in allnighters to get projects out by their deadlines. When her boss questioned her willingness “to do what it takes,” she asked him if he really wanted people doing high-visibility client work when they were exhausted. She proposed and carried out a “research” project: charting the accuracy of reports generated

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during normal working hours versus those that had been done at midnight.
Her findings were irrefutable: reports generated during normal hours were considerably more accurate, and the all-nighters became a thing of the past.

Maintaining Career Identity
“Just because I’m staying at home with my kids, does not mean I’m not an accountant anymore,” said Rita.2 Recognizing that her education and work experience does not disappear because she is not in an office, Rita maintains her career identity by being active in her professional association and reading her trade publications. “And when I fill out forms asking for my profession,
I put ‘accountant,’ not ‘homemaker.’” Rita is acting as a career self-agent, remaining an accountant over the different terms of employment that she sets for herself.

Implications for Organizations
While many companies offer FWAs, more transformational change is needed. Organizational leaders must create a culture that supports career self-agency. To do so, senior decision makers will need to redefine the ideal employee, and then design and actively support policies that enable employees to manage their own careers.

Redefining the Ideal Employee
An organization’s leaders must redefine what is needed from its employees and what will be rewarded. Old norms need to be challenged (e.g., no more 5
p.m. meeting start times, no more full parking lots at 8 a.m.). Conventional methods of measuring work need to be examined (e.g., shifting the focus from the number of billable hours to the productivity of those hours). Restrictive head-count practices need to be expanded to cover job sharing and part-time employees. And the systems for determining promotions and awards need to include FWA employees and their contributions. Most important, senior organizational leaders must model the new norms and expectations.

Monitoring and Providing Feedback on the Desired New Attributes
Performance appraisals (PAs) need to be rewritten to capture the newly valued employee attributes. Measures for work–life balance should be

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included. For example, the Ford Motor Company has family members give input into an employee’s PA to assess their additional roles of parent, spouse, and community member (Mainiero & Sullivan, 2005, p. 119). Still in an experimental phase, this 360-degree review recognizes that “we all operate in three domains—work, home, community [and] ‘Total’ leaders take advantage of [all three] connections” (Hammonds, 2001).

Encouraging Employees to Use FWAs
Organizations need to examine their use of FWAs because individual managers may say “no” to employees requesting participation. Powell and
Mainiero (1999) found that managers were more likely to say “no” to requests that they perceived would be disruptive, specifically denying alternative work arrangements to employees who were working on critical tasks and/or possessed critical skills (pp. 41-56). To address this issue, Powell and
Mainiero suggest that organizations monitor the use of FWAs and reward managers who use them. They also suggest having a central decision maker to evaluate employee requests to reduce the inconsistency in approvals across managers. Another factor discouraging the use of FWAs is employees who recognize the explicit costs in reductions to their benefits or the unspoken costs to their careers. The explicit costs can be addressed structurally: For example, companies can offer full or prorated health benefits or allow employees taking time off to continue to pay into their pensions and not be penalized. The unspoken costs are more powerfully discouraging, and more challenging to address. Employees, particularly women, see FWAs as career suicide. In the
Hewlett and Luce (2005) survey, a full 38% of women said there was a stigma attached to people in their organizations who use work-life policies.
The most powerful way of encouraging employees to use FWAs is to reward managers who have employees engaged in them (Mainiero &
Sullivan, 2005). Managers may be reluctant to grant FWAs for a number of reasons: They may correctly interpret from the organization’s culture and leaders that FWAs are to be discouraged because they may entail costs in the form of additions to head count, the need to cross-train employees in critical skills, and the potential disruption of critical work flows (Mainiero &
Sullivan, 2005). In addition, reluctance may stem from a manager’s own definition of commitment. Managers should not be penalized for FWA-related additions to head count or for “bucking the system” by allowing their employees to work unconventionally. Organizations should include employees’ use

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of FWAs as a measure on managers’ PAs and give recognition to managers who demonstrate commitment to FWAs.

