The Makeshift Careers of Women in Malawi: Neither Traditional Nor Flexible

Introduction

Academic debates on careers reflect research mainly developed in western economies. However, people’s careers are strongly influenced by their underlying societal contexts (Rodrigues et al., 2016; Xian and Woodhams, 2008), so how well these models apply to non-western countries is unclear. Several authors have called for context-based career studies (Ganrose, 2007; Sullivan, 1999). Sullivan and Baruch (2009: 1562) considered that:

studies of workers in non-western countries that recognise the economic and societal influences on careers are especially important because most of what we know about careers is based on studies conducted in the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia, making western models the de facto ‘standard’ against which careers in other countries are compared.

Moreover, although new career concepts (Tomlinson et al., 2018) allow more flexible paths, and thereby are said to better reflect women’s greater concern for work–life articulation, these assumptions derive from the experience of women in some western countries and may overlook the contextual reality of women elsewhere, especially in the global south.

This article addresses these issues through a qualitative study exploring the careers of professional Malawian women. The objective goes beyond using the Malawian study to test a theory from the north and explores if professional women’s career experiences in a global south context could expand conceptual understandings of women’s careers in ways applicable to both the south and the north. This builds on the recognition within work–life balance debates that wider international comparisons help develop more holistic perspectives that enrich understandings in different global contexts (Lewis et al., 2007).

There are strong grounds for expecting the socio-economic context shaping Malawian women’s careers to differ significantly from that influencing their western counterparts. Malawi is among the poorest countries in the world, ranked 183 out of 189 countries by per capita GDP in 2019 (Conceição, 2019). Consequently, any post-colonial male breadwinner ideals are very far from Malawian reality, where women’s earnings are essential for their families’ economic survival and women’s labour force participation rate at 74% well exceeds the OECD’s 65% average rate (World Bank, 2021a). Formal employment accounts for only 6.4% of employed Malawian women ¹ compared with 16.2% of men (Government of Malawi, 2014). However, as most Malawian women are subsistence farmers or informal workers, this is the only group likely to have employment experiences comparable with those for women in the global north. Neither flexible working nor formal childcare is widely available in Malawi (Semu, 2002) and although better paid women may use domestic helpers, they still have significant household and care responsibilities (Kanyongolo, 2011). Domestic tasks are greater in the south because of underdeveloped infrastructure (e.g. lack of running water in some areas) and fewer durable goods. They also extend to support for community activities to maintain traditions (Lewis et al., 2007) and service family events. Furthermore, childcare needs are high, as nearly half the population is under 15 (Index mundi, 2021), partly a result of the AIDS epidemic. Nevertheless, women with a foothold in formal employment are unlikely to ‘opt out’ to provide childcare due to the household’s reliance on their earnings and limited opportunities to ‘opt back in’.

Consequently, the influence of work–family articulation on Malawian women’s career choices is likely to be very different from that experienced by most of their western counterparts. In exploring how careers are shaped in this specific context, the aim is to extend the conceptual range of careers research to capture women’s experiences in the global south and thereby to shed light on the narrowness of current careers concepts even when applied to western societies.

Reviewing current career concepts from a gendered perspective

Career research has moved beyond the traditional organisation-focused linear career model offering regular salary increases and social status to those prioritising work above all else, irrespective of family circumstances (Worthington et al., 2005). Instead, a range of new models are said to provide a better fit with emerging employment trends and societal arrangements. Globalisation, technology and associated restructuring of work and organisations have changed how careers are viewed (Sullivan and Baruch, 2009). The boundaryless careers concept emerged in response to these transformations and perceived reduced employment security within organisations (Arthur and Rousseau, 1996). Equally important, as more women entered employment, the narrow focus on achieving material and status success was reconsidered and greater emphasis placed on individual psychological assessments of career goals. The protean career model suggests that women, particularly those with care responsibilities, may seek to self-craft their careers rather than follow linear organisationally defined paths (Cabrera, 2009; Hall, 1996), while the kaleidoscope career concept (Mainiero and Sullivan, 2006) suggests that women may prioritise values other than material success at particular life stages. According to these approaches, women may design careers on their own terms and have their own value-based success measures (Cabrera, 2009).

