What Factors Influence a Woman's Decision to Return to Work? A Review of Literature on Career Models

Rupali Nandamuri
Research Scholar, IBS Hyderabad (Under IFHE - A Deemed to be University u/s 3 of the UGC Act, 1956), Hyderabad, Telangana, India; and is the corresponding author. E-mail: chaudhuri.rupali@gmail.com

Smita Kulkarni
Assistant Professor, Department of Human Resource and Soft Skills, IBS Hyderabad (Under IFHE - A Deemed to be University u/s 3 of the UGC Act, 1956), Hyderabad, Telangana, India. E-mail: smita@ibsindia.org

Prerna Chhetri
Associate Professor, Department of Human Resource and Soft Skills, IBS Hyderabad (Under IFHE - A Deemed to be University u/s 3 of the UGC Act, 1956), Hyderabad, Telangana, India. E-mail: prernachhetri@ibsindia.org

The literature on women workforce that rejoin work after a career break, is limited to either determinants or consequences. However, there is a need to identify and understand career development models that focus on career breaks and women re-joining the workplace. This will give an understanding and insight into the factors that determine and influence women to return to work. Therefore, the paper reviews existing career development models in the available literature and proposes a comprehensive framework of factors that influence a woman's decision to re-join work post career break. The factors have been classified as internal and external factors. An understanding of the factors can help organizations as well as individuals contribute towards supporting women to rejoin work post career break.

Introduction

Career motivation and development have long been topics of great interest for both practitioners and academic research. This has led to a plethora of research on career and career development which resulted in several career models. However, many of these models are not specific to women and their issues. This is especially critical for women who leave work to look after their families, responsibilities of caring for younger children, elders, etc. Several papers have focused on the reasons why women leave the workplace (Hanson et al., 2008; and Metz, 2011), but rarely have researchers investigated the reasons for women returning to work after a break. This paper aims to understand the reasons why women who have left the workplace want to return to work by reviewing the literature on the career models. It aims to understand the influence of internal factors like career self-efficacy and protean career attitudes, and external factors like HR interventions and economic policies on their decision to return to work. This paper reviews several career theories to arrive at a conceptual framework for women who desire to return to work. This study contributes to the growing literature on the evolution of newer models of careers for women in this millennium.

Background

The world has marched into the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) with opportunities in cloud computing and Internet of Things. Klaus Schwab, the founder of the World Economic Forum, described the 4IR as an opportunity for governments to consider labor reforms as the nature of work has changed drastically from labor-intensive to technology- driven models. This applies to women especially as they often have high intent but low skill and low paying jobs. The 4IR could work in favor of these women in the short term. It has been noticed globally that there is a decline in the trend for Female Labor Force Participation (FLFP)1 which means women are less likely to participate in the labor market compared to men. This is evident in Southern Asia, where women's labor participation rate is 51.4 percentage points below that of men.2 In India too, Labor Force Participation Rate (LFPR) had been documented to be 54%, where female LFPR is nearly 50% lower than male LFPR.3

In another report by Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy, India had seen a dip in the female labor force participation rate among women of all ages except the ages of 20-24 years. The picture of women in the labor force is different in rural and urban India. Young women in the urban areas join the workforce than the rural areas of India (Urban India: 18.7%, Rural India: 12.2% in the age group 20-24 years of age).4 While the labor force participation of women in their twenties has increased, it has dipped sharply thereafter. There is however, a modest rise in women participation between the ages 30-34 and 35-39 years (Refer Exhibit I).

The Government of India, through the Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship, expressed commitment to improve the female labor force participation in the recent past (Refer Exhibit II). In 2018, National Institute of Transforming India (NITI) Aayog, the Government of India think tank released the 'Strategy for New India@75' with an aim to accelerate economic growth and to achieve UN Sustainable Development Goals. This strategy document identified constraints/challenges and suggested the way forward

for achieving the objectives. One of these objectives was to boost female labor participation to at least 30% by 2022-23.5 In order to encourage women joining the workforce, the think tank suggested policy changes and wanted to 'create liberal laws/guidelines that encourage women to re-enter the workforce after a break'.6 This clearly suggests that there is a definite need for women to join back work which would help them to reach their potential and also help the economy. This prompts an urgent need to explore why women want to come back to the workplace.