Setting Up Rewards for Employees Using FWAs
Setting up a rewards system can be done in a number of ways. First, organizations should set up career paths that best utilize women according to their goals and timelines. Women need to receive challenging assignments and be placed in challenging positions, since both lead to further challenging work, promotions, and senior positions (Kanter, 1977; Larwood & Gattiker,
1987). Assuming a woman wants to be on a mommy track, and automatically placing her off the promotion track, cannot be permitted. Second, line experience must come early in a woman’s career so that if later she does leave to care for family, she can return with that critical experience under her belt.
Third, nonlinear career paths must be institutionalized. “Up or out” work environment philosophies, where only vertical movement is valid, must be challenged (Feyerherm & Vick, 2005, p. 216).
Next, organizations must examine how to minimize the “mommy tax,” the foregone income as a result of temporarily opting out. This can be sizable:
The cost to a woman who temporarily leaves paid employment has been estimated at more than $1 million over the course of her career (Mainiero &
Sullivan, 2005). Hewlett and Luce (2005) found a woman experiences an average 18% reduction in lifetime earning power when she off ramps and
37% if she takes 3 or more years off. Companies, therefore, must rethink how to bring a reentering woman up to a competitive salary, provide training to reacclimate her, and place her in positions where she can directly affect the profit of a company. Those profit/loss positions are typically most valued in organizations, and her salary can then reflect that responsibility. These steps will not only ease the double binds facing women as they act as career agents but bring their practices in alignment with the 21st century “we are all self-employed” definition of careers.

Implication for the Career Counseling Practice
Career counselors play a critical role in both extending the recognition and understanding of the career paradigm shift and in empowering women to face double binds arising from gendered expectations. First, by providing language and a model, counselors can help women understand their role as “career self-agents” and the challenges they will face in organizations,

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challenges such as the potential lack of systemic support and the often invisible barriers and damage to their power, influence, and success. Helping women change from seeing themselves as the problem to seeing themselves as change agents empowers them to ask and negotiate for what they need from a position of confidence rather than apology.
Second, by talking about the “we are self-employed” career paradigm, counselors convey two messages essential to fostering the necessary self-agency.
Women learn that they are not unique or alone in their drive to create a career that fits with their broader life goals: Other people are making this rational response to a shifting environment. They are not an aberration. By sharing the context (demographic shifts, organizational changes, technology), the counselors also legitimize their personal inclinations and desires. In both cases, the counselors essentially give women “permission” to act in ways that make sense to them, but in ways that they have been told (by the press, by organizations) are wrong.
Counselors can also help women become more strategic (and less reactionary or opportunistic) in their career decision making by inviting them to take a longer view of their career. Rather than allowing women to be thinking of just “the next job,” counselors can encourage women to look at the entire arc of their career and anticipate potential interruptions and the full range of their life goals. If they expect to have children, women could be encouraged to get line experience early. If they want to get into politics, women could be encouraged to build a strong financial position early.
Being strategic also entails overcoming some gendered behaviors that may be counterproductive to their own goals. For example, women often need to be encouraged to promote themselves (Tannen, 1995), to feel comfortable competing against another person for a job, and to overcome a job rejection and resume collegial relationships.
Finally, counselors can develop women’s tactical career skills, such as negotiating in organizations for what they want and need. In acting as career self-agents, women need to first make current (and often constricting and/or outdated) organizational practices more explicit. Then they need to negotiate for alternatives while demonstrating how the organization will benefit from the change. There is resistance to moving from fixed-hours, fixed-place jobs.
There is also resistance in challenging the conventional definition of commitment that is defined by “face time” versus outcome. Fletcher (1999) offers four strategies as part of “practical pushing” that include “naming” the norm,
“pointing out the potential costs or unintended negative consequences . . . and offering different . . . alternatives” (p. 121).

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Implications for Research
While recent scholarly work provides much-needed rigorous examination of women’s careers, it has focused on a narrow band of women. The Hewlett studies (2002, 2005) were intentionally conducted on one demographic: high-achieving women (most likely White and privileged). Mainiero and
Sullivan (2005) included “women and men from different levels and backgrounds to more realistically capture the careers of most working professionals.” Even then, their sample consisted of 87% Caucasian respondents.
Researchers and society will benefit if we broaden the demographic samples to include career issues of women across racial, ethnic, and class lines.
Another limitation in the current popular discourse is the underlying assumption that only women are feeling the pressures of work–life balance.
But many men are also facing the issue of aligning the demands of work and the challenges of family (Brady, 2004; Shellenbarger, 1999, 2002). In an online study of 2000 men and women conducted by Bright Horizons and
Simmons School of Management, 95% of respondents rated their life outside work as equally or more important than their jobs (Stork, Wilson, Bowles,
Sproull, & Vena, 2005). Focusing the work-life conversation predominantly on women obscures the fact that more and more men also face an evolving definition of careers. Anecdotally we know that men have run into a wide range of reactions if their career choices were deviant from the “work is primary” model. Some men are seen as father-of-the-year if they leave work early to watch their child’s soccer game. Komisar (2000) was held up as a role model in his Harvard Business Review article about his no-career alternative.
Yet another man said he was not only scorned by men for taking time off to be the primary caretaker for his newborn but also by stay-at-home moms who refused to allow him to join their “mother’s play group.” To the extent that we expand this research agenda to include the dilemmas and opportunities for men, we strengthen the case for organizations to dedicate energy and resources for FWAs that benefit everyone.
Finally, we recognize that shifting career paradigms entails creating new systems inside organizations. Research is needed to identify these new systems, either by seeking out best practices currently used by experimenting organizations or by exploring the utility of possible alternatives. For example, research could examine new ways to evaluate employees’ performance under more flexible systems. Research is also needed to quantify the cost and impact of FWAs.

