Current Perspectives on Women's Multiple Roles

Abstract

An understanding of gender theory and processes provides a crucial framework for career assessment and adjustment regardless of how individual women may vary in their visions for occupational work and family life. Across cultures, social systems operate in similar ways to "structure the psyches of both sexes to reproduce their desired ideal types, and they do so by controlling what can be thought and felt" (Ker Conway, 1994, p. 152). This article centers around an understanding of the active processes of reproducing gender through societal language and discourses and how such processes can inhibit multiple role involvement and role sharing for women in modern dual-earner families. Two discourses particularly influential in the "doing of gender" are described, and these are referred to as the "women and men as equals" discourse and the "men as incompetent care-givers" discourse. A segment from the popular television program Dateline, provides a powerful illustrative example. Finally, ways to disrupt gender producing processes are briefly considered.