Women's career interruptions : an integrative review

Purpose: The purpose of this integrative literature review was three-fold: to explore the phenomenon of women’s career interruptions as revealed by publications in the past two decades, to propose a new career decision tree model (CDTM) and to outline an agenda for future research. Design/methodology/approach: The authors adopted the integrative literature review approach proposed by Torraco (2005, 2016) and used a mind mapping application called MindMeister to synthesize 64 identified articles. Findings: The proposed CDTM can assist those who are interested in exploring individuals’ career decisions to think systematically about career influencers at different levels. Originality/value: The CDTM is significantly different from existing career models and theories in that it explains women’s career interruptions in a context-sensitive manner. This model can assist human resource development professionals in analyzing the influencers of women’s career decisions and tackling individual problems level by level.