Perceived Interpersonal Influences and College-Major Nontraditionality as Predictors of Women’s Leadership Aspirations

Abstract

In this study, we examined the degree to which two forms of perceived interpersonal influence relate to college women’s plans to become leaders in their career fields. We also tested whether those associations vary as a function of the nontraditionality of the women’s majors (as indexed by the percentage of male students in their majors). The responses of 673 female undergraduate students to an online survey revealed that perceived support/guidance for career decision-making and perceived inspiration from career role models both had unique and positive associations with leadership aspirations, but those associations did not differ based on major nontraditionality. We discuss implications for career interventions designed to facilitate college women’s leadership aspirations and identify future research directions.

Keywords

career interpersonal influences leadership aspirations nontraditional majors social support career role models

Women comprise half of the United States’ (U.S.) labor force, but some sectors are highly stratified by gender (Bureau of Labor Statistics [BLS], 2017). In fact, of the 338 occupations for which the BLS keeps demographic information, more than 50% are considered nontraditional for either men or women because people of one gender make up less than 25% of the employees in them. Within a sector of the labor force, women also tend to be underrepresented in positions of leadership. For instance, women make up about 54% of financial services industry employees overall, but they are only 29% of senior-level managers and 2% of chief executive officers (BLS, 2017). Women’s underrepresentation in positions of leadership tends to be especially pronounced in male-dominated fields (Jericho, 2017; Scarborough, 2018).

Increasing the proportion of female leaders in various career fields could have several benefits. First, attracting female leaders could help professions more fully utilize the potential of their workers (Gregor & O’Brien, 2015). Second, increasing women’s attainment of leadership positions in male-dominated fields may reduce the pervasive gender wage gap because the occupations where female managers tend to be heavily concentrated are also those with the largest wage gaps (Scarborough, 2018). Finally, increasing the visibility of female employees may be a key to decreasing the labor force’s stratification overall (Gottfredson, 2005). Leaders and managers tend to be among the most visible members of an occupation and serve as potential role models for new generations. Highly visible female leaders in traditionally male-dominated occupations may decrease girls’ perceptions that the occupation is incompatible with being female and could reduce the likelihood of the occupation being circumscribed from consideration at a young age (Gottfredson, 2005; Stainback et al., 2016).

Empirical studies have documented that female leaders are as effective as male leaders (Eagly et al., 2003). Nevertheless, women face challenges in being perceived as credible leaders (Koenig et al., 2011). Perhaps because of the challenges and barriers to leadership positions, women are less likely than men to believe that they will attain leadership positions (Sheppard, 2018) and are less likely to aspire to become leaders (Eagly et al., 1994; Lechner et al., 2018). In turn, leadership aspirations are predictive of later advancement to positions of management and leadership (Fritz & van Knippenberg, 2017).

Given the benefits of increasing women’s visibility as leaders in their fields, we sought to understand more about factors associated with women’s leadership aspirations (defined as plans or intentions to advance educationally to high levels and enter and rise to career positions that direct, oversee, guide, educate, or have responsibility for others; Gregor & O’Brien, 2015). We examined such factors among college women because leadership positions in most fields require a college degree, and the terminal degree in some fields is necessary for attaining the highest positions of leadership (BLS, 2017). Our goal was to identify factors that could be used to develop focused interventions at a time when women are making important decisions regarding their careers. Because of their decreased likelihood of attaining leadership positions in male-dominated fields relative to female-dominated ones, we also sought to examine whether the factors operate similarly for women in relatively traditional and nontraditional fields.

Interpersonal Resources as Potential Facilitators of Women’s Leadership Aspirations

Social cognitive career theory (SCCT; Lent et al., 1994) provides a framework for conceptualizing individuals’ selection of career goals (which would include aspirations to become a leader) and the actions they take to implement those goals. In the SCCT model, a variety of contextual influences proximal to people’s career choices can serve as barriers or supports. These proximal contextual influences include interpersonal resources which can be facilitative—such as when a woman perceives strong encouragement to pursue a position of leadership from a college instructor—or constructing, such as when she perceives weak support from others upon expressing an intention to pursue a management career within her field and then doubts the wisdom of that career choice.

