Cultural Context in Women’s Career Development and Success with Dr. Nadya Fouad Part 2

Join in on Part 2 of the conversation with Dan and his guest Dr. Nadya Fouad as they continue to discuss women's career development in this episode of Psychotherapy & Applied Psychology, 

Dr. Fouad joins in from the Counseling Psychology division of the Department of Educational Psychology at the University of Wisconsin. Join Dan and Dr. Fouad as they discuss women's career development, cultural contexts, and the impact of societal changes on career choices. In Part 1, they delve into the challenges of balancing work and family, the evolution of women's roles in the workforce, the intersectionality of gender, race, and relationship dynamics that adds complexity to women's career development, and so much more!

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Transcript

Broadcasting from the most beautiful city in the world, I'm your host, Dr. Dan Cox, a professor of counseling psychology at the University of British Columbia. Welcome to episode number 10 of Psychotherapy & Applied Psychology. Here we dive deep with the world's leading applied psychology researchers to uncover practical insights, pull back the curtain, and have some fun along the way in an attempt to bring new ideas to practitioners, those trained to be practitioners, and the applied psychology curious.
I want to hear from you. You'll notice in the show notes a link that says, click here to text the show. If you click on that, you'll send me a text.
On my end, I only get the last four digits of your number. So don't worry, I won't be calling. Let me know what you think of the show, who I should have on as a guest, or just say hi.
Welcome to part two of my conversation on women's career development. If you missed part one, it's not required, but feel free to jump back one episode to hear the beginning of my conversation. So once again, it is my absolute pleasure to welcome one of the world's foremost experts in women's career development to the show from the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, Dr. Nadya Fouad.
What's your sense of how the cultural context or the messages that are coming to women, how those have changed over the decades or how those have stayed the same, those sort of external or cultural messages?
Yeah, I think that unfortunately some of them haven't changed. You should be a mother. Every woman should want to be a mother.
Every woman should want to be a homemaker, taking care because she's naturally more nurturing. Those messages are still there.
But, yeah, that's still there. Has it changed? There is a concomitant, you should work.
You should want, especially for white women, you should want to achieve. You should want, and for many African American women, you should want to be a credit to your race. You should want, for Latino women in a very traditional Hispanic environment, you should want to be aspired to be taking care of the house, taking care of your family.
You should want to do that. You should want to marry somebody who is going to provide for you. So it hasn't changed all that much.
Although there's more freedom, but it hasn't changed all that much.
So I want to hit on, and if you don't mind, I'm going to quote you a little bit. So in 2023, you had a paper published in the Counseling Psychologist. Yeah, several, but it's one systematic review, and I'm just going to quote you because I want you to sort of, I think it's well written and it's also worth commenting on.
So you wrote, you wrote, exploration of internal and external conflicts between the demands of work and family continue to be a significant factor in women's career development. And then a few lines later, often clients' internal and external conflicts interact in self-shaming thoughts and excessive guilt related to balancing these roles, end quote. And when I read that in my own anecdotal experience, that's what I see in here.
I see that as an experience that, I guess, particularly white women often have, that it's not like the balance scales where one has gone down and the other has gone up, that there is this kind of they've both gone up and to be frank, I think that I'm mostly naïve of that. Like, oh, wow, that's like, and then I hear it and I'm like, oh, wow, that's hard. Like, that's a hard way to live.
And to me, it can be not as a therapist, but as sort of someone who cares about, it feels like, don't feel that way. Obviously, it's not that simple, but that's my reaction. Because it's sort of like, oh, why do you, you know, like, why do you have, why do you put all this pressure on yourself to do this and do, it's okay, you know.
But that, so I was just, you know.
And how does that work for you?
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Well, so what's your question?
Well, I guess, could you speak to, well, I guess I sort of think that you were about to go with something. So I kind of want to let you just sort of riff, and then I'll come back with specific questions if there are any.
Okay. First of all, it's hard to get access. It is self-shaming, and it's hard to get access to what the messages are so pervasive, pervasive.
You know, it comes from media. I'm not on social media at all, and I'll tell you what my experience was that led me not to do that. But it comes from social media.
It comes from YouTube videos. Is that also called social media? Anyway, it comes from family.
It comes from books. It comes from, you know, think about my 10-year-old granddaughter.
She buys, you know, she's exposed to all of those fairy tales. You know, you meet the man, you meet the prince, he takes care of you. She also has other messages, and she certainly has messages from her mother who has a PhD, and you know, et cetera, et cetera, and her grandmother who has a PhD, right?
