interest or other vocational outcomes. SCCT is concerned with a
number of other important person and contextual variables (gender,
race-ethnicity, physical health or disability, genetic endowment, and
socioeconomic conditions) that are assumed to be intricately related
to the social cognitive variables and to the career development
process. Figure 7.2 provides an overview of how selected person,
contextual, and learning-experiential variables are hypothesized to
influence both the social cognitive variables and subsequent career
development outcomes. We focus briefly on the complex issues of
gender, race-ethnicity, and genetic influences.
Progress in understanding the role of gender, race-ethnicity, and
sociostructural factors in career development has been slow
(Fitzgerald & Betz, 1994). Historically, the major career develop-
ment theories tended to deal with such factors in fairly general,
descriptive terms, and earlier inquiry on gender and race focused
more on documenting group differences on career-related outcomes
than on clarifying the specific processes through which gender and
race affect career development (Hackett & Lent, 1992). SCCT
regards gender and race from a social constructivist position in
which these attributes are interwoven features of the person’s so-
cially constructed world, not simply inherited biological properties
of the person. We believe their relevance to career development
stems largely from the reactions they evoke from the social-cultural
environment and from their relation to the structure of opportunity
within which career behavior transpires.
Instead of focusing only on the study of sex (a biological vari-
able), psychologists are, increasingly, studying gender—a socially
constructed concept that includes the psychological, social, and
cultural implications of sex (Fassinger, 2000). Similar arguments
may be made about conceptualizing ethnicity as the psychological-
sociocultural experience of race (Casas, 1984). Viewing gender and
ethnicity as socially constructed aspects of people’s experience
shifts the focus to the social, cultural, and economic conditions
that shape the learning opportunities to which particular individ-
uals are exposed, the interpersonal reactions (such as support or
268 CAREER CHOICE AND DEVELOPMENT