Crossing over: gender and career at midlife

It has been claimed that many professional career women retire early because they are tired of fighting the male-dominated workplace culture for lesser rewards than their male colleagues. This essentialising view is contradicted by data collected in interviews with a group of professional men and women. In midlife, the women as a group are expanding their public activities, in contrast to the men as a group who have tended to remain in one occupational area. Yet it must also be noted that the career experiences of these people ranged across a spectrum, and that there were women whose careers approximated a "male" pattern, and men who shared the apparently "female" embracing of further challenge. Furthermore there appeared to be little relationship between the kind of career experience a woman had had and her desire to leave the workforce. I argue that to remain within the structuralist paradigm is limiting, and that an analysis of internalised discourses of masculinity and femininity provides a more helpful explanation of the outcomes discussed in this paper.