Literature Review

A problem that many organizations face is how to engage women workers in their 30s, in relation to their work and also encourage women who left the corporate ladder to join back the organizations. In order to find solutions to the problem, studies have been undertaken to understand the nature of the work, self-image that employees build up of their own work-life and the relation to their personal and family concerns (Schein, 1990). A person's career anchor is the evolving self-concept of what one is good at, what one's needs and motives are and what values govern one's work-related choices. One does not have a career anchor until one has worked for a number of years and has had relevant feedback from those experiences. But once a career anchor evolves, roughly five to ten years after one has gone to work, it becomes a stabilizing force in the total personality that guides and constrains future career choices (Schein, 1990). These anchors were originally based on a 13-year longitudinal study of 44 early sixties alumni of the MIT Sloan School Master's Degree Program in Management, supplemented by early and mid-career interviews of several hundred managers, teachers and members of various other professions and occupations to see if the categories applied to them (Schein, 1978 and 1985).

The Life career rainbow model provides certain other inputs that are extremely important as well. The model highlights career as an ongoing developmental phase, it is a combination and a sequence of roles played by a person during their lifetime (Super, 1982). There are nine main roles, namely, child, student, leisurite, citizen, worker, spouse, homemaker, parent and pensioner. Each of the roles mentioned above is played in four different theaters of life, namely, home, school, work and community. Each role is played in one theater, but individual roles can be played in multiple theaters as well. In addition, there are five life stages, namely, growth, exploration, establishment, maintenance and decline. Super noted that people have different life spaces due to personal factors (needs, values, interests and aptitudes) and situational factors (family, neighborhood, country, gender and racial bias). These personal and situational factors shape an individual's self-concept and career development tasks. In the paper, there are many roles mentioned, in reality it may be difficult to demarcate clearly when a role starts and when it ends. The time for each stage mentioned may not be the same. While this research gained many supporters (Okocha, 2001), it has not taken women into consideration.

Over the last few decades, a few more models have gained significance. One such model is the Boundary-less career model (Arthur, 1994). It described working lives that do not fall into the definition of a traditional career. The authors have provided six ways in which a career can become boundary less. These include the following, moving between different employers; drawing validation from external sources for reputation of themselves and the work they did; information of their skill set; sustainable relationships beyond the well-defined organizational boundaries including external networks; lateral movement over upward advancement of their careers and finally rejection of career opportunities for personal and family reasons.

Another model that has gained importance is the Protean career (Hall, 2002). This model focuses on career success through self-directed behavior and a value-driven attitude. The model stated that success results from an individual's own assessment of their own identity and they take responsibility and create their individual internal standards. Success in careers is not dependent on organization-defined standards of career management that are of high earnings and career advancement. Value-driven attitude referred to the degree to which an individual makes a career decision based on their core personal values. The Protean career is also characterized by its cyclicality. Instead of having a one-way career progression, a Protean career has a number of independent cycles of career exploration, learning and mastery over an individual's life span.

While both models may seem to overlap, they are distinct. That is a person could display protean attitudes and make independent, inner-directed choices, yet not prefer cross-boundary collaboration. In comparison, a person could embrace a boundary-less mindset, yet rely on one organization to develop and foster his or her career (Jon et al., 2005). These models have viewed careers differently than the traditional unbroken continuous careers. They are not free from criticism and there is little empirical support for the dominance of boundary-less careers (Inkson et al., 2012).

Cabrera (2007) found that careers were full of gaps/career breaks. She explored the reasons why women were leaving the workplace and found nearly 70% of the women who left the organization returned to work. The study also found that across a woman's life career, motives changed over time in sync with the Kaleidoscope career model.

