Revisiting Career Path Assumptions: the Case of Women in the It Workforce

Many researchers have argued that additional systematic analysis of the information technology (IT) workforce is necessary in order to more deeply understand organizational human behavior as it relates to career anchors or values and motivations that attract an individual to a particular career. For these reasons the purpose of this paper is to examine the career anchors of women in the American IT workforce and their relationships to occupational decisions. The data for this examination comes from interpretive interviews conducted with 92 women and a quantitative survey conducted with an additional 210 women. The results of our analyses give cause for challenging some longstanding assumptions about career anchors that exist in the literature. This research also makes a theoretical contribution through its extension of an emergent theory about within-gender variation to the context of career anchor variations among women in the IT field.