As theorized in the social cognitive model of career self-management (Lent & Brown, 2013), proximal interpersonal influences could facilitate career choice goals directly, by shaping the exploration of and selection of career choices. A teacher encouraging a young woman to consider management as a career goal and then showing her how to access resources that promote the exploration of management careers would be an example. Proximal interpersonal influences could also operate indirectly to shape leadership aspirations by increasing self-efficacy or the development of positive outcome expectations. Examples would be when a young woman feels more confident about her ability to succeed in obtaining the terminal degree in her field after a faculty member tells her she has good leadership potential or when she develops positive outcome expectations about leadership after seeing a prominent business leader receive an impact award for her efforts in spearheading a community initiative. In turn, self-efficacy and outcome expectations would promote leadership aspirations (Lent et al., 1994).

Support

One form of interpersonal influence that may be relevant to women’s aspirations to become leaders is career decision-making support and encouragement. Theoretically, support and encouragement can serve to strengthen a person’s resolve to persist in the face of difficulties and doubts (Kenny et al., 2003). In both qualitative (e.g., Amon, 2017) and quantitative studies (e.g., Buday et al., 2012; Garriott et al., 2017; Schaefers et al., 1997), perceived support and/or encouragement from others has been linked to girls’ and women’s consideration and pursuit of nontraditional careers such as those in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields. One empirical study (Boatwright & Egidio, 2003) revealed that a fear of negative evaluation from others was associated with lower leadership aspirations for women, but we did not locate any research directly investigating the association of perceived career decision-making support/encouragement to women’s leadership aspirations. Our first research question, therefore, was to what degree support/encouragement relates to women’s leadership aspirations. Given the finding that consideration of nontraditional careers in general has been linked to career decision-making support and encouragement, it seems likely that aspirations to become a leader in one’s field (also a nontraditional aspiration for women) might also be linked to this type of interpersonal influence.
Hypothesis 1: Women’s aspirations to become leaders in their career fields will be positively associated with their perceptions of career decision-making support/encouragement.

Modeling

A second form of interpersonal influence that is theoretically highly relevant to women’s leadership aspirations is perceived influence from career role models and mentors. Role models may serve as a source of inspiration (Nauta & Kokaly, 2001), challenge occupational stereotypes (Dasgupta & Asgari, 2004), and expand women’s range of perceived possible selves (Lockwood & Kunda, 1997), perhaps facilitating views of themselves as possible leaders. In qualitative studies (e.g., Baumgartner & Schneider, 2010; Carbajal, 2018), female business leaders have implicated a paucity of mentors as likely contributing factors to women’s underrepresentation as CEOs. Although highly elite female leaders who are perceived as dissimilar to oneself can impede women’s consideration of leadership positions because of upward social comparison (and, hence, reduced self-perceptions; Asgari et al., 2012; Hoyt & Simon, 2011), laboratory studies have tended to show that exposure to media images of women in counterstereotypical roles increases women’s career aspirations (Davies et al., 2005; Simon & Hoyt, 2013) and leadership behaviors (Latu et al., 2013) immediately afterward.

A quantitative study (Nauta et al., 1998) revealed perceived career role-model influence to be associated with leadership aspirations among women in STEM fields, and it seems probable that the leadership aspirations of women in a variety of other fields would also be linked to perceived career role-model influence (i.e., through vicarious learning experiences and handling role-model conflict). Consistent with this notion, Asgari et al. (2010) found that high-quality interactions with female faculty members during college were associated with women’s leadership aspirations. The samples in the Nauta et al. and Asgari et al. studies comprised students with narrow specializations who may have been in closer contact with faculty members in their disciplines than is typical of most students, so the degree to which perceived role-model influences are associated with the leadership aspirations of women in a variety of fields still needs to be verified. Our second research question, therefore, was whether these findings extend more broadly to the leadership aspirations of women in a variety of fields. We speculated that the inspiration women draw from role models would be associated with leadership aspirations even among less highly specialized samples.
Hypothesis 2: Women’s aspirations to become leaders in their career fields will be positively associated with their perceptions of career role-model influence.