But the messages are so pervasive about what your goals should be. And in America, I don't know if this is true in Canada, but in the US, it is very, the question that kids get, if an adult doesn't know what to say to a kid, they say, what do you want to be when you grow up? At age four, right?
And from a career development perspective, you know, what kids are going to say is what the uniform is or what the, you know, all of the external accoutrements of a career. They want the police uniform, the firefighter uniform, the ballerina slippers, the tutu, those kinds of very traditional things, right? And that gets gendered from the minute these kids are born.
You know, I mean, literally from the minute these kids are born. And the message is about what you should do, what you shouldn't do, how you should, what your values should be, what paths you should take are so pervasive that it's, you don't even know you're not, you're being, you're feeling crummy about not following a path that you didn't realize you had set yourself on, you know? And it's so, you know, thinking of Bronfenbrenner's multiple layers, you know, the, you get the messages about your gender, you get the messages about your race, you get the messages about your social, your schooling, your social class, you get the messages about, from the politics now, very, very divisive politics in the United States, and then before you know it, it's hard to unpack all of that, and you've made decisions, and that's really, if I could do anything, would be to get kids to make, to eliminate those barriers in high school, so when they're ready to make a decision, they're free to make the decision.
They haven't, like, you know, if you don't take math in high school, you want to be an engineer, you've got at least three years of remedial work before you can even think about what you want to do. So think about the barrier of that, much less if you want to be, aspire to be a physician or a scientist or, you know, et cetera, et cetera. I don't know that I'm answering your question, Dan, am I?
So if you were to speak to the therapist or the therapist in training about how they could work with women experiencing this conflict.
Well, the first thing would be to help women realize that it is, there are external barriers, you know? So this work I did, if I can pivot a little bit to this research I did, I had a student, Mary Fitzpatrick, who was an engineer, she had a bachelor's and a master's in engineering, and decided to come back and get a PhD in counseling site to really study women in engineering. And we were doing, she was on my research team doing a lot of this research on barriers for girls at middle school, high school, and college, and we were finding some interesting differences, but still seeing the gender differences, particularly in math, although one interesting thing is everybody lumps math and science together.
The kids themselves see them as very different. But Mary said to me, we don't want to do another project. I was getting my team to think of another project we could start.
She said, let's not ask why women go, what they choose to do. Why are women going into engineering and then not staying in engineering? And she had a lot of friends, colleagues over the years that did that.
And it's roughly half of the women who graduated engineering, enter the field, graduate in a very difficult curriculum, enter the field, and then they don't stay in the field. And so that really set us on a project with my colleague here in the business school, Romila Singh, which was a marvelous project. We ended up going to universities and getting their alumni list.
So these were women who graduated in engineering. And then we followed up with them. And then when, because, you know, I don't know what, about 500 of the 5,000 that we ended up getting had left the field.
And we were, you know, and they were leaving the field for chilly climate. They were leaving the field for sexism, racism, sexual harassment, you know, and blaming themselves, you know. So if I could say to anything to a therapist, it's like really helping women to realize this is, these are external barriers.
They do not need to take sexual harassment, you know. So often, women think this is my fault, I must have done something. And the whole culture is geared around blaming them for this.
So helping women to understand that there are external barriers and then there are internal barriers. And those internal barriers are the messages they tell themselves. I'm not good enough.
I don't know if I can do it. I don't know if I'll be a good enough mother. I don't know if I'll be a good enough partner, you know.
And then if they're in a non-traditional field, they may not have the kinds of resources that they need to be successful in that occupation.
So what do we do?
Well, I do think, you know, from a social cognitive perspective, we empower them. We help them learn political skills. We help them have, describe the situation and help them perhaps have a different lens on it, particularly if they're seeing it as an internal fault when it's really an external situation.
We know from the research that mentoring helps, that learning political skills helps, that helping them to own their voice at work helps. Those are the kinds of things that they can facilitate women doing and helping them to reframe the problem. So can I give an example?
In this study, we were hoping for 800 women in engineering to respond, and we ended up well over 5,000 women. It was incredible. It just lit a fuse for people.
I'm still getting emails from people writing and saying, you know, I was in your study in 2012. Yeah, that kind of thing. So we put a text box in, anything else you want us to know, and it was like thousands of pages of comments.
One woman wrote and said she was the last person. Her manager insisted or supervisor insisted on speaking to every single member of the department before they could, before they individually could go home. Not everybody as a whole could go home, but they individually could go home.
And because she was a single woman, she was always the last one. That he talked to the only woman in the in the in the department. She was the only one, the last one he talked to.
And she said, but I don't know that I can do anything because all the rest of them have to go home to a to a family. Well, okay. What do you do with that as a therapist?
