Our Separate Ways, With a New Preface and Epilogue

 

5

BREAKING IN

IN “FLASHBACKS,” we let our subjects tell us their life stories up to the point of their education. But how did these women get from college to the corporate life? How did they begin their managerial careers? Did they take similar or separate paths? A key question in our research was how women gained entry to a field that was dominated primarily by whites and males at the time these women were ready to break in.

We found that racial differences played a role in determining the way black and white women entered managerial careers. But gender played an even more powerful role. Understanding gender issues is a prerequisite to understanding these women’s experiences; because managerial careers have traditionally been a male domain, ...