Career development of women of color and White women: assumptions, conceptualization, and interventions from an ecological perspective. (Special Section).

Current career counseling practices are based on certain assumptions about clients and their career development, and these assumptions implicitly reflect male, western European experiences and worldviews. These assumptions may not reflect the general life priorities and specific role commitments of many women of color and White women. An ecological perspective on career counseling is proposed to conceptualize the dynamic interaction between the person and the environment. This perspective holds promise for assisting career counselors in their work with women of color and White women.

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Career counseling, as widely practiced today, evolved at a time when the typical career client was young, male, White, able-bodied, publicly heterosexual, and ethnically homogeneous (White immigrants from western Europe). However, today's U.S. labor force is far from homogeneous. One strategy to remedy the previously limited practice of career counseling is to make counseling available to everyone regardless of race, color, creed, affectional preference, or biological sex. In fact, the practice of career counseling has increasingly been extended to populations that vary in age, sociocultural status, race or ethnicity, and gender (Gysbers, Heppner, & Johnston, 1998).

In this article, we argue that this open-door policy of offering career counseling to everyone is insufficient in itself to address the needs of many women of color and White women. First, we briefly examine how the assumptions on which current career counseling practices are based implicitly reflect male, western European experiences and worldviews. These assumptions concern (a) the separation of work and family roles in people's lives; (b) reverence for individualism and autonomy in American life; (c) the centrality of work as life activity in people's lives; (d) the linear, progressive and rational nature of the career development process; and (e) the structure of opportunity characterizing the labor force as a whole. These assumptions render many career counseling practices either insufficient or irrelevant to the experiences of many women of color and White women. Next, we suggest that implementation of an ecological perspective may better meet the needs of many career clients today. Finally, we make sug gestions to encourage the career counseling profession to embrace a broader, ecological model of career development.

It is important to emphasize the reason for the careful use of modifiers (e.g., some, many) throughout this paper. The analysis of basic assumptions related to career counseling requires an examination of broad generalizations that are rooted in gender and cultural diversity and that reflect modal expectations about career development. Little justice would be done on behalf of marginalized individuals if a new singular mold was simply substituted for previous models of career development. An innovative model embracing diversity as the core of career development is needed.

Moreover, it is important to note that not all individuals have the luxury of making career choices. For many low-income people, having a paid job is a necessity that does not often involve choices about a career path. In these situations, the oppressive nature of pervasive poverty becomes the salient influence on career development.

Career Counseling Today: Examination of Basic Assumptions

Career counseling, as widely practiced today, continues to follow a brief, three-step model that includes an intake interview, administration of assessment measures, and test interpretation (Gysbers et al., 1998). The client's role in this model is to obtain and synthesize information about self and the world of work. The subsequent job and educational decisions are expected to initiate a potentially rewarding career trajectory over time. The counselor's role is to provide the client access to sufficient information about self and work and, if necessary, to improve independent decision making skills.

This model of career counseling is based on a number of implicit assumptions about clients and the career development process itself, which can be described as follows. Work plays a central and pivotal role in people's lives. Individuals are responsible for making independent decisions that actualize their career potential. The focus on individual assessment reflects an assumption that knowledge about individual traits and preferences is the most important factor in optimal career decision making. Career counseling also typically refers to counseling for work roles with little exploration of other life roles that are commonly assumed by adults (e.g., family, community). These rational job decisions initiate or maintain an orderly, linear progression of career development in terms of continuous, increasingly skilled, and rewarding involvement over time. Finally, career counseling perpetuates the optimistic belief that any individual, if she or he works hard enough, will be able to realize her or his occupational dreams. The world of work is seen as facilitating individual autonomy and rewarding hard work with economic security and success.

There is nothing inherently wrong with this vision of career development. It is consistent with an American ethos of individual self-sufficiency and freedom of choice, officially mandated since the birth of the United States as a sovereign nation. More than a political philosophy, the emphasis on individual autonomy is a worldview that permeates our psychological conceptualizations of the nature of human functioning. This vision of career development has never reflected the needs of everyone, however, and is not consistent with the general life priorities and specific role commitments of many women of color and White women.

