The Influences of Career Support and Sexual Identity on Sexual Minority Women's Career Aspirations

The authors examined the relationship between sexual identity, family/friend career support, and career aspirations in a sample of 381 sexual minority women. The results indicated that family career support and friend career support were positively related to career aspirations of sexual minority women. The results also indicated that the relationship between family career support and career aspirations depended on the level of negative sexual identity. The findings demonstrate the utility of social cognitive career theory (Lent, Brown, & Hackett, 1994, 2002) with this particular population. Limitations and implications for further research and practice are discussed. Over the last decade, there has been an emergence of conceptual and empirical research focused On career-related issues specific to sexual minorities. Despite this emergence, there still remains a paucity of research devoted exclusively to the career development of lesbians (Chung, 2003). Researchers continue to study the career development of lesbians and gay men together, regardless of the assertions from some researchers that sexual minorities should not be treated as a homogeneous group when exploring career-related issues (Elliott, 1993; Etringer, Hillerbrand, & Hetherington, 1990). Special issues on the career development of lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) individuals appeared in The Career Development Quarterly (Pope, 1995) and the Journal of Vocational Behavior (Croteau & Bieschke, 1996). Prior to 1995, however, there had only been 11 published empirical studies on the career experiences of LGB individuals, and of these 1 1 studies, five focused exclusively on the career experiences of lesbians (Croteau, 1996). Although these studies have been important to the development of future theoretical and empirical efforts focused on lesbians' vocational issues, these studies have been criticized as mostly atheoretical (Croteau, 1996). Fassinger (1995) asserted that the vocational identity of lesbians is inextricably interwoven with their sexual identity, and thus, it is important to examine the lesbian identity development process concomitantly with lesbians' vocational identity development process. Fassinger and Miller (1996) defined sexual minority identity development as "recognizing and accepting that one's primary or predominant sexual orientation is gay or lesbian within the context of a heterosexist and homophobic society" (p. 54). In an effort to address the limited theoretical attention given to the study of lesbians' career development, Fassinger (1996) used a theoretical framework of women's career development developed by Betz and Fitzgerald (1987) as a foundation to explore lesbians' internal and external vocational barriers related to the coming-out process, including occupational stereotyping, lack of lesbian role models, loss of parental support, and low self-confidence, in addition to counselor unawareness of the unique career struggles that lesbians endure. The influence of facultative factors on the career development of women in general has been underexplored relative to barriers as "interest in barriers stemmed largely from a desire to explain factors that stymie women's career development" (Lent, Brown, & Hackett, 2000, p. 42). Lent et al- (2000), therefore, encouraged researchers to explore supports as well as barriers and their relation to career choices. Researchers responded to this call and have explored the role of social support on academic and career- related outcomes. For example, perceived support from parents was found to relate to the educational plans, career expectations, career choice prestige, and career aspirations of Mexican American high school girls (Flores & O'Brien, 2002; McWhirter, Hackett, & Bandalos, 1998) and to career decision self-efficacy of African American high school students (Gushue & Whitson, 2006). In another study, Quimby and O'Brien (2004) strengthened the understanding of women^s career development; their results indicated that women who perceived fewer career barriers and who experienced stronger social support experienced greater student and career decision- making self-efficacy, thereby emphasizing the importance of social support in women's career development. …