Untangling Support/Encouragement and Inspiration From Role Models

Because career role models are often personally known to the people they inspire (Nauta & Kokaly, 2001), a challenge when interpreting findings regarding perceived role-model influence is whether any positive outcomes are truly due to inspiration or whether they are simply due to perceived support received from people who also happen to be role models. In the Asgari et al. (2010) research, close contact with female faculty members could have offered students a powerful source of support, and perhaps this support—not inspiration—accounts for the association between faculty–student contact and students’ leadership aspirations. We are unaware of prior research investigating support and perceived influence from career role models simultaneously, so it has not been possible to disentangle the two forms’ effects on career or leadership aspirations. As an extension of our second research question, we wanted to determine whether the relationship between perceived role-model influence and leadership aspirations extends beyond support. Because support and inspiration are theoretically distinct and because women could draw inspiration from role models who are not personally known to them, we speculated that the association between perceived role-model influence and leadership aspirations would hold even after accounting for perceived social support.
Hypothesis 2a: Perceived role-model influence will explain additional variance in women’s leadership aspirations after controlling for perceived social support.

Differences in the Salience of Interpersonal Influence by Major Nontraditionality

Perceived support and career role-model influence are theoretically plausible predictors of women’s leadership aspirations in any career fields. However, compared to women who are pursuing fields where there is gender balance, women entering nontraditional fields tend, to a greater degree, to face barriers such as gender microaggressions, explicit and unconscious biases, and institutional practices that can trigger stereotype threat and feelings of isolation (Ashcraft et al., 2016). Theoretically, those barriers operate as proximal contextual influences that may impede the development of career or leadership aspirations directly or via reduced self-efficacy and outcome expectations (Lent & Brown, 2013). Indeed, one empirical study found that women expect to need to exert more effort when pursuing nontraditional careers than traditional ones, and this expectation of added effort may especially serve as a deterrent to aspiring to upper level careers (Smith et al., 2013).

As a result of the added challenges, experts (e.g., Betz & Fitzgerald, 1987; Fritz & van Knippenberg, 2017; Stirling, 2012) have argued that women in male-dominated fields are especially likely to need additional resources and supports in order to persist and advance. Encouragement and support from others and inspiration drawn from role models may aid women in confronting some of the challenges associated not just with being gender minorities in their fields but also in persisting through doubts about their suitability for leadership those in fields when the few other women in the fields are in lower level positions.

Recommendations for promoting female leaders commonly include fostering networking and mentoring, with an assumption being that these are particularly needed for women in nontraditional career fields (e.g., Wallace & DeVita, 2018). Although it does seem logical that support and role-model inspiration would be particularly salient to the leadership aspirations of women pursuing nontraditional fields, we know of no research that has investigated this possibility, so the soundness of such recommendations is unknown. Our final research question was whether interpersonal influences are, in fact, particularly salient to the leadership aspirations of women in nontraditional fields. Given the need to counteract proximal barriers to career goal selection, we hypothesized that the nontraditionality of women’s majors would moderate the associations between interpersonal career influences and leadership aspirations.
Hypothesis 3: Major nontraditionality will moderate the associations of perceived support and modeling with leadership aspirations such that the perceived interpersonal influences are more strongly related to leadership aspirations among those in more highly nontraditional fields.

In summary, we hoped to examine and disentangle the associations between two forms of perceived interpersonal influences and women’s leadership aspirations. We were particularly interested in examining whether major nontraditionality moderates the associations between the perceived interpersonal influences and leadership aspirations, which would address whether providing greater access to interpersonal supports and models is a reasonable avenue for reducing disparities in female leadership in traditional and nontraditional fields.