First, the reverence for individualism and autonomy implicit in this widely practiced model of career development reflects only one among numerous possibilities for viewing the world. Contrary to this model, many women and people of color experience human life as defined, sustained, and responsible to others within a nexus of community. For many racial and ethnic minority members, membership in a collective group is far more important than individual accomplishments (Helms & Cook, 1999; Landrine, 1995). Career choices may thus be weighed in light of the potential contributions such choices would make to the group as opposed to the autonomous choices made for individual self-actualization (e.g., Heppner & Duan, 1995). For many people, the priority placed on roles outside of work may positively affirm the greater psychological salience of these commitments, rather than represent compensation for what is missing at work. This possibility is particularly likely when these extrawork commitments are rooted in nondominant cultural values (e.g., Morgan, Guy, & Cellini, 1986). Proponents of the relational perspective in women's career development have also argued for interdependence rather than independence as a defining principle for many women (e.g., Forrest & Mikolaitis, 1986; Gallos, 1989).

Patterns of life role enactment that commonly characterize many women's lives also do not fit a singular focus on career success. Across cultures and over time, with few exceptions, women retain major responsibility for home and family regardless of involvement in paid and unpaid work outside of the home (Betz, 1994). In a comprehensive review, Shelton (1999) concluded that

women continue to spend more time than men on housework, whether they are employed or not; they continue to do more of the work involved in caring for children and to take more responsibility for that work; and finally, women's volunteer activities are more likely to be related to family than are men's. (p. 387)

These patterns reflect gender-based allocations of duties that have transmuted in form rather than disappeared with the influx of women into the paid labor force (see also Sekaran & Hall, 1989). Cook (1993) described the pervasive allocation by default of home and family obligations to women and of paid work outside the home to men as constituting different gendered contexts of life.

Dramatic changes in participation by women in the paid labor force tended to normalize, for many women, the pattern of primary work commitment that was earlier expected primarily of men and unmarried women. The configuration for many women, however, may best be described as a "both/and" orientation, with life stories embedded in multiple commitments and interdependencies (Gergen, 1997). Economically privileged women may have considerable flexibility in how they optimize their commitments; for most women, by necessity motherhood has always meant simultaneously caring for home and family and working for pay. Regardless of economic status and the form that the role juggling eventually takes, the view that career decisions can be made without explicit consideration of home and family commitments is likely to seem naive and shortsighted to many women today.

It is not clear whether the relational orientations said to characterize women's and people of color's career development are comparable. Turner (1997), for example, argued that the development of African American women within a relational perspective is unique because of how mothers prepare their daughters to live in a racist society. Labeling women and people of color as uniformly relational neglects crucial between-and within-group differences in worldviews, values, and life experiences. It is clear, however, that actualization of an independent self through career success may not make sense as an overriding life focus to individuals who view life's meaning as primarily residing within a nexus of relationships.

It is not surprising, then, that the assumption that career paths are typically orderly, sequential, and continuous also does not fit the nature of the career paths of many people of color and women. Earlier in the century, career experts felt compelled to create separate taxonomies to describe women's career patterns or to omit them from empirical studies because of the error variance introduced by their diverse patterns. The appropriateness of the traditional model of career trajectories has been called into question for many racial or ethnic minority clients, for example, because of their culturally based conceptions of causality or time (Fouad & Bingham, 1995; Lee & Armstrong, 1995). Historically, if a client could not discuss her or his career as an orderly, sequential implementation of rationally made decisions, a counselor might have concluded that the client was unfocused, lacking in goal directedness, or vocationally immature. This conclusion may well be accurate for some clients but may also reflect mislabeling of a common career pattern among some people of color and women (see Bateson, 1990, for a vivid and celebratory portrait of women improvising life patterns).

Finally, the truism in the world of work that occupational success can be largely attributable to individual merit has never applied to everyone because of pervasive and powerful contextual barriers. Racial and gender discrimination has created social, psychological, institutional, political, and economic barriers that seriously erode the actual control many individuals have over career choice and satisfaction. Pay discrepancies favoring White men over individuals of color and White women continue today (Dunn & Skaggs, 1999). A hierarchical segregation that markedly favors White men over women and people of color for jobs that have more authority, status, and pay also persists today, despite affirmative action policies (Reskin & Padavic, 1999). Sexual harassment effectively translates systemic attitudes about gender-based power and women's appropriate roles into interpersonally mediated barriers to career satisfaction and personal well-being.