The Kaleidoscope career model (Cabrera, 2007) suggested that women's careers are like kaleidoscopes, which produce different patterns over time. Women's career patterns change when they rotate different aspects of their lives to accommodate their roles and relationships. In the early career phase of a woman, the dominant life/career pattern is to be concerned with goal achievement and challenge. In the mid-career phase of a woman, the dominant life/career pattern is to be concerned with balance for family and recreational demands. In the later career phase of a woman, the dominant life/career pattern is to be concerned with authenticity. The kaleidoscope career model has shown that a woman's careers are relational and are a part of a larger, intricate web of interconnected issues, people. This is in sharp contrast to models that consider linear and sequential aspect. This is also evident when the researchers asked the question "I took a break from work/career to care for family, children, or elders". In Mainiero and Sullivan's (2005) study on Kaleidoscope theory, it was found that only 5.6% of men said they took a career break, while 27.7% of women said they did take a break. It may be possible that women who are on a career break may want to return to work. They would most likely assess what work-life/pattern they crave for and will seek a job that matches that pattern in their life. But research has largely ignored this aspect.

Recent work on woman's career pointed out that their careers are not boundary-less, protean or kaleidoscopic but frayed (Sabellis and Schilling, 2013) but in reality, their careers have non-linear patterns interwoven by personal and professional lives and are dominated by consistent struggles. Some studies have found that career gaps have been negatively related to income and career success for women.

Valcour and Ladge (2008) examined the effects of family variables (age at first childbirth, number of children) and career success variables (career gaps; inter organizational mobility and proportion of one's career spent in part-time work). The study elucidated that woman focused more on subjective career success (job satisfaction, career satisfaction) than objective career success (income, hierarchy) which differed greatly from their male counterparts.

O'Neil and Bilimoria (2005) proposed that a woman's career is impacted by their own changing image of their career and it happens in three phases (idealism, endurance and reinvention) which correlate with the same three stages of early, middle and late career. They suggested that a woman's career develops in three distinct age-related phases, characterized by a change in the career pattern, locus, context and beliefs. The paper suggested that in the early career phase (age 24-35), the driving force is idealistic achievement. In the second phase (age 36-45), the driving force is pragmatic endurance. The woman desires to manage multiple responsibilities both personally and professionally. To a large extent, women realize their career development is impacted by others both professionally (managers, colleagues) and personally (spouses, children, family). In the third phase (age 46-60), the driving force is reinventive contribution. In this context, it may be possible that women who are on a career break will be able to assess what they really want from a career and seek closely a job that matches their values at that point of life.

Apart from the above-mentioned factors, the economic factors also play a major role in career outcomes, especially in terms of recession or lack of employment opportunities (Herman, 2015).

While these career models are important, career motivation cannot be overlooked. London (1983) studied the relationship between career motivation and individual characteristics along with the relevant situational conditions. In this paper, career motivation connotes the desire to put in extra effort to reach an individual's career goals. Individual characteristics fall into three domains, namely, career identity, career insight and career resilience. Career identity is the ability of an individual to identify their career with their own identity. Career insight is the individual's ability to be realistic about themselves and their career. It included goal clarity and social perceptiveness. Career resilience is the individual's ability to adapt to changing conditions and overcome barriers. Situational characteristics are the elements of a person's work environment. These include the staffing policies and procedures, leadership style, job design, group cohesiveness, career developmental programs and compensation system.

Social cognitive career theory (Lent et al., 1994) provided a process for career development and explained how basic career and academic interests are developed; how career and academic choices are made; and how career and academic success is achieved. This theory is anchored in Bandura's Social cognitive theory as an underlying framework. Holland suggested an individual's choice, preference, achievements of career are based on their personality type. He proposed that there are six categories of personality types, namely, Realistic (R), Investigative (I), Artistic (A), Social (S), Enterprising (E) and Conventional (C) (Holland, 1973). In his theory, personality is the inclination for a specific type of work activity and work environment is the activities a person performs.