Method

Participants and Procedure

All female undergraduate students at a large, public university in the Midwestern region of the United States who had not opted out of receiving research invitations were invited to access an online survey by following a link embedded in an email invitation. We only used data from participants who listed a college major because it was necessary to index the nontraditionality of students’ majors for the main analysis.

The sample consisted of 673 students who ranged in age from 18 to 50 years (M = 20.81, SD = 3.87). Mirroring the student population at their university, the majority of participants self-identified as White/European American/Caucasian (n = 572; 85%). The remaining participants identified as Hispanic/Latinx American (n = 43; 6%), Black/African/African American (n = 31; 5%), Asian/Asian American (n = 11; 2%), Pacific Islander (n = 1; <1%), and Biracial/Multiracial (n = 9; 1%); six participants (1%) did not indicate their race/ethnicity. In terms of class rank, participants identified themselves as freshmen (n = 167; 25%), sophomores (n = 92; 14%), juniors (n = 212; 32%), and seniors (n = 202; 30%).

Measures

Perceived interpersonal influences

We assessed the participants’ perceptions of interpersonal influences for career decision-making using the Influence of Others on Career Decision-Making Scale (IOACDS; Nauta & Kokaly, 2001). This measure has 15 items to which participants respond using a 5-point Liker-type scale (1 = strongly disagree to 5 = strongly agree). The responses to 8 items (e.g., “There is someone I can count on to be there if I need support when I make academic and career choices.”) are averaged to yield a Support/Guidance subscale score that reflects perceptions of the availability of social support and informational guidance when making career decisions. The responses to 7 other items (e.g., “There is someone I am trying to be like in my academic or career pursuits.”) are averaged to calculate an inspiration/modeling score that reflects the perception of the availability of career role models and mentors. In previous research, the Cronbach’s α reliability estimate for the Support/Guidance subscale scores was .85 and that for the Inspiration/Modeling subscale scores was .87 (Nauta & Kokaly, 2001). In this study, α for the Support/Guidance and Inspiration/Modeling subscales was .87 and .88, respectively. The Support/Guidance subscale’s scores are positively associated with perceptions of general social support, and the Inspiration/Modeling subscale’s scores are negatively associated with career indecision and positively related to career certainty and vocational identity (Nauta & Kokaly, 2001).

Leadership aspirations

We used the Career Aspiration Scale (CAS; Gray & O’Brien, 2007) to assess participants’ plans to become leaders in their fields. Participants rate each of the instrument’s 8 items (e.g., “I hope to become a leader in my career field.”) using a 5-point Likert-type scale (0 = not true at all of me to 4 = very true of me). It is possible to calculate separate Educational Aspiration subscale and Leadership and Achievement subscale scores, but the two are typically positively correlated (Gray & O’Brien, 2007), and we did not have theoretical reasons to expect the interpersonal influence constructs would have differential associations with the two aspects of career aspirations. Because both are relevant to becoming leaders, we chose to use CAS total scores, which are derived by averaging responses to all of the CAS items.

Gray and O’Brien (2007) found the Cronbach’s α reliability estimates for CAS total scores ranged from .72 to .77 with college samples; in the present sample, α was .76. CAS scores have been shown to relate positively to female college students’ occupational self-efficacy and multiple role self-efficacy, and they are inversely related to women’s ratings of family as more important than career (Gray & O’Brien, 2007).

Major nontraditionality

We asked each participant to list her academic major. We then used data from the university’s registrar to calculate the percentage of students in the major who were men. In our sample, these scores ranged from 0 (i.e., all other students in the major were also female) to 99 (i.e., almost all of the other students in the major were male), with higher scores thus representing greater major nontraditionality. We initially dichotomized the scores for this variable using the BLS cutoff of 75% to categorize a field as traditional (i.e., 25% or more of the other students in the major were also female) or nontraditional (i.e., fewer than 25% of other students in the major were female), but only 13 students had nontraditional majors using this cutoff. The 75% cut point is arbitrary and is not based on empirical data suggesting that this particular percentage is meaningfully different from slightly higher or lower percentages; therefore, we also conducted analyses using the continuous nontraditionality scores. The pattern of findings in the main analyses was identical using both types of scores, so we opted to report the results of analyses using the continuous scores given that dichotomizing scores results in a loss of statistical power. Our procedure for calculating continuous major nontraditionality scores mirrors that of Arévalo Avalos and Flores (2016) and Savela and O’Brien (2016), who quantified the nontraditionality of people’s chosen careers continuously by indexing the percentage of opposite-sex employees in them.