Given the existence of prejudice and discrimination, many people of color and White women may legitimately perceive institutional barriers impeding their career development and may settle for careers that underutilize their abilities. Others may eliminate some potentially viable possibilities because of anticipated barriers. The combination of external explanations for one's fate with a systemic attribution for one's life condition (Sue & Sue, 1990) contradicts the philosophy that characterizes traditional career counseling.

Another environmentally based barrier to implementing personal choice that people of color and women often face is that the actualization of career dreams can be expensive. Career options have financial costs, such as tuition and supplies, transportation and child care, or geographic relocation, that are beyond the means of many people. The existence of significant income disparities by gender and race means that many people of color and White women are unable to afford to pursue a career to fulfill personal or group identity without regard to cost (e.g., Brown, 1995; Reskin & Padavic, 1999).

Examination of some of these assumptions that are inherent in career counseling as traditionally practiced--the separation of work and family roles in people's lives; the reverence for individualism and autonomy in American life; the preeminence of work in people's lives; the linear, progressive, and rational nature of the career development process; and the egalitarian structure of opportunity characterizing the world of work--has raised some important challenges for career counselors. Although the career patterns of traditional clients are already diverse, the patterns of individuals who are considered "special" populations (e.g., people of color, women, gay/lesbian/bisexual, lower socioeconomic status individuals) may be even more diverse and complex to understand. Counselors are also reminded that the individuals who have traditionally served as the prototype in the models of career development--European American, middle- or upper-class, well-educated men--in fact represent a privileged minority of the population that needs vocational services. Such privileged individuals enjoy the most career advantages in terms of resources and opportunities, yet over the years they have received a disproportionate amount of the professional attention of career counselors!

The intertwining role of the individual and the environment takes on paramount importance in conceptualizing the career development of women and of racial and ethnic minorities because ethnicity and gender decisively influence career patterns. Any conceptualization of these influences must accommodate both unique and shared group experiences and types of dynamics ranging from the social-legal influences on the national level (e.g., Civil Rights legislation) to the individual's daily construing of the meaningfulness of her or his ongoing experience. To describe the career development patterns of both White women and women of color, an ecological perspective may bridge the gap between theory, research, and counseling practice.

Incorporating an Ecological Perspective in Career Counseling.

Beginning with Parsons (1909), career professionals have explicitly recognized the contribution of both individual and environmental influences on career behavior as they mold and modify a career. Typically, in career counseling, the environment represents an essential body of information about opportunities, rewards, and obstacles that an individual must reconcile with her or his career preferences. Career interventions are intended to maximize the quantity and quality of information the individual can then use in personal decision making.

One recognized limitation of the career literature to date is the absence of models that conceptualize the complexity of the interplay between people and their environments. Holland (1992), for example, persuasively argued that the nature of the match between personality type and environment type affected job satisfaction and tenure, but precisely how an individual experiences and manages incongruence has received little attention (see Spokane, 1994). Social-cognitive theory (Lent, Brown, & Hackett, 1994) and contextualism (Savickas, 1999) have considerable heuristic value for future theory and research, but to date they have had little impact on career counseling practice. The nature of the dynamic interaction between person and environment also remains relatively unexplored.

An ecological counseling perspective that Conyne et al. (2000) and we are currently developing has promise for stimulating new thinking about career interventions. Briefly, the ecological perspective generally states that human behavior results from the ongoing, dynamic interaction between the person and the environment. Behavior is the result of a multiplicity of factors at the individual, interpersonal, and broader sociocultural levels. Behavior can be considered as an "act-in-context" (Landrine, 1995, p. 5) in which the context is essential to the naming and meaningfulness of the individual's behavior rather than the context being seen as an external force impinging on the action. A person's behavior is, therefore, a representation of the complex interaction among the myriad factors that constitute her or his life, referred to as the ecosystem.

Bronfenbrenner (1977) developed one of the most cited ecological models in which he identified four major subsystems influencing human behavior:

1. Microsystems include the interpersonal interactions within a given environment, such as the home, school, or work setting.

2. Mesosystems constitute interactions between two or more microsystems, such as the relations between an individual's school and her work environment.

3. Exosystems consist of linkages between subsystems that indirectly influence the individual, such as one's neighborhood or the media.

4. Macrosystems are the ideological components of a given society, including norms and values.

Other formulations of ecological models (e.g., Conyne, 1985) posit the individual at the heart of this dynamic interaction among subsystems. The subsystems of the macrosystem and the microsystem in interaction with the individual are particularly useful in explaining career behavior.

