Explaining the adult careers of dyslexic boys: Variations in critical skills for high-level jobs

Several hundred boys who were diagnosed as dyslexic (specifically reading disabled) in adolescence and who attended a private college preparatory school for dyslexics were followed up in adulthood. The occupations of these men, who were above average in both intelligence and socioeconomic background, were compared to those of both a control group and the general white male population. As hypothesized, the dyslexic men had higher level jobs than the average man but they were much less likely than the controls to become professionals. They rarely entered jobs such as physician, lawyer, or college teacher which require higher degrees; instead most became managers or salesmen. The occupational differences between the dyslexic and control men were related to, but not completely accounted for, by their large differences in educational attainment. Data on the competencies rated as critical to good job performance in different occupations were consistent with the hypothesis that dyslexic men would establish themselves in relatively high-level jobs emphasizing nonacademic rather than academic on-the-job skills. Nondisabled professionals rated getting information through reading among the most critical of the skills required on their jobs. In contrast, managers and salesmen rated reading as less important than nonacademic competencies such as taking initiative and responsibility or being persuasive. The results illustrate the value of knowing more about the particular competencies required in different jobs in order to help members of special groups, particularly those such as dyslexies who have specific and enduring handicaps but who are otherwise intellectually normal.     

Applying an occupational classification to the work histories of young men and women

Holland's occupational classification was used to analyze the work histories of a national representative sample of young men and women ages 14 through 24. Hypotheses tested were concerned with the psychological orderliness of occupational changes, the relationship between occupational experiences and aspirations, and the relationship between consistent occupational codes and the stability of work histories. The analyses supported the usefulness of the occupational classification for organizing the work histories of both young men and young women. For both sexes, the classification reflected regular patterns of job changes. The category of a person's earlier job was an efficient predictor of a person's subsequent jobs; likewise, the category of a person's current job forecasted the category of his vocational aspiration. The consistency of an occupational code was also related to job stability for whites but not for blacks.     

An analytical description of employment according to race,sex, prestige,and Holland type of work

The composition of employment was examined using 1970 census data for employed civilians, Holland's occupational typology, and a prestige scale. The present report extends earlier examinations of the labor force using these dimensions by studying the sex and race composition of types of work at several levels of prestige, and by examining the extent of government employment among men and women in different jobs. Results indicate areas where women and blacks are under- and over-represented. In addition, because of the association between type of work and prestige level, aspirations or interest in a type of work may have implications for the level of work that is available. Counseling and research implications of the results are discussed.     

Of Men and Money: Characteristics of Occupations that Affect the Gender Differentiation of Children’s Occupational Interests

Occupational interests become gender differentiated during childhood and remain so among adults. Two characteristics of occupations may contribute to this differentiation: the gender of individuals who typically perform the occupation (workers’ gender) and the particular goals that the occupation allows one to fulfill, such as the opportunity to help others or acquire power (value affordances). Two studies tested hypotheses about whether U.S. 6- to 11-year-olds show gender differences in their interest in novel jobs that were depicted as (a) being performed by men versus women and (b) affording money, power, family, or helping values. In Study 1, 98 children rank-ordered their preferences for experimentally-manipulated novel jobs, and they answered questions about their occupational values and the value affordances of jobs in which men and women typically work. In Study 2, a second sample of 65 children was used to test the replicability of findings from Study 1. As hypothesized, children were more interested in jobs depicted with same- than other-gender workers in both studies. Boys showed greater interest than did girls in novel jobs depicted as affording money in Study 1, but not Study 2. Explicit knowledge that men and women typically work in jobs that afford differing values increased with participants’ age.     

Occupational mobility as measured by Holland's theory of career selection

This study examined the occupational mobility of men ages 45–59 as measured by Holland's theory of career selection and its relationship to men in the work force. Stability was discussed in two distinct ways: (1) stability within a job, and (2) stability in the kind of work a man does over a career. In his research Holland concluded that Realistic and Investigative personality types would change personality type less often and have more stable job choices in comparison to other personality types. The results of this study supported these findings to some extent, but also concluded that stability in a personality type was strongly influenced by the number of jobs available in a particular personality type and the structure of the labor market demand. In addition the results showed that psychological concepts seem to be more important in changing jobs than in selecting initial jobs.     