Results

Preliminary Analyses

The proportion of missing data on items comprising the measures ranged from 0.0% to 4.9%. Little’s missing completely at random (MCAR) test suggested that values were MCAR, χ²(762) = 791.88, p = .220. Because it did not result in a large number of cases being dropped and is not inappropriate when the data are MCAR (Baraldi & Enders, 2010), we used listwise deletion to deal with missing data.

Table 1 shows the means, standard deviations, and intercorrelations among all the variables. The perceived interpersonal influence variables related to leadership aspirations significantly and in expected directions, providing preliminary support for our first two hypotheses. Major nontraditionality was not associated with leadership aspirations.

Table 1.
Means, Standard Deviations, and Intercorrelations Among the Measures.

Measure 1 2 3 4

Support/guidance 1.00 .39** −.11* .14**

Inspiration/modeling 1.00 −.10* .17**

Major nontraditionality 1.00 .07

Leadership aspirations 1.00

N 650 650 673 650

M 4.21 3.58 31.83 2.93

SD 0.69 0.91 22.42 0.67

Note. Major nontraditionality is indexed by the percentage of male students in the major, so higher scores reflect greater nontraditionality for the female participants in this study.

*p < .01.**p < .001.

Main Analysis

To test the study hypotheses, we conducted a hierarchical linear regression analysis. CAS scores were the criterion, and IOACDS Support/Guidance and Inspiration/Modeling subscale scores and major nontraditionality scores were entered as predictors in the first step. As recommended in Frazier et al. (2004), we added interaction terms in a second step to test the moderation hypothesis. We created the interaction terms by multiplying major nontraditionality scores with (a) support/guidance scores and (b) inspiration modeling scores.

Prior to interpreting the main regression analysis, we checked multivariate assumptions. An examination of residual and normal probability plots indicated the data met the regression assumptions of linearity, homoscedasticity, and normality of the residuals (Darlington & Hayes, 2017). In addition, the predictors used for the analysis, including two interaction terms, had no indication of multicollinearity, with variance inflation factor values all around 1 and tolerance statistics less than .10.

As shown in Table 2, the variables entered in the first step explained a significant proportion of variance in leadership aspirations, R² = .045, F(3, 640) = 10.08, p < .001. Both support/guidance and inspiration modeling were positively associated with women’s leadership aspirations, providing support for our Hypotheses 1 and 2. The part correlation squared (sr²) values show that 9% of the variance in leadership aspirations was uniquely explained by support/guidance, and inspiration/modeling uniquely explained 13% of the variance. Thus, the analysis also supported Hypothesis 2a that a significant association between inspiration/modeling and leadership aspirations would hold, even when controlling for support/guidance. Contrary to our expectation, however, the addition of the interaction terms in the second step did not increase the proportion of variance explained, ΔR² = .001, F(2, 638) = 0.46, p = .632. Thus, we did not find support for Hypothesis 3 that the associations between the perceived interpersonal influence variables and leadership aspirations vary depending on the nontraditionality of students’ majors.

Table 2.
Results of Hierarchical Linear Regression Analyses Predicting Leadership Aspirations.