No, he should be evaluated for what, how he's treating her differently and what, how do you role model? How do you empower her to go have that conversation? And if he doesn't change, how do you empower her to go have the conversation with his boss?
You know, those are, that's an example.
So could I ask you to like dig into that a little bit in terms of like, you know, if I'm, if I'm working, imagine you're, if you were talking to a student on Practicum, you know, and, you know, how would you help them teach, I guess one, to believe that she should have that conversation, but maybe even more to the point, because this is more unique, I think, is how do, you know, how would you walk them through how to teach her to have that conversation effectively?
Well, it's a good question because I do this all the time with students, right? So asking, so what does she want to have? I would want the counselor to empower the client to choose her own goals, first of all.
So I'm not going to impose that on her, but I am going to, there is some consciousness raising that I think needs to happen here that she doesn't have to put up with this. You know, if she doesn't change, if she doesn't change the situation, how likely is she to leave? Does she want to leave?
What would she want to, how would she want to resolve it with the realization that the angrier you get, the less productive a conversation is, right? And I also really believe in earlier discussions are better. So the earlier she can have that conversation with him, that maybe he doesn't even realize it.
But the consequence is that she's working every night until 10 o'clock and sometimes doesn't, you know, and feels like it's very unfair and feels like she's being treated very differently. And I will bet you that there are policies in our organization that work against that. So the first, I would also encourage her to know what the policies are, to know what her rights are, so that she can be informed on the decision that she wants to make.
So walking through that with her and the consequence of not doing anything as well.
I think that part of, you know, when you were talking earlier about how to help women in some of these situations, part of what I was hearing was kind of a very, I mean, whatever your orientation happens to be, but a very, an obvious application of a very cognitive model, right? Like, so, you know, what are these expect, you know, what are you telling yourself, what's reasonable, what's right, you know, that sort of stuff. But then when you jumped into talking about, you know, learning political skills, which is sort of what we're talking about here, I was like, ah, that is something that we don't teach very much in our classes or shows up very often in our textbooks, is how do you help a client...
Yeah, and so that really sort of stood out to me as like, that is a unique thing that would be helpful for practitioners in terms of when they're working with clients.
Yeah, so I would say, as a therapist, I'm much more emotional, much more get to the emotions, because most of the clients I've worked with over the years have been too much in their head to get to, for me to really do good work just cognitively, you know, so more emotional in terms of how do you want this to go and how is this feeling for you and is it working for you and so on and so forth. But also from a social cognitive perspective, from the career theory of social cognitive perspective, I also would approach it from how do you increase self-efficacy and how can you have some successful experiences? How can you decrease your anxiety?
These are sources of self-efficacy and sources and also start to look at realistic outcome expectations.
So I had a conversation about a month ago, did an episode with Jesse Owen from the University of Denver, and he really helped me clarify my thinking when it comes to social justice and what he proposed or he sort of argues that we should be doing in the therapy room. And I'm going to, so I don't want to speak for him, but my sort of interpretation of what I learned in that was that he pushes, you know, he's a big fan of social justice approaches and theories and practices. And when he's working one-on-one with a client, that he's focused on the client and what's going to be most beneficial for them rather than focusing on changing the system.
Like those two things are pretty separate. I'm wondering what your thoughts are and if you could speak to that a little bit in your thinking about working with women.
Well, I think it's a good question because there's always... So you remember my talking about the zeitgeist and the environment. And certainly feminist therapy came out of that zeitgeist in the early 80s.
And Laura Brown's writing about feminist therapy and the personalist political, right? And the notion that we owe... I'm not an adherent to this, but the notion that we owe our clients the challenges of...
the challenge of a feminist perspective, that they must, that they should understand the power dynamics involved in the shaming, the self-shaming that you talked about. I have a hard time... I guess I would say I have a hard time not doing that without informed consent.
And I haven't done therapy personally for a long time, so I'm just talking about what I'm doing, talking about with supervision of the client work my students do. But I would have a hard time doing that without informed consent, but I think I still need to raise the question that... what are the power dynamics here?
And what do you want? Raising the question doesn't impose the value on them. But it's, you know...
I have students who are in large mental health systems, you know. How do you not question the... That's a social justice perspective for me.
You know, the role of insurance, the role of the management of these companies for the gain and not for the good.
Well, and I think what I heard you saying, which makes sense, is if you're working in that large system, then what you push for, what your attention might be in that system, would fall under a sort of a social justice framework, where at least what I heard you saying is, if you were working with a client or you were working with someone working with a client, that the consciousness raising or awareness of power dynamics, I still hear that as that's still in service of the client.
Well, I think absolutely. And I struggle from a feminist perspective to be aware of that. But it's not my decision.