While the above-mentioned literature delves into the career development theories, these theories do not showcase the nature of woman's careers (Schreiber, 1998). Schreiber investigated the career development pattern for women by looking into the following areas: work-family balance, career interruptions and diverse career paths.

Conceptual Framework

From the above literature review, certain themes have emerged which are relevant for women who want to reenter the job market. These, in turn, can develop into propositions for future analysis. The broad themes are: First, a woman's career path which is culminated by the number of variables like the number of career gaps a woman has had (Valcour and Ladge, 2008) and the mobility between employers (Rousseau, 2001). Second, the woman's own motivated behavior which is culminated by the number of variables like self-directed behavior, rejecting career opportunities for family (Hall, 2002), career interests (Super, 1982), career identity, career resilience, career insight (London, 1983) career anchors (Schein) and career patterns a woman plans to achieve (Cabrera, 2007). Third, situational factors (family, country and neighborhood). Fourth, the organizational support through the human resources programs those companies have initiated to attract women getting back to work. These would include the staffing and training policies, job design, group cohesiveness (London, 1983).

Based on the analysis of the different career research theories and models, a conceptual framework has been proposed. To understand a woman's decision to restart work, a wide range of factors need to be analyzed (Figure 1).

This new model considers women's protean career attitudes, resilience, career self-efficacy as individual antecedents and government legislation, organizational interventions as external antecedents for a woman's decision to restart work.

Career Self-Efficacy: This is a belief held by an individual on their own ability to perform a career-related behavior, tasks, in order to make a career-related decision. Hackett and Betz (1981) had proposed that self-efficacy was an important variable in career development and decisions. They had argued that men and women, due to the gender role socialization, react differently to career development. Subsequently, Taylor and Betz (1983) developed the career decision self-efficacy scale to measure the individual's belief in completing tasks required for making a career decision.

Protean Career Attitude: This encompasses that the individual is self-directed and value-driven career orientation towards their career. This is different from traditional career attitude, where organizations manage the career. Individuals high on protean career attitude tend to manage career by themselves and take greater responsibility. Under insecure employment conditions, the concept of protean careers has emerged as a potential enabler for success (McDonald et al., 2005).

Government Policies: This shapes the local labor market and influences woman's employment opportunities.

Conclusion

Participation of women in the workforce today is increasing by the day and so is the increase in women's career break. The rate of rejoining work is however lower and several organizations as well as scholars are examining the systems that can be built to support women to rejoin work after a career break. Review of various career models focuses on internal factors such as career self-efficacy and protean career attitude as important factors that will enable women to rejoin work after a career break. The role of HR in employing practices and policies in creating a workplace conducive to encouraging women to rejoin work after a career break plays an extremely significant role. Similarly, the government policies around maternity breaks and provision of job opportunities for women to rejoin work can have a great impact on women's decision to rejoin work.

Managerial Implications: As per the World Bank report in 2019, women in India contribute 23% of the labor force vis-a-vis the global average hovering at nearly 48%.7 To alter this gender inequality, much has been written in the popular press on how certain companies in India have launched programs. These programs are meant to attract women who have left their corporate careers but want to return to work. These programs are usually internships on project basis and full-time jobs. TATA group launched the 'Second Career Internship Program' in 2008. This program helped women to decide the kind of project they want and the flexibility to work from a specific geographical location. In this program, women have an option to work part-time that suits their personal commitments. Another conglomerate, Godrej, one of India's largest conglomerates started its 'Careers 2.0' program in 2016. This program hires women for short-term projects, women are helped to acclimatize and become comfortable with returning back to work. Some of these roles are in communications design, corporate communications and human resources. At Dr. Reddy's Laboratories, generics pharmaceutical company based in India, has recognized this talent pool and they had launched the 'Comeback Careers for women'. These are positions that have been created especially for these women across all their departments. These are full-time roles. The above programs bear testimony that many companies want women to come back to work. In addition to building diversity, it acts as a sound pipeline for recruitment of women. There are several opportunities for women, Hence, it is important for career research studies to focus on women returning to work and the factors that impact their decision to do so.

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