What Do Women Want?: An Investigation of Career Anchors among Women in the IT Workforce Jeria L. Quesenberry College of Information Sciences and Technology The Pennsylvania State University 1-814-865-8952 (phone) jquesenberry@ist.psu.edu Eileen M. Trauth College of Information Sciences and Technology The Pennsylvania State University 1-814-865-6457 (phone) etrauth@ist.psu.edu ABSTRACT In an attempt to address the underrepresentation of women in the information technology (IT) workforce it is important to understand the values and motivations of female professionals. Hence, the purpose of this paper is to examine career anchors of women in the IT workforce and how these factors are manifested in their careers. In doing so, we examine data from a field study of 92 female IT practitioners. Three important findings resulted from this exploration. First, technical competence and managerial competence are mutually exclusive. Second, a combination of career anchors for a given individual can be found. Third, career anchors vary in terms of temporal characteristics. Categories and Subject Descriptors K.7 The Computing Profession; K.4 Computers and Society General Terms Management, Human Factors, Theory Keywords Career anchors, diversity, gender differences, women, IT workforce, careers of women in IT, IT profession, IT careers, IT professionals, individual differences theory of gender and IT 1. INTRODUCTION Researchers have argued that traditional models for understanding organizational, social and cultural influences on careers are becoming increasingly problematic [3][12]. They explain that this shift is primarily due to recent changes in the definitions of work, widespread downsizing, shifts in organizational loyalties and the increasingly global nature of the labor force. Marshall and Bonner [12] add that prior organizational research models share a key assumption that “most employees seek natural progressions upward and they want to work for a single, stable employer” (p. 281). Yet the current workplace is characterized by complex job arrangements with highly divergent and diverse career paths. Hence, researchers have begun to embrace organizational theories that account for the dynamic nature of today’s workers [3]. A common organizational theory used to account for these factors is career anchors. Career anchors refer to people’s self-perceived talents, values and the evolved sense of motives as it pertains to his or her career [16]. Researchers have argued that determining career anchors of information technology (IT) employees is important because these characteristics influence the selection of and retention in occupations [1][9]. Ramakrishna and Potosky [13] stress that organizations might be able to improve retention of IT employees by matching employee career anchors to their career opportunities. At the same time, women are underrepresented in the IT workforce. For instance, women accounted for approximately 59 percent of the American labor force in 2004 [23]. Yet, during the same time period they accounted for only 32.4 percent of the IT workforce [10]. In addition, studies have also found that women are more likely than men to leave the IT workforce (e.g. [24]) and are less likely to return [10]. Hence, the purpose of this paper is to investigate career anchors of women in the IT workforce in an effort to better understand factors that contribute to their underrepresentation. This paper is structured as follows. First, we provide a brief overview of literature on career anchors of IT professionals and relate these findings to gender and IT research. Then we present data from a field study of women in the American IT workforce. Finally, we present the contribution of this research to both theory and practice. 2. LITERATURE REVIEW Schein [15] first introduced the concept of a career anchor as “that element of our self-concept that we will not give up, even if forced to make a difficult choice” (p. 158). Hence, career anchors influence people’s career choice and decisions. Schein and DeLong [6] identified multiple career anchor categories, which are described below: 1. Technical/Functional Competence – The desire for technical activities in order to gain proficiency in a certain area. 2. Managerial Competence – The desire for managerial activities such as supervising, managing and coordinating the work of others. 3. Entrepreneurship/Creativity – The desire to create new products or services despite challenges, risks or obstacles. 4. Autonomy/Independence – The desire to be free of constraints and restrictions in order to pursue managerial or technical competence. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. SIGMIS-CPR’07, April 19–21, 2007, St. Louis, Missouri, USA. Copyright 2007 ACM 978-1-59593-641-7/07/0004...$5.00. 122