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The study aims to explore the factors that influence Emirati women's career choice in the UAE. This study contributes to the influence of context in career choices by investigating how Emirati women chose information technology (IT) as a profession through the lens of the social cognitive career theory.

This study undertook in-depth interviews with 21 Emirati women working in technology in the UAE. The study considers women's career choices at three levels, i.e. from an individual, organisational and national context perspective.

The key findings include identifying the importance of national context in influencing career choices among other factors such as family centrality, desire to be seen as a role model, company reputation and government policy.

The study has wider implications for women's career choices in other contexts. The findings highlight the challenges women face, such as a lack of role models and family centrality, which need to be considered in recruitment policies and practices in other national contexts.

The originality of the study is its contribution to the literature developing understanding of the influences on women's career choices in the Emirates. While previous studies have identified the role of patriarchal influence on women's careers, we have less understanding of the importance attributed to individual factors such as being perceived as a role model within their family and to society. Similarly, the literature provides limited evidence of the influence of factors such as government sponsorship and company reputation.

The purpose of this study is to explore Chinese women’s pursuit of entrepreneurship as a career choice through the intersectional lens of gender and culture. The study aims to identify factors that influenced Chinese women’s decisions to pursue entrepreneurship.

In this exploratory qualitative study, we conducted qualitative, in-depth, semi-structured and one-on-one interviews with 16 Chinese women entrepreneurs.

We identified various factors that influenced Chinese women’s career choice of entrepreneurship. The factors include entrepreneurial attributes, rapid economic growth, societal and cultural influences, the dual role of family influences and strategic entrepreneurship.

Our study provides a contextualized understanding of the experience of Chinese women’s entrepreneurship career choices. It enriches the existing literature on career choices within the career development for Chinese women entrepreneurs. By applying social cognitive career theory (SCCT) to a specific cultural and gendered setting, we proposed the social cognitive women’s entrepreneurial career theory, which offers fresh insights into the interplay of personal, contextual and behavioral dimensions in shaping Chinese women’s entrepreneurial career choices.

This study aims to explore the nature of women's career experiences over the life course by examining career patterns, career locus, career contexts, and career beliefs.

A qualitative, inductive approach to data gathering and analysis was employed, using life story surveys, semi‐structured interviewing, thematic analysis, grounded theory, code development and descriptive statistics.

The data revealed distinct patterns of how women's careers develop over time, particularly with regard to the impact of career contexts (societal, organizational, and relational) and women's own changing images of their careers and career success. A three‐phase, age‐linked model of women's career development is proposed: the idealistic achievement phase; the pragmatic endurance phase; and the reinventive contribution phase.

Future studies should test replicability of these findings to determine whether this three‐phase model is embedded in the particular socio‐historical context of the times in which the particular women in this sample have lived or is universally applicable across different eras and changing realities.

Better organizational efforts are needed to ensure that women receive ongoing coaching and mentoring, work for managers who support their development, have access to organizational resources and opportunities to develop their skills, are given challenging assignments, are acknowledged for their unique talents, and are recognized for aptitude learned through life experiences and “non‐traditional” work histories.

This is a rare, women‐only study that looks at the career dynamics of women over the life course.

In the last twenty years, the women’s movement has resulted in a greater representation of women in once male-dominated venues, such as the job force and higher education. Women currently represent nearly 43% of those in the United States labor market, and it is expected that four in every five women ages 25–54 will be employed by the year 2000 (Hoyt, 1988; U.S. Department of Labor, 1995). Despite women’s increasing participation in the world of work, they continue to choose occupations that represent the stereotypically feminine range of occupations, meaning less pay and less status (Betz & Fitzgerald, 1987). For example, women are still underrepresented in engineering, architecture, and the physical sciences (Eccles, 1994; U.S. Department of Labor Women’s Bureau, 1995). These gender-based occupational patterns are also evidenced in college enrollment; women continue to comprise the majority in academic majors that are considered traditionally feminine, such as early childhood, elementary, and secondary education, library science, nursing, and home economics, whereas men are the predominant majors in physics, chemistry, architecture, and engineering (Bartholomew & Schnorr, 1994; National Science Foundation, 1990).

This paper aims to examine the role of the spouse, specifically the husband, for the woman manager's career by focusing on the gender role construction between spouses, and the relationship of these roles to the woman's career.

The topic was investigated within a Finnish context by analyzing the narratives of 29 female managers. A common feature among the women was their managerial position and extensive work experience. All the women had or had had one or more spouses in the course of their careers, and all but one were mothers, mostly of teenage or adult children.

A typology distinguishing five types of spouses was constructed: determining, supporting, instrumental, flexible, and counterproductive. The results suggest that fluidity in gender roles between spouses is associated with the woman manager's sense of success and satisfaction in her career compared with more conventional gender role construction. It seems that traditional gender roles between spouses can be one reason for women's difficulties in attaining (top) managerial positions in Finland.

The study contributes to the prior literature concerning the work‐family relationship by extending research into an area so far overlooked: namely, the role of the spouse in relation to the woman manager's career. The study calls into question the straightforward and unequivocal view of the family – so typical in discussions about work‐family issues – by showing the many different meanings that women managers attach to one of the family members.

The purpose of this study is to investigate women and men’s differences in perceived importance of various job attributes. Analyzing the job attributes that derive value might help to form intervention ideas for promoting greater participation of women in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) industries. Current research has primarily focused on this issue from educational, sociological and gender-based approaches, suggesting interventions such as enriching women’s science literacy and skills, increasing their science self-confidence and changing stereotypical views of the STEM field as masculine (perceived as lacking altruistic or communal values). Other have suggested policy interventions that include workplace family supportive programs.