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Conclusion
In this article, we identified several megatrends that are driving the shift from a “work is primary” to a “we are self-employed” career model and explored the double bind that women, by being at the forefront of this transition, are facing. We explored some of the strategic choices both women and organizations have made, and the implications for women, organizations, and those conducting future research. In closing, there are four points to keep in mind when considering double binds.
First, double binds are pernicious as the pressure to maintain the status quo is exerted. The popular press benefits through magazine sales by sensationalizing the choices women are making rather than exploring them in a meaningful way. Organizations benefit by demanding 24/7 commitments from their employees even when there is no reciprocal loyalty.
Second, the transition to career agency will be slow and painful.
Individuals on the leading edge, namely women, will face far greater resistance than those who follow. But organizations that lead may also suffer disproportionately. For example, if one bank hires a greater number of employees to permit 40-hr workweeks or flextime, the bank’s profitability may suffer because of higher labor costs. Until other banks adopt the same practice, driven by the need to attract and retain talented workers, the leader’s labor costs are out of line with the industry’s costs.
Third, while double bind decisions appear to be made by individuals, they have macroimplications. For example, a woman decides to stay at home with her children. Her husband then goes to work and views his female employees through his own “stay-at-home-wife” lens. Working with the belief that women should raise children, he may be inclined to reject a female employee’s request for job-sharing or be less likely to institute new FWA policies for the organization. One only has to look at the Forbes.com article (Noer, 2006) cautioning men against marrying women with careers to see how a distorted lens can affect behavior.
Another example of the macroeffect is what Hirshman (2005) calls the
“regime effect”. Even though most women “don’t quit their jobs for their families, (as the White privileged women highlighted in the press have), they think they should and feel guilty about not doing it (p. 26).” These wellpublicized individual decisions have made the masses of women who cannot afford to quit work suffer even greater angst in the double bind.
Finally, there are two players in every double bind, and if only one is taking action, the double bind will persist. Today’s discourse, as it is currently

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configured, lets organizations off the hook. Much of the current dialogue focuses on women and their individual choices rather than looking at organizational processes and practices as a contributor to the double bind. For example, women are viewed as opting out rather than organizations being viewed as offering limited career options. In addition, individual choices do little to change the systems and policies that disadvantage employees seeking to enact the new career model. Individual choice suggests that an employee has to choose: either work or family (Rapoport et al., 2002). While organizational aloofness keeps the double bind in place, the marketplace may eventually reward those organizations that reduce it by adopting policies that are aligned with the new career paradigm. These organizations will be poised to attract and retain talented career self-agents, both male and female.

Notes
1. We are choosing the language “flexible work arrangements” rather than the often used phrased
“alternative work arrangements” since the latter language suggests an outdated conventional norm.
2. Interviewee stories cited in this article are part of an ongoing qualitative research project about women’s careers. Three stories were published in the CASE Association Proceedings, 2004, “Career
Dilemmas: Women Facing Difficult Choices” (Shapiro & Ingols, 2004). Several were included in Take
Charge of Your Career, 2005, Barnes & Nobles Silver Lining Press. In all cases, names have been changed to protect confidentiality.

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Shapiro et al. / Confronting Career Double Binds 333
Mary Shapiro is a senior lecturer at Simmons College School of Management, the only allwomen MBA program in the country. She teaches, researches, and publishes in the areas of communication, team leadership, and, in particular, women and their careers.
Cynthia Ingols, EdD, is an associate professor, Simmons School of Management, and teaches and conducts research on leading organizational change and careers, particularly how women manage these activities.
Stacy Blake-Beard, PhD, is an associate professor of management at Simmons College in
Boston, Massachusetts. Her research interests include mentoring at the intersection of race and gender, the impact of formal mentoring programs, diversity in organizations, and women’s careers. Downloaded from http://jcd.sagepub.com at SAGE Publications - Full-Text Collections on October 13, 2009