This book examines common issues and concepts concerning women in non-traditional, male dominated occupations. It explores the question of whether these women are the agents of change or are instead changed themselves. It provides a statistical examination and theoretical analysis of occupational sex segregation in the UK, the rest of the European Union, and the USA. Then, it provides a more in-depth understanding of women's work lives through the experiences of the women themselves in four occupations; management, academia, engineering and the priesthood.

This research investigated the relationships between reference group choice and job satisfaction, and explored womens definitions of career success. Women working in traditional and non-traditional occupations (N = 52) in a mid-sized university in Western Canada participated in personal interviews. The results revealed that significantly more women compared themselves to others when assessing their job satisfaction than those who did not. No significant differences emerged when comparing levels of satisfaction of women in non-traditional occupations with male reference groups and women in traditional occupations with female reference groups. Similarly, no significant differences in levels of satisfaction emerged between women in non-traditional occupations with female reference groups and women in traditional occupations with female reference groups. However, low power may have accounted for the non-significant findings. Other factors, such as job characteristics, that may be influencing levels of job satisfaction are discussed. Content analysis of womens definitions of career success suggested that women in each type of occupations used similar subjective criteria when defining career success, with the two most frequent coded criteria being happy with work and achieving their goals. Organizational implications of the findings are discussed, including possible factors influencing womens levels of satisfaction, and the development of reward systems reflective of the interests of all employees. Future directions for research are proposed, such as continued investigation of the concept of similar comparison others for women, and womens perceptions of the importance of social comparisons in assessing levels of job satisfaction.

This report uses data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth Labor Market Behavior to test a series of hypotheses about characteristics of individuals and their families that influence their occupational preferences and their turnover in the military and in civilian jobs. The study's findings have three important policy implications: (1) women enlistees have much lower exit rates from the armed forces than their counterparts in civilian jobs; (2) job traditionality does not affect turnover for women in civilian jobs (for a variety of definitions of the traditionality variable and for several alternative specifications of the civilian turnover model); and (3) for women in the military there is no effect of being in a traditionally female or a traditionally male occupation on turnover.