Choice-based conjoint and choice model analyses were conducted to examine the importance of different job attributes for women and men.

Salary and the ability to combine work and family obligations were the most important determinants of women’s career choices.

This study is a first step to inform future intervention designs based on social marketing strategy. Focusing on the attributes related to women’s career choices is suggested to facilitate women’s entry into the STEM industry.

Increasing the value of STEM careers might lead to more equal representation of women in the STEM field.

For the first time, initial principals of a social marketing intervention is suggested after an examination of the core attributes related to women’s career choices.

The purpose of this article is to understand how women develop entrepreneurship as a career identity through women's various life stages. Using a life story approach, the authors study the formation of Indian businesswomen's entrepreneurial identity in businesswomen's unique socio-cultural context.

The study drew upon 15 semi-structured interviews with practicing women entrepreneurs using a qualitative methodology. Gioia methodology was used to systematically analyze the data for theory building.

The narratives of the Indian women entrepreneurs indicate that Indian women's entrepreneurial identity was a developmental process influenced by various episodes in different life stages-childhood, adolescence, marriage and motherhood. Life episodes influenced the creation and enactment of this entrepreneurial identity, which led to the emergence of entrepreneurship as a career choice.

The study's retrospective design may have raised concerns involving memory recall. The open-ended questions gave the participants the freedom to recount the life episodes that influenced the participants the most and may have partly mitigated this concern.

Prior studies have focused on specific life stages of women entrepreneurs, without taking a holistic life-story view, thereby missing out on how career identity is formed as a result of life episodes. Using the developmental psychology approach, the authors provide a nuanced and holistic lens to understanding women's entrepreneurship.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how women academics from the Arab Middle East enact their careers with reference to double-bounded contexts: academia as an institution encoding organizational career scripts and gender as another institution encoding specific gender roles. It is hoped that this cross-cultural perspective would broaden the understanding of careers beyond the economically advanced industrialized countries and better inform the current debate on the boundaryless career model.

The study is qualitative and exploratory in nature. It draws on one-to-one interviews with 23 female academics in early, mid and late careers, working in research universities in the Arab Middle East region.

The choice of academia as a profession is mainly driven by the subjective perception of an academic career as a calling, the lack of attractiveness of other career options in the region, and the appeal of the flexibility of academic work. Furthermore, the findings highlight both organizational (lack of mentoring and university support) and cultural factors (Islam, patriarchy, and family centrality) that shape/bind women's careers choices and patterns allowing thus for a better understanding of local constraints to the boundaryless career view in the Arab Middle East context.

The paper contributes to the boundaryless career theory development by addressing one of its major shortcomings, namely the lack of attention to context. It provides fresh insights from the Arab Middle East to the ongoing debate whether careers are boundaryless and subject to individual agency or whether careers are shaped by wider institutional factors and support existing calls in the literature to conceptualize careers at the intersection of several influencing factors.

Considerable research has been conducted to highlight women's career decisions to opt-out of corporate positions, but little is said about those who leave to become entrepreneurs. The purpose of this paper is to theorize kaleidoscope career parameters in relation to entrepreneurship stages and demonstrate the role of macro-national context (i.e. government initiatives and cultural practices) in women entrepreneurs' career choices.

The authors interviewed 34 Malaysian women entrepreneurs (MWEs) who were established in their careers and explored the following two research questions: (1) what career parameters are prioritized at different entrepreneurship stages? and (2) how does macro-national context influence women entrepreneurs' careers?

Adopting a kaleidoscope career lens, the authors show that authenticity was prioritized during the initial entrepreneurship stage, while balance and challenge were prioritized during the establishment and business advancement stages, respectively. The authors demonstrate that government support was conducive to women's decision to opt-in and stay in the entrepreneurship path. The findings also denote that cultural practices facilitated women's pursuit of entrepreneurship by encouraging family members to support women entrepreneurs in their career choices and actions.

The qualitative approach enabled us to specify the context-specific meaning women entrepreneurs in our study associated with authenticity, balance, and challenge. In doing so, this research extends the kaleidoscope career model to better understand women's career patterns at different entrepreneurship stages.

The role of women in Pakistani society – largely embedded in its patriarchal socio–cultural environment – has important implications for women’s entrepreneurial activity in the country. This study aims to investigate and analyse the influence of informal institutional factors on women’s entry into entrepreneurship in Pakistan, and determine how women exercise agency to cope with the constraints posed by such factors.

A qualitative approach is used to explore the normative context and lived experiences of women entrepreneurs in relation to the influence of socio–cultural beliefs and attitudes on their entrepreneurial career choices.

The findings suggest that women’s entrepreneurial career choices both revolve around and are shaped by a complex interplay of socio–cultural influences. Pakistani women entrepreneurs exercise their agency as a means of negotiating gender roles within both household and society, using religious descriptions as a means to justify their entrepreneurial activity.

While every effort has been made to ensure that the data were objectively interpreted, and the derived findings were robustly analysed, the research team acknowledges the many difficulties associated with adopting a social constructionist approach. As articulated by Fletcher (2011), the key issues of contextual objectivity (i.e. where the researcher judges what is important), reflexive turn (the need for the researcher to constantly reconnect with the subject) and potential multiplicity of contexts (the various contextual and potentially conflicting influences on the researcher) presents ongoing challenges for researchers in this field.

This study offers valuable insights into the impact of the informal (socio–cultural) institutional factors on women’s entrepreneurial activity, opening up new avenues for further research. The study also contributes to the women’s entrepreneurship literature from the perspective of an Islamic developing country.