It's not my.
Life. So I think that you could do more harm than good if you're imposing this perspective on clients that they're not ready to hear. If you're raising questions, it's one thing.
It's imposing. Do you realize this is a power dynamic here? I don't think it's ethical to do that.
So how would you handle it instead?
Well, I think raising the question, is it possible, you know, there are potentially power dynamics here. Is it possible that that's what's going on? And I have had the experience where a student has resisted looking at it that way and then circled back and said, oh, you know, maybe, maybe.
So I think that my goal, my role is to raise the question. I don't do anybody any good if I don't raise the question, if I think that that may be there. It may be an insight that is valuable to the client, and they can choose to disregard it if they want.
I think it's an interesting, the question of, is this a sort of gendered power dynamic, or is this something different? I often sort of say, is this a manifestation of sexism, or is this person just kind of a jerk?
Yeah. So to go back to that article, and one of the things we found in that review, the systematic external barriers are still so pervasive for women, right? So the question I think is, is this an external barrier, or are you internalizing something to your detriment?
And I still think that's a relevant question.
Now, I mean, women can be jerks too, right? But I still think it's, if you start to question the decisions that, I mean, so many of these decisions are human made, right? If you question the decisions, like who says you only get six sessions?
Who says, right? And what if you need more? Who says I can only have six sessions with this client, right?
And why was that decision made? And what if the client needs more? I'm digressing a little bit here, but what is so many of these decisions are made from external factors that have very little to do with the mental health of the client.
And I still think helping a client to view the appropriate role of external constraints is valuable.
Yeah, and I love what you just said, and I know that you talk about this in your work, but that it's such a simple framing. Is this something I can, is this internalized? Is this something I'm telling myself or I'm sort of, and that could be an internalization of something external, but is this something I'm telling myself that's getting in my own way of living the life I want to live, or is this an external barrier and I'm going to deal with those things somewhat differently?
And I do think that the, I'm going to go back to something I said earlier. I think you still have to ask about the consequences of bucking some of those messages. And, you know, so what are the, in that story I was talking to, I gave of the woman and the supervisor, are there consequences to her challenging him?
And what are the, walking through, talking through, you know, role modeling, empty chair technique and so on and so forth, talking through what might be the consequences of this and what would she, how would she handle that? Yeah, that's just good therapy, right?
So, at the beginning of this conversation, you talked about the work that you did in that school and how effective it was.
Have we, so what I heard, one of the things I took away from that is that we can do things to help open up women's perspectives in terms of potential careers, potential occupations that they could go into, things they would like, things they would be successful in. Are we doing that? And let's sort of keep it to the US where you have your expertise.
Are we doing that overall? Is that part of the system now? And I know it varies, right?
No, it's not. No. I did a study with Angela Byers Winston, who's now at University of Wisconsin-Madison, where we looked at the census.
So remember I talked about women entering the workforce in the late 70s, early 80s. So we looked at 1970, 1980, when you're starting to get affirmative action policies, EEO policies. So we looked at the census, 70, 80, 90, 2000, and 2010.
And if you looked at the policies, the external policies, the billions of dollars that have gone into federal grants, foundation grants on helping girls go into STEM careers, if you looked at all of that and EEO and affirmative action, you should have seen that influx of women and racial ethnic minorities into the workforce, you should have seen a better distribution across occupations. You still saw, we still saw in 2015, the same occupational segregation we saw in 1970. So it's pretty depressing.
There's some combination of external factors and internal factors that go into why this occupational segregation is so pervasive. You know, what? I don't know.
I mean, here I'm ending my career and saying the same thing. Yeah, it's so pervasive.
I had naively assumed that it had gotten better. I'm not saying that it was perfect, but I had assumed it had moved a couple of points.
Well, I think where it's moved a couple of points is in education.
We are seeing more, but 20 percent of college engineering graduates are women. That's been the case since 1990.
Half of them are leaving engineering. That's still the case since 1990 or 90s. There needs to be more systemically done.
And in the current, in the US, the current backlash against NEI initiatives doesn't help. Because some of the things we know that do help have to be systemic. They have to be systemic.
Right, and that's sort of what I would think a lot of the programs that have been developed and evaluated over the years, that those would be integrated into the education system.
Yeah, and it's not that we don't know some things. For example, here's a policy. For example, there's a very, the American School Counseling Association has a marvelous set of standards and ways that kids in the United States should have career development programming, as well as academic programming, social-emotional programming.
It's a very, very good model, mandated by many states, almost none of which mandate a school counselor do it. So in Wisconsin, for example, there is a mandated school counseling program, but they don't have, it doesn't have to be delivered by a qualified school counselor. And we know what the best ratios are, and student to counselor ratios, right, in schools.