The relative effectiveness of alternative job sources

Vocational research has focused on the occupational choice process and the individual's adjustment to work. Very little research has examined the job search process in which the individual must engage in order to implement occupational choices. This study examines one dimension of the job search process: the relationship between job source and subsequent work experiences. The data reveal that when the respondents initially entered the labor market, those relying on formal job sources tended to work in higher-level occupations and in jobs more closely related to their training than their counterparts who used other job sources. In the longer run, the labor market advantages associated with the use of formal job sources dissipated for the engineering majors but tended to persist for the business alumni.     

职业污名与离职倾向：牵连家人污名与家庭卷入的作用

职业污名对从业者的工作态度和工作行为有着重要影响。以往研究从个体职业身份的视角解释职业污名的作用, 忽略了从业者个体身份认同的多重属性。本研究基于身份边界理论, 提出职业污名会通过牵连家人污名这一机制影响从业者的离职倾向。另外, 这一机制的强弱取决于个体的家庭卷入程度。本研究通过对分属不同职业的384名从业者的3轮问卷调研发现, 家庭卷入调节了牵连家人污名在职业污名与离职倾向之间的中介作用。当个体的家庭卷入水平高时, 这一中介作用更强; 家庭卷入水平低时, 该中介作用更弱。本研究在理论上提出并检验了职业污名影响的新机制, 同时对实际管理工作提出了建议。     

REPRESENTATION OF THE WORLD OF WORK IN DAYTIME TELEVISION SERIALS

Daytime television serials were analyzed for their representation of the world of work. It was found that 80 percent of all jobs portrayed were in the professional, technical, and managerial category with a very high representation of jobs in the health fields. When occupations represented by men and women characters were separately analyzed, similar patterns of gross overrepresentation of the professional occupations and underrepresentation of clerical, sales, and benchwork categories were noted. This distortion of the world of work as portrayed on television serials was compared with the distortion already noted in the occupational literature.     

Distinctive self and occupational member concepts in different occupational preference groups

This investigation attempted to test and extend selected aspects of Super's self-concept theory of career development. Four hundred twenty-eight male college student subjects, representing 39 college majors, selected their most-preferred occupational interest areas from a list of 14 factorially separable areas. The students described both themselves and their most-preferred occupational member concepts with Adjective Check List items. Individuals with demonstrably different self-concepts and occupational preferences displayed differences in the concepts that they held of members of their preferred occupational areas. Relatively distinct dimensions of similarity of self and occupational member concepts among students who preferred the same occupational area were also found.     

Procrastination's Impact in the Workplace and the Workplace's Impact on Procrastination

Procrastination is a self‐regulatory failure, whose costs are debated. Here, we establish its impact in the workplace. Using an Internet sample, we assessed 22,053 individuals in terms of their sex, employment status, employment duration, income, occupational attainment and level of procrastination. High levels of procrastination is associated with lower salaries, shorter durations of employment, and a greater likelihood of being unemployed or under employed rather than working full‐time. Also, procrastination partially mediates sex's relationship with these work variables. Women tend to procrastinate less than men, evidently giving women an employment advantage. If women procrastinated the same as men, there should be 1.5 million fewer women in full‐time employment in the US. alone. Determining the causes of procrastination in the workplace, we also examined it at an occupational level. The results strongly support the gravitational hypothesis: jobs that require higher levels of motivational skills are less likely to retain procrastinators. However, there was some support that jobs can foster procrastination. Procrastinators tend to have jobs that are lower in intrinsically rewarding qualities.     

