According to previous research, achieving women display nontraditional personality traits and are influenced by affiliative motives. To examine the needs exhibited by professional women who have made significant achievements, 23 career women (physicians, attorneys, veterinarians, business women, politicians, and artists) completed the Edwards…

Research on women in atypical occupations has generally focused on highly educated women and has neglected to compare atypically employed women to equally educated women in sex-typical occupations. Since the median American worker has only 13.6 years of schooling, the lack of research on the personality characteristics of noncollege-degreed women…

A study was conducted to examine the effects on young women of reading about nontraditional role models in the sciences and engineering, and discussing various aspects of participating in science and engineering careers with a trained instructor. Subjects for the study were 153 female students enrolled in advanced, elective science courses (10th…

Research studies concerned with sex-role stereotypes have noted that behavior is often shaped by expectations others hold about certain individuals. In one experiment, female undergraduates who expected to meet attractive desirable men portrayed themselves as more feminine and performed less intelligently on a bogus IQ test when they thought the…

An in-class survey of a sample of 345 (266 male and 79 female) college students enrolled in agriculture classes at a midwestern university was taken to determine whether different socialization patterns played a role in their decision to enroll in agricultural education. The survey included questions on attitudes toward men and women in society,…

Self-definition is a thought pattern, scored from imaginative fantasy, which is related to constructive behavioral independence of social norms. Research has shown that self-definition seems related to the opportunity for operant initiative-taking, especially when active and less sex-stereotyped activities are chosen. Senior college women (N=118)…

Women are significantly underrepresented in those occupations most highly valued in Western society. To investigate sex role stereotypes as the discriminant variable between female students in male programs and in traditionally female programs, female Israeli vocational high school students (N=1,138) completed the Bem Sex Role Inventory (BRSI),…

A "release from proactive inhibition (PI) task" method examines the masculine-feminine connotation of a word as an attribute of encoding in memory. Male (N=45) and female (N=61) subjects were given four trials, each trial consisting of three occupations with all masculine or all feminine connotations, a subtraction task, and a recall…

What impact did a nontraditional work experience have on subsequent life decisions in older women's lives, and what can be learned from these experiences that could have an impact on the educational and career decisions of girls and young women? This paper presents data from a collaborative research project with a group of eight older adult women…

Past studies on the sex-typing of occupations have used a single bipolar scale, ranging from masculinity to femininity. An empirical examination of both occupational sex roles and occupational prestige was conducted using two unipolar scales to assess masculinity and femininity. College students (N=183) rated 94 occupations, which were then…

Since the reemergence of the women's movement in the early 1970's, it has been necessary to reexamine women's definitions of success and attitudes toward work across a spectrum of traditional and non-traditional jobs. Three basic hypotheses were tested: women in female-dominated jobs (1) have higher fear of success imagery and (2) attach more…

Women have traditionally entered courses of study congruent with social sex-role stereotypes. Two critical questions were examined with regard to their choice of college major--whether traditional or non-traditional. Women and men enrolled in 22 instructional program areas in the University of Wisconsin system for the years 1973-74 and 1977-78…

This study examined gender roles and career orientation among 126 male and 126 female fourth through sixth grade gifted students. The Children's Sex Role Test was used to assess masculinity, femininity, and androgyny. While results showed more gender appropriate scores for males than females, overall more boys than girls were classified as…

Previous research on the personality traits and needs of professional women has found that women in nontraditional roles possess traits that are more characteristic of the male sex role, and that in many instances they are higher on those traits. To determine sex and occupational differences in the self-perceptions of male and female psychologists…

Although research has shown that children tend to designate traditional sex-role areas when asked what they would like to be and that girls nominate a narrower range of vocations than do boys, more recent findings suggest that children of both sexes nominate equal numbers of vocations. Older girls, unlike boys, also choose nontraditional…