However, even in the western context, critics argue the transformation to new career forms has been exaggerated, with organisation-based careers remaining important and most people’s preferred arrangement (Elchardus and Smits, 2008; King et al., 2005; Rodrigues and Guest, 2010; Tomlinson et al., 2018). Furthermore, evidence for flexible careers, whether protean, boundary-crossing or kaleidoscopic, is far from universal, with full-time continuous careers more the norm for women in, for example, Finland, Portugal and several eastern European countries (Niemistö et al., 2021; Sánchez-Mira and O’Reilly, 2019). This may apply even more in most post-colonial developing countries, where employment opportunities are limited and material needs high (Mokomane, 2014), so that opting out or working part-time may be neither desirable nor possible even though formal childcare and leave policies may be underdeveloped. Full-time continuous working among women is not necessarily linked to adequate parental leave and childcare support whether in developed or developing economies (Ruivo et al., 1998). This suggests that more attention should be paid to diverse societal contexts in shaping women’s career trajectories than to theories emphasising women’s values and self-agency. Malawian women’s trajectories may not conform fully to either traditional or contemporary career models but could display elements of both and/or features of their own.

While contextual influences vary across countries, women’s employment careers everywhere are marked by inequalities in both the family and in employment. Women’s disproportional responsibilities in the home sphere mean that work–life articulation considerations play a greater role in women’s career decisions compared with men’s (Crompton, 2006; Mokomane, 2014). This greater need to accommodate work to home life places women at a labour market disadvantage, partly explaining their lower earnings, which in turn reinforce the gender-unequal division of domestic labour within heterosexual couples (Fagan and O’Reilly, 1998). Proponents of protean and kaleidoscope models present non-traditional paths as opportunities to exercise free-agency in self-crafting careers that are more driven by work–life balance issues and personal values, with limited attention paid to materialistic values and needs, including breadwinning pressures. There is, therefore, insufficient acknowledgement that women’s choice of flexible careers is not only a result of gender inequalities in care responsibilities and in employment opportunities but also itself results in gender inequalities by lowering pay over the life cycle.

The risks of pursuing flexible careers may be higher in developing countries due to limited job opportunities. Even in a western context, the boundaryless career model exaggerates inter-organisational mobility. Decisions to cross organisational, industry and occupational boundaries are found to be significantly influenced by costs and risk factors as well as gender and family circumstances (Rodrigues et al., 2016). Family constraints on mobility may also be stronger where gender relations are more traditional.

Compared with the traditional career model, kaleidoscope and protean models are more sensitive to women’s work–life articulation needs but have been criticised for exaggerating individual agency and downplaying the institutional conditions, cultural norms and organisational practices that limit women’s choices, even in developed countries (Tomlinson et al., 2018). Moreover, the debate on work–life articulation and work–life conflict (see Crompton, 2006) regards life pressures as emanating mostly from domestic and care commitments. However, women in developing economies may face more challenging family contexts where the main pressure is to undertake wage work even when care and domestic burdens are also high. Work–life articulation debates play down breadwinning pressures but African authors have observed how in developing societies paid employment is not seen as competing with care but as part of it, as a means of enhancing family welfare (Mokomane, 2014). Even in a western context, Schmidt (2017) suggests that women’s employment can be interpreted as a form of care if women see it as breadwinning to provide for the family’s material needs and secure their (economic) well-being, rather than as the pursuit of self-interested career objectives.

Debates on career versus care implicitly assume that women have options to reduce or even give up their work commitments but where welfare support for life events (e.g. divorce or a partner’s unemployment, early death, illness or disability) is limited, the risks of opting-out of organisational careers increase. Dual-earning protects households against these economic risks (Smith et al., 2013) and women may not have significant choice, even when jobs involve long hours and travel (Hewlett and Luce, 2006), but to try to fulfil both work and domestic demands. Without a new ‘reproductive bargain’ (Pearson, 2014: 34), where the state provides services to lessen care burdens, women in developing economies may have little option other than performing this double shift.

The kaleidoscope career model identifies various pull (mainly family and care) and push (mainly discrimination and lack of advancement) factors that may interact to create interrupted non-linear trajectories (Mainiero and Sullivan, 2006). Women at childrearing life stages are presented as emphasising balance. However, the term balance has been critiqued for implying an idea of harmony that obscures both the complexities, dilemmas and compromises involved in women’s strategies to manage competing work and family demands and the contextual forces that shape these strategies (Crompton, 2006; Lewis et al., 2007). ² Moreover, despite acknowledging that these problems force women into alternative flexible paths (Cabrera, 2009), the positive aspects of self-crafted careers are overstressed and the impact of trade-offs and compromises overlooked (Olsen, 2021), namely on objective material success measures including pay and progression.