Being attractive,advantage or disadvantage? Performance-based evaluations and recommended personnel actions as a function of appearance,sex, and job type

Prompted by a concern with the effects of appearance on how individuals and their work are regarded and how rewards are allocated in work settings, an experiment was conducted to determine whether physical attractiveness differentially affects the performance evaluations and recommended personnel actions for men and women holding managerial and nonmanagerial jobs. As predicted, attractiveness proved to be advantageous for women in nonmanagerial positions and disadvantageous for women in managerial ones. Unexpectedly, however, appearance had no effects whatsoever on reactions to men. Additional results indicated that attractiveness enhanced the perceived femininity of our female stimulus people, but did not enhance the perceived masculinity of those who were male. These data were interpreted as supportive of the idea that the differential effects of appearance in work settings are mediated by gender characterizations, and that fluctuations in the perceived person-job fit are key to understanding the seemingly inconsistent reactions to attractive and unattractive women in employment situations. The theoretical and applied implications of these findings are discussed.     

Student self-selection for specializations in engineering

The general hypothesis that students self-selecting themselves for different occupational fields differ in relevant values and interests was tested for specializations within engineering. Industrial engineers were found to be different in work values and in their image of their subfield from students of other engineering specializations. The study concludes that in terms of type of student selecting engineering, the profession cannot be treated as an undifferentiated entity. It is suggested that in future research engineering students may be regarded as relatively homogenous with respect to work values only if their area of specialization is duly considered.     

Workforce Segregation and the Gender Wage Gap: Is “Women's” Work Valued as Highly as “Men's”?1

This study focuses on gender segregation and its implications for the salaries assigned to male‐ and female‐typed jobs. We used a between‐subjects design to examine whether participants would assign different pay to 3 types of jobs wherein the actual responsibilities and duties carried out by men and women were the same, but the job was situated in either a traditionally masculine or traditionally feminine domain. We found pay differentials between jobs defined as “male” and “female,” which suggest that gender‐based discrimination, arising from occupational stereotyping and the devaluation of the work typically done by women, influences salary allocation. The ways in which the results fit with contemporary theorizing about sexism and with the shifting standards model ( Biernat, 1995, 2003 ) are discussed.     

Gender traits and identities in a "masculine" organization: the Israeli police force

Gender and occupational identities were examined within the Israeli police force, a stereotypically masculine organization. The principal hypothesis was that women in this organizational setting did not reject their gender identity. Rather, they self-attributed more traditionally masculine traits in addition to their feminine traits. This was especially so among women going through particularly intense occupational and organizational socialization needed for field jobs. The findings only partially confirmed the hypothesis. Most women in the sample considered themselves to be highly feminine, even though they self-attributed masculine traits. Although the women, like their male colleagues, ranked occupational identity higher than gender identity, their feminine identity (usually in contrast with the masculine organizational context) was not repressed and their gender identity was as strong as that of the men.     

The influence of gender labels on the sex typing of imaginary occupations

Social scientists have been concerned not only with gender stratification within the occupational labor force but with young peoples' recognition and aspiration toward same-gender careers. In this paper we investigate how gender labels influence individuals' evaluational sex typing of occupations. Four gender-marked booklets were constructed such that six imaginary occupations within the story were performed by persons labeled as women, men, both men and women, or individuals. College, high-school, and fifth-and third-grade students were asked to evaluate whether a gender-marked occupation was a position for women, men, or both sexes and possible for girls and boys. Students were also asked to indicate which occupations they preferred. Not only were the occupations classified in relation to the gender labels, but occupational gender barriers were perceived. In essence, males were restricted from engaging in female-labeled jobs and females were restricted from engaging in male-labeled jobs. However, career aspirations     

Knowledge of the world of work: A test of occupational information for young men

The study evaluates a test of occupational information administered to a national sample of 5000 young men, aged 14–24 in 1966, as part of the National Longitudinal Surveys of employment behavior. The predictive validity of the test score is assessed by reference to multiple regression analyses which confirm the significance of the score as an independent predictor of subsequent hourly earnings and occupational status. Correlation and factor analyses are used to examine the quality of the measurement instrument. All in all, the instrument is judged to exhibit desirable characteristics in terms of internal consistency reliability, discriminatory power, and level of difficulty. The test's reliability compares favorably with a commercially produced test designed to be used in counseling as a measure of occupational knowledge. With the possible modification of deleting a section relating to knowledge of earnings differentials, the test is commended to those involved in assessing and counseling the occupational choice process.     