Predictor R² B SE B β sr ²

Step 1 .045

Support/guidance .094 .041 .096* .09

Inspiration/modeling .106 .031 .143** .13

Major nontraditionality .003 .001 .100* .10

Step 2 .047

Support/guidance .096 .041 .098* .09

Inspiration/modeling .106 .031 .143 .13

Major nontraditionality .003 .001 .106 .10

Support × Nontraditionality −.028 .030 −.039 −.04

Modeling × Nontraditionality .013 .029 .018 .02

*p < .05. **p < .01.

Discussion

The purpose of this study was to examine how perceived interpersonal influences relate to college women’s aspirations to become leaders in their career fields. Leadership aspirations were of interest because of their known association with later leadership behavior (Fritz & van Knippenberg, 2017) and their potential as targets of interventions that could increase the visibility of female leaders in various fields.

Consistent with SCCT’s (Lent et al., 1994) conceptualization of interpersonal influences as contextual supports, our findings confirm the positive associations of perceived support and modeling to women’s leadership aspirations. Earlier studies (e.g., Buday et al., 2012; Garriott et al., 2017; Schaefers et al., 1997) had linked relational support to women’s consideration of careers in male-dominated fields but had not examined the association of support to leadership aspirations in particular. Our findings thus extend what is known about the outcomes associated with career decision-making support and encouragement. Prior research (Nauta et al., 1998) had linked perceived career role-model influence to the leadership aspirations of women in STEM fields, and our findings suggest that such perceived influence is also associated with the leadership aspirations of women in other fields as well.

Because women’s career role models are often people they know personally, it has been unknown whether the models’ contributions extend beyond support/encouragement. Prior studies documenting the beneficial outcomes associated with having a career role model (Asgari et al., 2010; Nauta et al., 1998) have not been able to address that question because support and inspiration have not been assessed simultaneously. An important new finding from this study is that support/encouragement and inspiration/modeling each explain unique variance in women’s leadership aspirations. Our study therefore supports the idea that women’s leadership aspirations may be shaped, in part, through the modeling of possible selves that career role models provide and not just from the support that mentors offer.

In our study, major nontraditionality was weakly but positively associated with women’s leadership aspirations when controlling for other variables. This unexpected finding is at odds with statistics documenting a smaller percentage of female leaders in male-dominated fields (Jericho, 2017; Scarborough, 2018). A possible explanation is that common factors shape both major selection and leadership aspirations. Perhaps women who have avoided or overcome barriers to entering nontraditional fields have similarly overcome barriers that inhibit leadership aspirations. It may also be that working through the challenges associated with selecting a nontraditional career goal requires women to have a particularly high degree of career commitment and that same commitment increases the likelihood of aspiring to leadership positions. Such speculation awaits verification as we did not assess commitment in this study.

Because those who enter nontraditional fields may face more obstacles than do those in traditional career fields, we had speculated there would be a greater reliance on contextual supports among those in nontraditional majors. Testing this possible moderation effect was another contribution of the current research. Contrary to our expectation, the strength of the positive associations of support/guidance and inspiration/modeling with leadership aspirations did not vary significantly depending on nontraditionality. Thus, support and modeling appeared to be salient to the leadership aspirations of women regardless of their fields.

At least two possible explanations may explain the finding that nontraditionality did not moderate the associations between the perceived interpersonal influences and leadership aspirations. An optimistic interpretation is that the experiences of women in the male-dominated majors are comparable to those of the students in more traditional majors such that the need for and salience of interpersonal career supports is not greater for them. The small proportion of our sample in majors considered truly nontraditional using 75% criterion may have meant that most students had fairly similar experiences within their majors. Given that prior research has documented an increased frequency of harassment, discrimination, and discouragement among women in male-dominated fields (Ellis et al., 2016), however, we suspect this is not the most likely explanation.

Another possibility is that because women are underrepresented as leaders in all sectors of the labor force, including in female-dominated fields (BLS, 2017), aspiring to a position of leadership represents a nontraditional career goal even when one is not a gender minority. Interpersonal supports may thus be just as important in overcoming stereotypes about women’s suitability for leadership in female-dominated fields as they are in male-dominated ones.

