Do Schools Guide Young Women in Career Choices?

Many educational systems only offer career counseling to students in their junior or senior years in high school, if at all. Counselors, who are often dealing with the more formidable issues of teen pregnancy, drug use, and violence, lack the hours and energy to guide female students to positive futures. Thus, young women look to popular magazines for inspiration; magazines that assert that the "right" clothing, makeup, and dating strategies are keys to a joyful womanhood. If these popular magazines discuss work at all, it is in relation to planning oneås career wardrobe. Today, models are often photographed in career-like settings, sipping coffee or chatting on the phoneëbut that is the extent to which most fashion magazines depict women in careers. Finally, because popular publications fail to glamorize the benefits of "nontraditional" career fulfillment, teenage girls avoid pursuing careers in mathematics, science, or technology. As one woman recently remarked in a USA Today article on the lack of women entering technical career fields: "We need a television show starring an anorexic, beautiful software engineerßthen the girls would go "Oh, I want to be that!"

Organizations and industries recommend that educators and policymakers strengthen efforts to prepare young women for careers. In addition, research organizations remark on the lack of women working in math, science, and technology careers. The following links discuss these findings in more detail:

Links:

Becoming a Computer Scientist: A Report by the ACM Committee on the Status of Women in Computing Science
http://cpsr.org/cpsr/gender/becoming.comp.sci

Educational Pipeline Issues for Women
http://www.ai.mit.edu/people/ellens/Gender/pipeline.html

Career Planning for Young Women