In his description of a counseling ecologist, Conyne (1985) illustrated how multiple settings and functions can potentially constitute counselors' work. Counselors can intervene using direct (e.g., individual or group counseling) or indirect (e.g., consultation, environmental design) methods for remedial, developmental, or preventive purposes with either the person or environment (or both) as targets of change. Conyne also emphasized the importance of a person's interpretation of life events as mediating processes shaping the person's behavior and the environment in a dynamic interaction.

In an ecological approach to career counseling, the focus typically remains the client, but the goals and methods of the ecological career counselor are explicitly intended to shape optimal person--environment interactions for individuals to develop vocationally (Conyne et al., 2000). Interventions, including those conducted on an individual basis through individual career counseling, are implemented within the ecosystem of the individual. The counselor understands that the client's career behavior is currently and will continue to be influenced by a host of dynamic factors that are inherent in her or his unique ecosystem. How and where counseling interventions can be most effectively implemented for an individual is determined through careful assessment of the client's ecosystem. Within this broader perspective, the career counselor serves as an advocate and liaison, working as a partner with the client to foster more successful and satisfying interactions within the world of work.

Career counselors are accustomed to helping individuals alter their perceptions about desirable and appropriate career alternatives through such individual counseling interventions as correcting idiosyncratic cognitions, expanding the zone of acceptable alternatives (Gottfredson, 1981) through occupational exploration, or changing perceptions of self-efficacy via persuasive communications or role-playing (e.g., Lent & Hackett, 1987). These familiar interventions essentially modify the resources an individual brings to ongoing transactions with the environment and may well change the ways that others respond to the individual. Career counselors may also be called to serve as client advocates, working toward environmental and societal changes that may facilitate the career development of present and future clients (O'Brien & Fassinger, 1999). Still other interventions place counselors in the role of empowering clients to change their environments through education and support. Regardless of the nature of the interventions, counseling is intended to shape optimal person--environment interactions to help the client develop vocationally.

An ecological model of career counseling interventions calls for counselors to consider ways of changing person--environment interactions by using diverse methodologies. Clients are best served when a diverse range of conceptualizations and interventions are considered. An ecological perspective reminds counselors that person--environment interactions can be changed in numerous ways for any given client, for example, by changing the environment through the counselor's or client's initiative, thereby making systems more helpful or affirming; helping clients identify and practice skills to cope with the environment more effectively; or addressing clients' cognitive processes that shape their transactions within the environment.

An ecological perspective can be helpful in describing the myriad of individual, contextual, and interactional factors that shape the career development of women of color and White women. The next section in this article briefly highlights several ecological interventions that illustrate the diverse ways that career counselors can facilitate personally relevant and efficacious changes. Efforts to specify principles for ecological assessment and decision making about appropriate counseling interventions are currently underway (Conyne & Cook, 2001).

Clarifying and Affirming Women's Life Options

In counseling women of color and White women, career counselors must explicitly address how an individual client experiences macrosystem imperatives concerning caring for others. From early childhood throughout life, many women are exposed to pervasive messages that a woman's life should revolve around taking care of others and that their career plans are somehow superimposed on this primary obligation. Career counselors should pay particular attention to how women of color and White women assign importance to the needs of significant others and family members in their career decisions. Clients may feel validated to identify the ways in which a strong orientation toward relationships and family can result in unique support as well as additional demands. Conversely, many women may need support in actualizing an exclusive or primary commitment to career in a society that continues to mandate care for home and family as a sine qua non in women's lives. All women should be assisted in identifying their strengths, defining themselves independently of the uniformity myths and stereotypes that abound, and deciding when (and if) they have the desire and energy to confront these myths and stereotypes.

Individual changes can also occur by making changes in the microsystem. Career programs in schools can be an important ecological intervention extending into adulthood and broadening children's perceptions about the world of work through what they see and hear from respected others. The more that children observe competent adults like themselves performing a range of interesting tasks, the more likely it is that they will assume that such diverse roles are open to them as well. For children of color, intentional interventions may be particularly crucial. The pervasive race/ethnic differentiation of employment in the United States makes exposure to diverse attractive career possibilities less probable within the environment of the child of color. Older children may benefit from observing how adult women of color realistically balance home and career priorities over time. Discussions that explore how women can actualize collectivist values in diverse careers can also be illuminating. For example, research scientists can study health issues particularly salient to their communities (e.g., AIDS, sickle cell anemia), or artists can celebrate ethnic art forms or represent subject matter central to many women's lives (e.g., family relationships, body image). Career explorations involving parents and peer group members can also be particularly helpful in gaining support within a young person's most salient microsystems.

