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Midlife Career Momentum for Women

Roberts, B. W. & Friend, W. (1998). 'Career momentum in midlife women: Life context, identity, and personality correlates.' Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 3(3), 195-208.

In this detailed research report, Roberts and Friend (1998) discuss the career momentum of women approaching midlife. The authors argue that whereas studies of men's careers tend to indicate a progression of increasing investment, plateauing, and then decreasing investment in work until retirement, women's careers might show a different pattern because of the interruptions of family responsibilities. For example, at midlife, women may increase their investment in their careers, enabled by freedoms associated with children leaving home. On the other hand, women might decrease their career investment to spend more time with a retired spouse or to care for elderly parents (see also The 'Sandwiched' Generation).

The authors investigated the relation of career momentum to women's concurrent life context (eg family structure), identity structure, personality and psychological wellbeing.

Roberts and Friend explain that work and its defining features play an important role in constructing each person's overall identity. Investment in a career is related to high self-esteem in women. It increases the number of areas of stimulation in a person's life and provides more contexts in which to express and achieve one's goals, leading to more satisfaction, self-esteem and self-worth.

Factors such as earning money, successfully completing projects, working effectively with co-workers, and receiving promotions and pay raises are achievements associated with increased self-worth, and activities more likely to be afforded to someone who is actively pursuing a career.

Roberts and Friend used data from a longitudinal 30-year study (the Mills study) where participants were originally contacted in 1958 and 1960, then followed up in 1963-1964, 1981 and 1989 to trace the personality and life events of approximately 100 women.

The researchers found that the women in the study, by their early fifties, more often considered themselves to be increasing their career momentum than maintaining or decreasing it. However, according to an objective index of career momentum (job title and description), most women were maintaining, rather than increasing or decreasing career momentum. Women married to spouses who were retired were more likely to have low career momentum. There were no differences among high, medium and low career momentum groups at age 52 in the number of children living at home, nor were there differences in marital status. Thus, the hypothesis that an 'empty nest' or being single results in increasing investment in a career was not supported. In addition, spouse's income and health, as well as their level of care for their parents, were unrelated to career momentum at midlife.

Interestingly, women with high career momentum in midlife saw work as more important to their sense of self than women with maintaining or decreasing momentum.

The authors make an interesting point about a concept known as 'social age', which is an awareness of prescribed social norms attributed to one's position on a social clock. People can feel on-time or off-time on any given social clock, which is in turn associated with a person's personality and psychological adjustment. In Roberts and Friend's study, few women were consolidating their careers, retrospecting about past accomplishments or preparing themselves for retirement. The majority of the women viewed their occupations as a source of stimulation and future possibilities. Hence, for their cohort and sample, it was 'on-time' to continue to advance one's career at age 52.

The women who saw their career momentum at a high level showed a consistently high profile across measures of life context, identity structure, and psychological wellbeing. Women who were continuing to invest in their careers at midlife enjoyed greater occupational attainment and rated their work role more importantly than women who were either maintaining or decreasing their career investment in midlife. These same women scored higher on measures of self-acceptance, independence, and effective functioning at age 52 and rated their physical health higher than the other two groups of women.