Moreover, what is overlooked in all these debates is that many women with caring responsibilities do have continuous full-time organisational trajectories in both developed and developing countries. These careers will still be shaped by gender discrimination and work–life articulation, but less is known about how these challenges are managed. Women typically struggle to meet ideal worker expectations due to their disproportional care responsibilities (Cook et al., 2002; Worthington et al., 2005). Furthermore, the ‘culturally prescribed values of individualism and autonomy’ (Worthington et al., 2005: 232) embedded in the traditional career model imply that career decisions first and foremost reflect the employee’s best interest. However, women may be expected and prepared to place their family’s interests ahead of their own, particularly in countries like Malawi where collectivist values are strong (Sulamoyo, 2012). Social expectations on women may include not only fulfilling their domestic and care responsibilities but also providing materially, through employment, for their nuclear and extended families, as is typical in developing country contexts (Annor, 2014; Mokomane, 2014) and to contribute to community activities. Lewis et al.’s (2007) critique of the work–life balance debate points to tensions in developing economies between participating in the modern wage economy and maintaining community traditions. These tensions affect mostly women, who are expected to provide the unpaid labour to keep community traditions alive.

Further challenges for women’s careers emerge from attitudinal and structural barriers to progression (Ridgeway and Correll, 2004; Tlais, 2014) that may be more pronounced in sub-Saharan countries due to limited formal childcare and parental leave, more traditional and patriarchal gender relations and more complex family configurations creating obligations beyond the nuclear family (Annor, 2014; Mokomame, 2014; Semu, 2002). Moreover, organisational cultures and policies may create more challenges for women in developing countries (Jaga et al., 2017; Mokomane, 2014; Mordi et al., 2013). Women’s lower share of formal sector jobs may strengthen gender beliefs in, for example, women’s lower work competence (Ridgeway and Correll, 2004). Women may accept their subordinate status in contexts where keeping a job is vital, but these gender beliefs may also lead women to seek to prove their performance and commitment in the hope of limiting discriminatory effects on their careers. This may present a double challenge if they need to demonstrate competencies while receiving limited employer support for family obligations beyond basic maternity leave. This neglect of family commitments may be reinforced where workplaces are ‘structured around an assumption that all workers have a source of unpaid labour to care for their families, or that they will somehow be able to manage their responsibilities’ (Mokomane, 2014: 8). The scarcity of formal sector jobs may allow employers to pursue policies that are out of kilter with their workforce’s needs and realities. Also in some sub-Saharan countries, colonial legacies in the form of bureaucratic rules may result in family-blind public sector employment policies such as mandatory relocation. For instance, Ntseane (2014) describes how teachers in Botswana are subject to mandatory geographical transfers irrespective of family circumstances.

A major gap thus remains in the literature regarding how women manage the tensions between full-time continuous careers and their social and family obligations. As the analysis below suggests, the idea of compromise must be at the core of a framework for representing women’s careers, especially but not exclusively, in developing countries. Such a focus could help develop a more adequate model that acknowledges how women’s careers are shaped both by gender inequalities and work–life articulation considerations and by the context where they take place.

From this review, three research questions can be identified:

Method

Findings

This section explores the three research questions drawing on the analysed interview material.

Discussion: Towards the alternative concept of a makeshift career

The career narratives in this study are characterised by a pattern of compromises and second-best choices that fit neither the traditional organisation-defined paths (Worthington et al., 2005) nor the voluntary self-direction underpinning protean and kaleidoscope models (Cabrera, 2009; Mainiero and Sullivan, 2006). Instead, they suggest the need for a new career concept, that of a ‘makeshift career’ to represent how, throughout their careers, women may have to opt for something ‘temporary and of low quality but used because of a sudden need’. ⁴ The concept of ‘makeshift career’ is closely linked to the idea of compromise in the sense that individuals may need to ‘accept something slightly different from what they really want, because of circumstances or because they are considering the wishes of other people’. ⁵ To develop the case for the makeshift career concept, the discussion first considers how this new concept fits both the context in which women were forging their careers (RQ1) and with evidence of the role played by women’s agency in managing careers amid the tensions of their work–life articulation and their experience of gender discrimination (RQ2). This is followed by a discussion of whether this alternative makeshift career model not only more adequately captures the career paths of women in Malawi and in similar socio-economic contexts than extant models but also could extend understandings of women’s careers in a western context (RQ3).

