(Press-News.org) London, UK (September 1, 2015) - Women leaving work to raise children have to redefine who they are, a study from the SAGE journal Human Relations finds. After exiting professional and managerial occupations, mothers are engaged in an ongoing mother/professional identity struggle, argue the researchers Shireen Kanji and Emma Cahusac. The process through which the mothers' choice is constructed as 'right' does not occur before their exit from work but manifests itself afterwards and intensifies over time, the study reveals.
"Analysis of mothers' sense making reveals how the choice to exit, channeled as it is through layers of societal and individual pressures, is laden with cost. An evaporating work identity and evolving struggles for self-redefinition following workplace exit highlight the loss women experience", explained the researchers.
Based on in-depth interviews with 26 mothers in London, the study sought to build on research showing that what is on offer is a long way from what women want and reveals that the 'choices' available are a far cry from the reality of women's feelings and attitudes. The researchers found that:
"The mothers in this study wanted to work, and many of them could have afforded childcare, but they nonetheless left their workplaces. Their stories do not match popular media portrayals of professional women opting out after realizing their true vocation was caring for their children."
Having a child causes a challenging identity shift in the workplace as women inevitability no longer fit the devoted employee mold. Thus, women experience an immediate disjuncture between who they are and who they are meant to be at work.
The study concludes:
"Over time, most women became reconciled to their loss, in part by changing their own priorities, and through this process they make their 'choice' the right one. But accepting or being content with the final outcome, which may have taken years to achieve, is not the same as mothers choosing what they had wanted. Many of the mothers in our study would have chosen a different path if other choices had been on offer."
INFORMATION:
The article "Who am I? Mothers' shifting identities, loss & sense making after work place" by Shireen Kanji and Emma Cahusac and published in Human Relations, can be accessed by reviewers here. Please note that the article will not be freely available to all until the embargoed lifts on Tuesday morning.
SAGE Founded 50 years ago by Sara Miller McCune to support the dissemination of usable knowledge and educate a global community, SAGE publishes more than 850 journals and over 800 new books each year, spanning a wide range of subject areas. A growing selection of library products includes archives, data and video. SAGE remains majority owned by our founder and after her lifetime will become owned by a charitable trust that secures the company's continued independence. Principal offices are located in Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore and Washington DC. http://www.sagepub.com
London, UK - 1 Sept 2015: Carbonated beverages are associated with out-of-hospital cardiac arrests of cardiac origin, according to results from the All-Japan Utstein Registry presented for the first time today at ESC Congress.1 The study in nearly 800 000 patients suggests that limiting consumption of carbonated beverages may be beneficial for health.
"Some epidemiologic studies have shown a positive correlation between the consumption of soft drinks and the incidence of cardiovascular disease (CVD) and stroke, while other reports have demonstrated that the intake of ...
More than half the world's population now lives in cities. As numbers continue to swell, decision-makers across the globe grapple with how best to accommodate growing resident numbers while maintaining healthy urban ecosystems. Previous research has demonstrated that urban green spaces and trees yield far-reaching benefits to humans, from increased happiness and health to absorbing surface water run-off and storing carbon. Researchers have long debated whether it is better to build compact developments with large parks or nature reserves, as often found in Europe and Japan, ...
A new development in engineering chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells, called affinity tuning, can make the CAR T cells spare normal cells and better recognize and attack cancer cells, which may help lower the toxicity associated with this type of immunotherapy when used against solid tumors, according to a preclinical study.
Many solid cancers have high levels of certain proteins such as ErbB2 and EGFR, which make them suitable targets for anticancer therapies. However, such proteins are also present at low levels in normal cells. Because of this, CAR T cells ...
Engineering chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells to lower their affinity for the protein epithelial growth factor receptor (EGFR) made the cells preferentially recognize and eliminate tumor cells that have high amounts of EGFR while sparing normal cells that have lower amounts of the protein, according to a preclinical study.
CAR T cells that are currently being tested to treat B-cell malignancies target a specific protein present on leukemia and lymphoma, but these immune cells cannot distinguish cancer cells from normal cells, explained Cooper. Even though such ...
In recent years, an effort has been underway to redefine malnutrition in pediatric patients to include both the acute clinical population and the more traditional ambulatory populations. Identifying and treating malnutrition in pediatric patients is important from an acute standpoint and to ensure that children have enough nutrition to reach optimal final height and development.
Pediatric malnutrition in the clinical setting was recently defined by the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics and A.S.P.E.N. as "an imbalance between nutrient requirements and intake that results ...
ANN ARBOR--Daily marijuana use among the nation's college students is on the rise, surpassing daily cigarette smoking for the first time in 2014.
A series of national surveys of U.S. college students, as part of the University of Michigan's Monitoring the Future study, shows that marijuana use has been growing slowly on the nation's campuses since 2006.
Daily or near-daily marijuana use was reported by 5.9 percent of college students in 2014--the highest rate since 1980, the first year that complete college data were available in the study. This rate of use is up ...
The fossil of a previously unknown species of 'sea scorpion', measuring over 1.5 meters long, has been discovered in Iowa, USA, and described in the open access journal BMC Evolutionary Biology.
Dating back 460 million years, it is the oldest known species of eurypterid (sea scorpion) - extinct monster-like predators that swam the seas in ancient times and are related to modern arachnids.
The authors named the new species Pentecopterus decorahensis after the 'penteconter' - an ancient Greek warship that the species resembles in outline and parallels in its predatory ...
Many of the most memorable stories in the history of science revolve around the conscious realization of an idea - the "Eureka!" moment. But what triggers these moments? Is there always some serendipitous event preceding a sudden epiphany, such as when Isaac Newton famously figured out gravity when he saw a falling apple?
Writing in September's Physics World, Vitor Cardoso talks about how these questions led him on a quest of discovery through the web-based project The Birth of an Idea, which he co-founded with artist Ana Souse Carvalho.
"Ana and I had been talking ...
Women living in poor areas in the UK are almost twice as likely to develop clinical anxiety as women in richer areas. However, whether men lived in poorer or richer areas made no difference to their levels of generalised anxiety disorder (GAD). These are amongst the main findings of a major survey on how socio-economic factors affect mental health in the UK.
Generalised anxiety disorder is one of the most common mental health conditions in modern society, but little objective work has taken place to show the factors in society which can lead to the development of anxiety. ...
How do you convince someone with schizophrenia or other psychotic disorders that they are ill if they don't want to believe it? If you don't recognize that you are ill, you may resist treatment, but is there something which causes this lack of awareness? Awareness of illness, also known as 'insight', is a serious problem in the treatment of psychotic patients. Now work being presented at the ECNP Congress in Amsterdam investigates whether concentrations of a marker of brain cell dysfunction are associated with impaired insight.
Past studies have indicated that an area ...