You know, very few states actually have that. So that's an example where if you really wanted to move the needle, if you really wanted to move the needle, that's where the money needs to go. And it did in the 60s.
The Sputnik focused a lot of money and resources into schools to increase science education that both girls and boys benefited from, right, the National Defense Education Act. And then that money gets, you know, sort of the original career education materials came from. So we know what works, we just cost money.
And there's less and less incentive to do that preventive kind of work.
So what's pushback that you've gotten to your work?
Well, I would say the biggest pushback I've gotten has been around the engineering work, where we were, I mean, the first pushback came why didn't we study men? Why, you know, my answer to that was it wasn't about the men. We were really interested in what was the experience for women.
And in that, we got pushback on that article that was published in TCP, in The Counseling Psychologist, because we just focused on within group differences for women. And people kept saying, yeah, but what about the men? I was like, I don't care about the men.
I mean, I am married to a wonderful man. I have three sons. I care about men specifically.
But in this research question, I really wanted to know what the differences were for women. And what did we need to know about the experiences for women, not as compared to men, but what their experiences were for women. And then in the engineering study, because we really did conclude that it was the climate.
It was a climate. So one of the articles, I think one of the presentations we gave, it was titled, It's a Climate Stupid. It's the climate that was really making women leave engineering, not workforce.
Most of these women were working in big companies that had the policies in place, but we were concluding that it was the climate. And the pushback there was, no, it's not the climate, it's because they want to have babies. It's like, no, that's not what our research is showing, but it was like, I started to go, we asked to talk to various companies and stuff, and I wouldn't go unless I had an opportunity to really speak to decision makers.
And regardless of the level that I was talking to, the CEO or the CIO or CTO or whatever their title was, they'd say, yeah, but they really just, you know, they just need to work harder. No, if you want to keep women, you need to make the environment different. Well, how do I do that?
Well, pay attention, you know, pay attention to who's, if you have policies, who's taking advantage of them? What's going, the manager, the frontline manager, frontline supervisor was so critically important, and that was the person that was not having the most interventions, intervene, the ways to intervene for them. Nobody paid attention to what they were doing.
We followed up, got money to do, this was too bad, but we got a grant to look at teams and what were the, what predicted an effective team that led to innovation. And that study totally got derailed by COVID. We had companies that were willing to work with us, and then you're just not going to study.
They didn't want to study teams during COVID, and then they didn't want to study teams where half of them were remote. And it just was, yeah. So it totally derailed that project.
It's too bad because it was a good study.
So if you were talking to a clinician who was working, let's just for example here, who was working with a mom, and mom is stressed out because she's having this, I want my daughter to have, you know, I see my daughter is good at math, likes math or whatever. It doesn't even have to be that. But she's worried, you know, she wants to open up opportunities for her daughter who's 10, who's 12.
And this is something that mom's thinking about a lot because she's reflecting on her experiences where, and her perception of herself and even, you know, in our little example here, she actually is, mom is actually quite good at math, but she went into, you know, but I don't know. Whatever she went into, it has nothing to do with math in our little example. And so how would you, what would you encourage, how would you help that clinician, that helper work with mom so that she could open up the doors for her daughter, her perception or perspective of her daughter?
I would get her involved in any extracurricular activities that support math and science, summer programs, museum programs, take to take, you know, get her involved, take her to, you know, Washington, DC and go to the National, you know, the National Space and Air Museum, Air and Space Museum. I would take her to Kansas City and go to the space thing there, whatever that thing, you know what I'm talking about. I would just expose her to as much opportunities to learn as possible.
I would, so again, this is thinking about what are the opportunities to learn, learning experiences? What are the opportunities to get role modeling? Where are the role models in the community or YouTube or whatever that would be?
I would try to assess if there's anxiety that needs to be reduced, test anxiety or something like that. Now we're talking physiological arousal. And I would give her all the opportunities to pursue those learning experiences.
So really it's the, how can I help her be exposed to these? And I need to think creatively about what's in my community, what's in my budget, what's possible to get her into these situations.
Right. Exactly. And then listen for what might be, so now I'm talking about increasing self-efficacy and increasing realistic outcome expectations.
So what could you do with this? What would be an opportunity to, if you're studying whales, who studies whales? If you like dinosaurs, who studies dinosaurs?
So you're linking the interests to the career as well.
Well, Dr. Fouad, I really appreciate your time. This has been fantastic. That's a wrap on part two of my conversation with Dr. Nadya Fouad, to whom I am most grateful.
Please don't forget to get in touch by sending me a message. Until next time!