A first characteristic to emerge from the research material on the Malawian context was the extreme disconnect between employer practices and the needs of the workforce. There is an almost total lack of accommodation to dual earning, with it even becoming more difficult to achieve relocation on family grounds in teaching. There is no sign of the state providing support for domestic burdens in a new ‘reproductive bargain’ as called for by Pearson (2014), yet employers continue to ignore issues of work–life articulation, at best complying reluctantly with limited mandatory maternity leave. While these employer practices may reflect colonial legacies within the public service and western male breadwinner employment models, the key problem may be employers’ monopsonist power over their workforces, enabling them, for example, to insist on difficult relocations as a pre-condition for promotion. With work–life balance already recognised as a utopian imaginary in the West (Lewis et al., 2007), this context provides even less chance of balance. Instead, despite stronger tensions between the two domains (Crompton, 2006), work demands normally prevail due to limited options to adjust employment arrangements to family and care needs. While makeshift compromises only offer limited and unsatisfactory adjustments, they may be the only solution, as women’s earnings are too valued for any departure from dual full-time earning.

This links to the second contextual feature driving the adoption of makeshift arrangements, namely the family and community context. These women faced two types of pressure emanating from the family but pushing in contradictory directions. The first was pressure to be breadwinners – both as dual breadwinners (or as single mothers) and as breadwinning contributors to the extended family. The term breadwinning here reflects the emphasis placed on the importance of women’s earnings in supporting both the immediate and the extended family. A woman’s role as breadwinner, even when her husband is the main breadwinner, can, as Schmidt (2017) argues, change perceptions of the meaning of their work, so that, as Mokomane (2014) suggests, in an African context it becomes part of family care rather than an activity perceived as in conflict with family responsibilities. New career models, alongside debates on work–life articulation, tend to stress pressures on time and on care responsibilities and overlook the material costs of flexible careers. In Malawi, the dominance of the breadwinning imperative shapes the nature of the compromises that women make. These must not jeopardise their employment position and their financial implications must be marginal. These compromises reflect women’s weak position relative to their employers but also the wider insecurity of life in Malawi beyond the shortage of employment. With no social safety net, the risks are higher than in the West of losing a provider partner and also of facing high dependency in the extended family due to health and life events. The limited attention to the breadwinning imperative in western women’s career models indicates a legacy from the historical treatment of women’s employment participation as marginal or contingent. However, even in western countries, how far women see themselves as permanent or contingent labour market participants varies (Lyonette et al., 2011; Sánchez-Mira and O’Reilly, 2019). Furthermore, while joint breadwinning may be facilitated in some contexts – particularly Nordic countries – by social support systems (Schmidt, 2017), in other countries, such as Portugal, the need to boost family income was a major factor in the growth of female breadwinning (Ruivo et al., 1998). Societal context may affect the perceptions and meaning of women’s work and a focus on breadwinning may offer new insights into women’s career decisions and work–life articulation strategies.

The second family pressure on women pushes in the other direction and stems from their domestic and care responsibilities. This differs from a western context not only due to the volume of domestic work but also because formal sector workers are assumed to overcome this conflict by hiring domestic help (Mokomane, 2014), thereby legitimising employers’ disregard of family pressures. Women in financial services did hire domestic help but still had overall responsibility for domestic and care work and for some specific family and community tasks. In teaching, relatively low pay and short classroom hours led women to do most of the domestic work. Thus, the nature of work–life conflicts and the scope for compromises vary across social, economic and cultural contexts. Women are also at the forefront of providing a bridge between cultural traditions and expectations (Lewis et al., 2007), even where employers do not accommodate these traditional roles; for example, at funerals or weddings, or tending the sick.