Vocational behavior and career development, 1980: A review

Papers were reviewed in the sections where their major findings seemed to have the most important implications. Since it typically was not possible to do justice to individual studies in a few lines of summary, readers are referred to the specific articles of their interest for further information regarding other findings.As has been the case in the past several years, the number of studies related to vocational behavior and career development appears to be expanding, along with perceptions of what is relevant to the field. As greater emphasis is placed on the working life of individuals after initial occupational choices are made, researchers on vocational behavior and career development will increasingly find it necessary to synthesize research findings from the areas of industrial/organizational psychology, organizational sociology, and organizational behavior and theory. This factor may suggest greater collaboration among researchers across these fields in the future. In any event, the broadening base of relevant research, while challenging, also is an exciting development with rich potential for increased knowledge of vocational behavior.As Walsh mentioned in his review of 1978 literature, there is a vital need for more work of a longitudinal nature. We see some increase this year, but we are too frequently forced to draw conclusions regarding long-term vocational development from studies which are mainly crosssectional and correlational in nature.Among the research directions of note this year is the increasing emphasis on information processing/decision-making frameworks as a means of studying the vocation development process. Other trends were the growing concern with the relationship between work and nonwork, interest in recruitment processes, and the emphasis on situational as well as individual factors in predicting vocational behavior.     

Immigration, Gender, and Psychosocial Adjustment: A Study of 150 Immigrant Couples in Israel

Research on gender differences in the process of psychosocial adjustment of recent immigrants is scant. This study was designed to assess occupational, social, and personal/psychological aspects of adjustment to life in Israel among 150 heterosexual couples that immigrated together from the former Soviet Union after 1990. The mean age of participants was 46, over 60% had postsecondary education, and have lived in Israel for the average of 9 years. The study included a structured survey and in-depth interviews with 15 couples. The results suggest that overall levels of adjustment and well-being reported by men and women are rather similar, although they take somewhat different paths toward social integration. Men were doing better in the economic/occupational domain, whereas women were more active in the social domain (e.g., building their personal networks, exploring new lifestyles). Both men and women had experienced occupational downgrading in Israel, but more women worked in physically-demanding jobs such as geriatric nursing and cleaning. Women suffered a more dramatic occupational downgrading than men, as well as lower job security and under/unemployment. Yet, they showed more flexibility and tolerance of their new work roles. No tangible gender differences have been found in the general indicators of psychosocial well-being and overall satisfaction with life in Israel. Processes of social adjustment among immigrants from the former Soviet Union may be less gendered than in other immigrant communities, reflecting more egalitarian gender relations in the Russian/Soviet culture.     

The Impact of Gender and Age on Attitudes and Reactions to Unemployment: The Israeli Case

The research examined the impact of gender and age on attitudes and reactions to joblessness among 613 unemployed individuals in Israel (aged 21–60 years). With regard to ethnicity, most of the participants were born in Israel and the remainder were evenly distributed between Europe–America and Asia–Africa. The majority of participants had at least secondary education. On the whole, results indicated that both gender and age had significant effects, but did not interact. Furthermore, there was little significant interaction between marital status and gender. Despite recent changes in women's orientations toward work, gender differences are still evident in relation to unemployment: (1) women tend to reject jobs more readily than men on the basis of job content, working conditions, conflicts between job requirements and family obligations, and masculine-typed work, and (2) men tend to devote more time per week to job hunting. As these differences are not age related and are partly independent of marital status, it can be argued that they stem from generalized social expectations regarding gender roles (men as breadwinners and women as responsible for the home) to which unemployed men and women adjust themselves even before they actually fill these roles. In addition, the following age differences were apparent: (1) middle-aged unemployed reported spending more time looking for work than did members of the younger groups, (2) the youngest group saw advantages in unemployment in that it left them time to devote to themselves and also reported the least deterioration in health as a result of unemployment, and (3) young people were more likely to believe that others have no respect for the unemployed, yet preferred to be out of work than to accept a low-paying job.