Moreover, career counselors might consider how adult work environments can respect, and benefit from, orientations that are more relational than the strongly individualistic ethic that is prevalent today in many settings. For example, counselors might consult with organizations on ways that a relationship-sensitive work culture can further job performance and satisfaction among all workers or how various cultural traditions should be respected. Organizations can encourage mentoring relationships and professional networks for information and support. Of course, helping individual clients to locate role models, mentors, and child care through networking may also advance their vocational success.

The most fundamental environment in which counselors can intervene is the counseling relationship. As professionals, counselors have been shaped by experiences with race, gender, and professional socialization. Career counselors need knowledge, diverse skills, and creativity to identify and acknowledge the injustices that women of color and White women often face and honesty and humility to confront the biases unwittingly perpetuated by the counseling profession and by career counselors themselves.

Managing Time Demands of Multiple Roles

Career counselors might also strive to make changes in the macrosystem that influence the microsystems of women of color and White women. As noted earlier, many women who work outside the home continue to be primarily responsible for the care of the home and children. One key to effective management of multiple roles rests with changing societal norms and values regarding flexible work hours. Researchers have hypothesized that many women may select highly traditional, less prestigious, and low-paying occupations because these jobs often allow more flexibility regarding work hours (Betz, 1994; Betz & Fitzgerald, 1987; O'Brien, Friedman, Tipton, & Linn, 2000). Changing the structure of the world of work to allow flexible work hours in a wide variety of occupations may encourage more women to select nontraditional, prestigious, and high-paying positions. This change may benefit the workplace, as demonstrated by the fact that many companies that have moved toward flexible work hours have documented increased prod uctivity, less turnover, and reduced absenteeism among their employees (Pierce, Newstrom, Dunhanm, & Barber, 1989). Women may also be helped to see that certain less-traditional occupations for women (e.g., professor, self-employed entrepreneur, electrician) may require intensive involvement in the early years to establish one's career but can evolve into satisfying, yet flexible, careers.

Moreover, career counselors might work to assist women in learning negotiation skills to enable them to ask for what they need from their workplace (Gelfand, Nishii, Raver, Smith-Major, & O'Brien, 2000). Although obtaining flexible work hours is much more dependent on the orientation of the business than on an individual woman's negotiation skills, some data suggest that women are less likely to negotiate for fear that they will offend their employer or that they will be perceived as someone who wants special favors or is not a team player or a hard worker (Kolb & Coolidge, 1988). Many women of color may feel pressure to be model representatives of their group and may be reluctant to ask for anything that suggests special needs on their part. However, attention to the development of negotiation skills may assist women in obtaining other benefits (e.g., maternity leave, salary increases).

Many women may also benefit from assistance in negotiating the sharing of responsibilities with their partners. Individual women's personal struggles with issues around caring for family are magnified in the context of a society that views women as responsible for these tasks and a partner who is likely to feel both unwilling and unable to participate equitably because of career and gender role expectations. Unfortunately, many women unwittingly contribute to the maintenance of unequal responsibilities in the home because of powerful gender socialization. Many women caught between the needs of three generations--younger children, intimate partners, and older family members--may need to be empowered to identify responsibilities and solutions appropriate for each level. Sensitivity to a woman's cultural context is essential in this challenging task.

In addition, it seems timely to consider the ways that employers can lessen the negative impact on women who choose to leave the workforce for a limited amount of time to care for children or elders. Many women who make this choice essentially forfeit advanced achievements in many careers because they are no longer considered serious about their work (Friedman & Galinsky, 1992), or they must struggle to update their knowledge and skills. Career counselors can assist these women in determining their long-term career plans and in creatively managing their work and family pursuits. Employers can also consider instituting "return-to-work" policies that encourage valued employees to maintain their affiliation and skills over time.

Many women may feel supported to hear counselors acknowledge that the U.S. world of work sanctions, but does not facilitate, multiple role commitments. It is assumed that someone other than the employee takes care of home and family responsibilities so that they do not intrude on the workplace--and that "someone" is typically a woman. Personal struggles with the demands of multiple roles are, to some extent, rooted within the macrosystem and require considerable ingenuity and self-sacrifice for all but the most privileged to manage.