Our second research question considered the role of women’s agency in shaping careers. The women in this study were found to be agentic but far from the free agents imagined in new career models who self-craft careers or pursue non-material values. Instead, they directed their agency at finding ways to pursue their full-time organisational careers, whether through actions to overcome discriminatory barriers to promotion or by seeking short-term or second-best solutions to help them meet family demands. Most women in this study aspired to advance their careers and took actions to overcome gender beliefs (Ridgeway and Correll, 2004) concerning their competence and performance, while also making trade-offs to accommodate the demands of their complex lives. This complexity included accepting more interference by their husbands in their working lives and decisions than the western norm. Their active engagement and concern to progress their careers stands at odds with assumptions that women would seek balance in their compromises by forgoing jobs that make higher demands (Olsen, 2021). Women’s decisions to delay promotions were mainly linked to problems of family location or to the difficulties of training away from home, thereby preventing them fulfilling their household roles. Most participants were motivated to pursue promotion and indeed some acted up in more responsible roles without a pay rise in the hope of later promotion. Thus, agency was used to further the breadwinning imperative, provided this did not risk long-term family separation.

In relation to our third research question, this study extends conceptual and empirical understandings of women’s careers, first by revealing the limitations of existing career models when applied in a developing country context and, second, by proposing an alternative model that addresses those limitations and may also be applicable to women in developed countries. The ‘makeshift career’ concept characterises career trajectories as the outcome of sequential decisions that are not always made to achieve professional growth and meeting one’s aspirations but instead involve proactive adjustments and compromises to manage the constant tensions between work and family demands and to deal with workplace setbacks. The kaleidoscope theory recognises that women make career choices with reference to the interests of others, particularly in midlife when child rearing (Mainiero and Sullivan, 2006), but it assumes that balance is the main objective at that stage and is achievable, and that in later life stages women pursue an individual search for greater authenticity. Both the kaleidoscope and protean models also over-emphasise the role of free-agency and the voluntaristic nature of women’s career choices. This has obscured the dilemmas and structural constraints that women face due to inequalities in employment and within the home. Those models also pay limited attention to the financial motivations and consequences of these choices. In contrast, the makeshift approach by providing more adequate recognition of the problematic nature of work–life articulation, particularly where breadwinning is part of a woman’s responsibility of caring for their families, also allows for compromises and second-best solutions over women’s whole life-course.

While the qualitative nature and small scale of the research prevents generalisation in a statistical sense, the makeshift career concept is theoretically relevant beyond the scope of the study. The makeshift metaphor fits the Malawian and other developing country contexts characterised by scarcity of formal jobs, strong financial needs, shortage of formal childcare and flexible arrangements, and strong gender norms. This study demonstrates the case for expanding the contextual range of empirical studies to extend perspectives and generate new conceptualisations. The career compromises made by the women in this study were indeed shaped by the Malawian context, but women elsewhere also experience tensions between the family and the work domain, face contextual constraints and barriers at work, and often have to make compromises that result in far-from-ideal outcomes for themselves.

Thus, while further research is needed, the concept should prove useful for examining women’s contemporary careers in western countries. By considering the complex dynamics of how individual decisions interact with organisational factors, societal contexts, family circumstances and financial conditions, this approach highlights the need for a sociological focus on material needs, institutional conditions and collective norms influencing women’s career decisions rather than the new career models’ concerns with individualised values and psychological motivations. Moreover, while women in this study have limited choices other than to pursue full-time continuous careers, even where more options and support are available, women still make constrained choices. Support for dual earning is still often insufficient but cross-national variations in career patterns are also influenced by social norms and institutional legacies from women’s labour market integration process or industrial relations actors’ attitudes to flexible working. Where flexible career options are available, the makeshift career concept could capture the less-than-ideal nature of the solution if flexibility involving interruptions or part-time work limits earnings prospects and advancement. Compared with the over-agentic and over-optimistic stance of new career conceptualisations, the makeshift career metaphor provides a more realistic representation of how women navigate and negotiate their careers, compromising between their family demands and financial constraints within the organisational and societal contexts where careers are forged. The concept of makeshift career recognises the gender inequalities that underpin the constraints and tensions experienced by women everywhere and how these inform their career choices. Although many men also struggle to achieve their full ambitions and have to make do with second best, so long as women bear an unequal share of domestic and care work, it is women’s careers that will be most characterised by compromises and makeshift arrangements to do the best they can to manage their commitments to both spheres.