Temporality and Gender: Young Adults' Career and Family Plans

Abstract

Qualitative data from a study of gender differentiation in mathematics are utilized to support and develop the proposition that men and women live in different temporal worlds. Patterns concerning anticipations of how work, education, and family will be organized are clearly gender differentiated. G. H. Mead's theory of time is used to conceptualize these differences as problems of continuity and discontinuity. It is argued that men live in linear temporal worlds and women live in contingent temporal worlds. These modalities are specified in greater detail through an analysis of “what” and “how” problems of the future. The conceptualization of gender differentiation in temporality is brought to bear on several substantive issues of gender differentiation and society.