Obtaining Quality Child Care

The importance of quality child care remains a critical consideration for working parents and affects many families at multiple systems levels. The lack of affordable child care often disproportionately affects women, given the large number of single parent homes that are headed by women and the fact that women are often paid less than their male counterparts (Fields & Casper, 2001). Often, parents have difficulty locating reputable child care providers (Galinsky, 1988), and this problem is magnified for poor women who might be prevented from entering the paid labor force because of a lack of child care resources. Access to affordable and high-quality child care would expand the number of vocational opportunities available to women. In addition, more women might elect to work outside the home if they felt that their children could be placed in caring environments that stimulated intellectual and interpersonal growth.

Career counselors can assist women with children by sharing knowledge about reputable child care facilities and by assisting clients to organize and support one another regarding child care (e.g., shared transportation, assistance with coverage when children are ill). Also, career counselors may want to share recent research findings that demonstrate that children who are placed in child care do not experience negative effects in intellectual or social development (Scarr, Phillips, & McCartney, 1990). Parents might gain reassurance from learning how to evaluate child care arrangements and how to negotiate satisfactory routines and discipline practices on behalf of their children. Counselors who are developing educational and career programs for adolescent and older women should provide child care for participants' children.

In addition, counselors should be sensitive to the fact that family care issues are not necessarily limited to locating care for young children. For example, some women might be concerned about children with special needs or the impact of their absence on adolescent children or elders who require some supervision. For other women, family members might routinely expect to provide care according to family or cultural custom, with complicated consequences for family dynamics and welfare. Still other women bear responsibility for multiple generations within their homes. Career counselors must be educated to address these issues and their very real career consequences.

Creating Healthy Working Environments

Changes in attitudes and specific workplace policies related to sexual harassment are occurring (with costly and embarrassing litigation probably serving as an effective motivator for change). Continued attention to sexual harassment in the workplace on a macrosystem level is needed to ensure that all women have access to safe working situations that are not harmful to their physical or psychological health and their career advancement. Organizations need to educate employees about appropriate behavior on the job and mandate sanctions for behavior that disrupts the work performance and satisfaction of their employees. Educational systems, likewise, have the responsibility of modeling and enforcing civil behavior among their community members, regardless of gender.

On a microsystem level, career counselors can prepare women to handle sexual harassment in the workplace and, therefore, lessen the likelihood of continued victimization. In addition, practitioners might assist women who have been sexually harassed to determine how they can confront this situation in their work environment. Finally, they can alleviate some of the psychological distress that sexual harassment victims often experience. Because of the common occurrence of sexual harassment in various forms, counselors might also want to explore the impact of any past episodes of harassment on women's current career attitudes and behavior.

Moreover, career counselors can assess multiple types of discrimination and can serve as sounding boards for women of color and White women who are working in unfriendly environments. Clients might benefit from learning how to identify and respond to subtle forms of discrimination in ostensibly equitable environments, for example, being excluded from informal transmission of information. Career counselors can provide support, reassurance, and career management skills, and, perhaps more important, access to legal resources and community support. McWhirter (1994) argued convincingly for the importance of community and peer support for individuals facing discrimination. Career counselors might want to encourage career exploration or vocational groups for women to create networks when indigenous support systems are lacking within a woman's ecosystem.

Improving Access to Role Models and Mentors

At the microsystem level, role models are needed for people of color and White women in many employment and educational settings (Eccles, 1987). Access to role models can assist individuals in preparing for educational and vocational opportunities and in succeeding in career pursuits (Kram, 1988). In addition, role models who successfully combine work and family are especially useful (Gilbert & Evans, 1985).

Given the career-related obstacles that may be present for women of color and White women, access to supportive (and challenging) mentors may assist individuals in negotiating the barriers that confront them in their path to educational and vocational achievement. Mentoring programs have been shown to be successful for people of color and White women (Evansoki & Wu Tse, 1989). Role models of both genders and a variety of cultures/ethnicities are needed, because women can benefit from being mentored by people of similar or different genders and ethnicities. People of color can serve as supportive role models for Whites and vice versa: Whites should not neglect opportunities to mentor people of color.

Career counselors can also serve as role models and can assist clients in obtaining mentors in their fields. They may work to instill confidence in searching for or contributing to a mentoring relationship, and they can serve as a reminder of the importance of assisting others who have yet to achieve their potential in their career development. They can also assist organizations in developing effective mentoring programs for employees.