Implications

Although societal and environmental changes are clearly needed to reduce harassment and discrimination that impede women’s attainment of leadership positions (Hopkins et al., 2008), in this study, we focused on women’s perceptions of interpersonal influences as they are amenable to intervention by counselors who are working with individual women in college. Our findings suggest interventions that increase perceptions of career support and modeling may hold promise for increasing the likelihood that women aspire to become leaders. Because associations between the interpersonal influences and leadership aspirations did not vary by major nontraditionality, such interventions might be useful in any fields.

Our findings suggest interventions that increase access to interpersonal supports as well as facilitating access to career role models may be useful as these forms of perceived interpersonal influence explained unique variance in women’s leadership aspirations. Whereas support might be gleaned only from those known personally to women, career role models need not be personally known, which supports the practice of ensuring that visible female leaders are portrayed in a variety of fields via the media.

When working with individual women, career counselors might consider providing support/encouragement via self-affirmation interventions, which can decrease stereotype threat (Cadaret et al., 2017). It would also behoove counselors to encourage women to make use of relationships with others who will support and encourage their leadership aspirations, especially with women who are in leadership roles themselves (Ni & Huo, 2018). At a systematic level, counselors could provide consultation with academic advisors and faculty to challenge perceptions that women are ineffective leaders and encourage them to be intentionally supportive of women who express interest in leadership positions (Hopkins et al., 2008).

A counselor might help students connect with persons who can serve as role models. Exposure to women in nontraditional roles has been shown to have a positive impact on women’s leadership aspirations immediately afterward (Davies et al., 2005; Simon & Hoyt, 2013), but whether these exposures translate into increased leadership aspirations over the longer term remains to be investigated. Because interactions with female faculty have been shown to be associated with leadership aspirations (Asgari et al., 2010), programs could be encouraged to recruit and ensure that female students have access to female mentors in their majors.

If the finding that major nontraditionality does not moderate the associations between interpersonal influences and leadership aspirations is confirmed in additional studies, then it would suggest we will need to consider other potential routes for intervention when attempting to increase especially low percentage of female leaders in nontraditional fields. Recent research (Ellinas et al., 2018) suggests anticipated work–family conflict is associated with women’s leadership aspirations, and it could be that anticipation of such conflict varies depending on the traditionality of women’s fields. Qualitative studies may be a beneficial way to obtain in-depth information from women in nontraditional fields to determine how to address concerns about work–family conflict.

Additionally, considering non-interpersonal facilitators may be important as women pursuing nontraditional majors could simply be less likely to value interpersonal interventions. Relational self-construal (i.e., how people understand themselves through their interactions with others) moderates the association between support and career decision-making difficulties (Li et al., 2017). Whereas those high in relational self-construal appeared to benefit from social support, social support was unrelated to career decision-making difficulties among those with lower relational self-construal. Because women who have people-oriented interests are unlikely to pursue some nontraditional majors, such as those in engineering (Su & Rounds, 2015), it is not unreasonable to speculate that those women who do pursue those nontraditional fields may be lower in relational self-construal and thus find less meaning in interpersonal supports. Personality variables such as instrumentality—which has been linked to both nontraditional career choices and the attainment of leadership positions (Savela & O’Brien, 2016)—may better account for differences in leadership aspiration rates for women in traditional and nontraditional fields than do interpersonal influence variables.

At any rate, our finding of a positive association between nontraditionality and leadership aspirations hints that a common factor may promote both. If confirmed in future research, this would suggest interventions resulting in women’s attainment of leadership in nontraditional fields might do so by increasing the sheer number of women pursuing nontraditional fields in general. They may not necessarily need to target leadership aspirations in particular.

Limitations and Future Research Directions

The most salient limitation of this study has to do with the nature of the sample. The overall number of participants was fairly large, but the majority were not in majors considered nontraditional using the BLS 75% criterion. The pattern of findings in our study did not differ when we scored the major nontraditionality variable dichotomously versus continuously, but a restricted range in nontraditionality could have meant the experiences of students did not vary much as a function of the proportion of men in the major. Future research with more diversity in terms of nontraditionality will be needed to more definitively answer the question of whether nontraditionality moderates the associations of interpersonal influences and leadership aspirations. Future research might address this limitation by recruiting participants from nontraditional majors more intentionally rather than drawing from a general student population.

