Understanding and Researching 'Choice' in Women's Career Trajectories

In this chapter we consider some of the cultural conditions that make the notion of choice appear persuasive in accounts of women's career experiences. We contextualize the emergence of choice around careers by connecting it to the cultural discourse of postfeminism. Reflecting a primacy placed on individualization and on the role of the individual, divorced from structures such as gender and class, postfeminism is oriented towards an understanding of feminine agency and a new 'choosing femininity' that suggests women can 'have it all'. In connecting the phenomenon of choice to its social and cultural context, we highlight in particular the hidden and hitherto unrecognized influence of postfeminism in Hakim's account of preference theory which proposes that labour market outcomes are largely the result of individual choices made.