ABSTRACT
Despite several decades of lamentation and exhortation by parents, educators, psychologists, and those in sympathy with the loosely knit movement known as “feminism,” girls are still relatively more likely than boys to grow up to be nurses and secretaries rather than physicians and corporate executives. Girls still avoid the mathematics courses required for careers in “nontraditional” professions like science and engineering. Given that sex roles seem to be alive and well, it is not too surprising that career development, as a specific area of study, has historically been devoted to models depicting the aspirations and accomplishments of males. Psychological research has traditionally relied on investigating relationships among variables in its efforts to understand human behavior. In contrast, the “person approach” delineates the person as the appropriate unit of analysis. It is the total individual, embedded in his or her total environment, who, across time, exhibits the change and the stability in behavior that psychologists label development.