Equalizing Salaries of Women of Color and White Women

Of critical importance at the microsystem and macrosystem levels is the fact that people of color and White women are paid less than are White men (U.S. Department of Labor, 1997). Legislation is needed to equalize the salaries of employees who perform comparably, regardless or gender or ethnicity (as well as other variables that will not be addressed in this article). Lower salaries provide less incentive for women to pursue careers outside the home, a pursuit that has been shown to relate to positive mental health and life satisfaction (Betz, 1994). In addition, lower salaries limit access to child care, transportation, clothing, and other resources that are necessary for many women in the work world. Moreover, the psychological costs of being paid less than male counterparts who are performing the same job can have severe costs for working women. Women may also be willing to settle for less money than they deserve because of their satisfaction with other job features or the undervaluing of their contributi ons to their working environment.

Career counselors can encourage women of color and White women to negotiate salaries that reflect their work responsibilities (Gelfand et al., 2000). Clients may need to be educated about their relative worth in today's economy. When salaries are not equitable, career counselors can assist people of color and White women to work to change salary inequities and not to internalize this discriminatory practice as a reflection of their ability or potential. They can provide support in a job search to find an environment that does not condone discriminatory practices. Counselors might also ask themselves whether women within their working environments (e.g., support staff) are being paid a fair wage.

Conclusion

Despite the Civil Rights movement and the women's movement, changes in every system level are needed, as equal access to opportunities in the workplace continues to elude women and minorities (Betz, 1994). The glass ceiling remains omnipresent, and many talented employees never reach their vocational goals because of their race or gender. Women struggling to take care of their families while earning a living must do so with little assistance from a system that regards family work as invisible, of secondary value, and incompatible with paid labor practices. Many women continue to earn less than men do, and they are less likely than men are to get assistance from their partners with the work that still must be done after the paid work is completed.

We acknowledge that career counselors have much to do without also organizing for affordable child care or lobbying legislators for changes in the structure of the workplace. However, an exclusive focus on changing what women (or men) do to limit their vocational potential is destined to fail without commensurate attention to the ways in which the microsystems and macrosystems contribute to making the educational and vocational achievement of people of color and White women much more difficult and ultimately limited in scope (Fassinger & O'Brien, 2000).

The ecological counseling perspective reminds career counselors that behavior does not occur in a vacuum. Individuals' career development, by nature, emerges from a lifelong dynamic interaction between the individual and her or his environment. Because of their individualistic theoretical paradigms, career counselors are far more likely to consider self-efficacy than child care alternatives as determining a career path or to change girls' perceptions of viable career alternatives for women than to consult with the media about how to present the most effective models of empowerment. Within the ecology of a woman's life, diverse, seemingly modest alterations can have the power to decisively shape a previously unimagined future. Conyne (1985) reminded counselors that simple cans of paint can be tools for a powerful environmental intervention--if paint is what is needed to empower an individual or group, change perceptions of one's lifespace, or literally transform an environment. We challenge counselors to expand their conceptions of counseling interventions to embrace the complexity of the dynamic processes labeled career development.

To illustrate how the ecological model can be used in career counseling, the six case studies that are presented in the following pages have been developed. Each case provides an application of the model and describes interventions, issues, and potential barriers. Ultimately, the power of the model will be assessed by its usefulness in conceptualizing and intervening with women and their environments.

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Ellen P. Cook, Division of Human Services--Counseling Program, University of Cincinnati; Mary J. Heppner, Department of Educational and Counseling Psychology, University of Missouri--Columbia; Karen M. O'Brien, Department of Psychology, University of Maryland. The impetus for this work came out of the Advancing Together Conference, Division 17 Section on Women, American Psychological Association, held October 1998 in Ypsilanti, Michigan. The authors thank the organizers of that conference and the original members of the workgroup who provided ideas, support, and critique of previous drafts of this work. In addition to the authors of the case studies that are included in this issue, the workgroup members were Charlene Alexander, Fran Davis, Monica Justin, Kathy Karageorge, Michelle Pride, and Beverly Vandiver. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Ellen P. Cook, Division of Human Services--Counseling Program, PO Box 210002, University of Cincinnati, OH 45221-0002 (e-mail: ellen.cook@uc. edu).