Second, our sample mirrored the student population from which it was drawn in that the majority of participants self-identified as nonracial/ethnic minorities. Diversity among women in management and leadership has improved in recent years (BLS, 2017), but minority women remain underrepresented compared with white women. It would be useful to explore whether the salience of interpersonal influences to leadership aspirations varies for women who are racial/ethnic minorities. Such women are underrepresented in leadership positions on two dimensions (gender and race/ethnicity), which could increase the need for additional contextual supports. Future studies with larger proportions of students who are racial/ethnic minorities would enable an exploration of three-way interactions (i.e., Interpersonal Influence × Major Nontraditionality × Race/Ethnicity) that were not possible for us to examine with our sample.

Third, the correlational, cross-sectional nature of our study does not permit inferences of causation to be made. Although our hypotheses were theory-based and we found that career support/guidance and inspiration/modeling were positively associated with women’s leadership aspirations, we do not know with certainty whether interventions targeting those interpersonal influences would result in an increase in the number of women aspiring to become leaders. It is possible that women with leadership aspirations intentionally seek support from others and look for career role models to a greater degree than do those without leadership aspirations. Future research using longitudinal designs is needed to answer questions about the antecedent in the association between interpersonal influences and leadership aspirations.

Fourth, when we designed the study, the CAS (Gray & O’Brien, 2007) was the best option for assessing leadership aspirations, and it produced scores with acceptable reliability. A revised measure—the CAS-R (Gregor & O’Brien, 2016)—is now available, however. The revised measure contains items assessing achievement aspirations as well as leadership and educational aspirations, and its scores appear to be more reliable than those from the original CAS. In future studies, we recommend that researchers use the CAS-R.

Finally, our outcome variable was students’ plans to become leaders. This is a useful construct to examine when students are in college because it is potentially amenable to change via interventions. Ultimately, however, it will be important to examine whether interpersonal influences are associated with actual leadership attainment. Ideally, research using a longitudinal design would examine the fit of a model in which leadership aspirations are specified as a mediator of relations between interpersonal influences and later entry into leadership positions.

Conclusions

The aim of this study was to determine whether career decision-making support/guidance and inspiration from role models relate to women’s leadership aspirations. We found that while perceptions of support/encouragement and role-model inspiration were positively associated with leadership aspirations, these associations did not differ depending on the nontraditionality of women’s majors. The results support practice of facilitating women’s access to others who provide guidance and inspiration for career decisions, but they do not necessarily suggest such interventions would reduce disparities in female leadership in traditional versus nontraditional career fields. Further research will be needed to identify other potential factors that may be unique to the experiences of women in nontraditional fields.

Measure	1	2	3	4
Support/guidance	1.00	.39**	−.11*	.14**
Inspiration/modeling		1.00	−.10*	.17**
Major nontraditionality			1.00	.07
Leadership aspirations				1.00
N	650	650	673	650
M	4.21	3.58	31.83	2.93
SD	0.69	0.91	22.42	0.67

Predictor	R²	B	SE B	β	sr ²
Step 1	.045
Support/guidance		.094	.041	.096*	.09
Inspiration/modeling		.106	.031	.143**	.13
Major nontraditionality		.003	.001	.100*	.10
Step 2	.047
Support/guidance		.096	.041	.098*	.09
Inspiration/modeling		.106	.031	.143**	.13
Major nontraditionality		.003	.001	.106**	.10
Support × Nontraditionality		−.028	.030	−.039	−.04
Modeling × Nontraditionality		.013	.029	.018	.02

Footnotes

Authors’ Note

This study is based on the first author’s master’s thesis, completed under the direction of the second author.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Jennifer L. Yeoward

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