Measuring Career Support in Women’s Private Domain: Insights from Patriarchal Contexts

Discriminatory family practices such as early marriage, limited mobility and restricted access to education often hinder women’s professional development in patriarchal societies. In some instances, women are prohibited from working because employment requires public interaction. Women who enter the workforce are frequently expected to prioritize family responsibilities over their professional commitments. As a result, career-related family support becomes crucial in sustaining and advancing women’s careers in patriarchal contexts. However, research on the impact of career-related family support on women’s careers in patriarchal societies remains limited, primarily due to the absence of gender-specific tools to assess the career support perceived by women professionals in these contexts. Addressing this gap, we propose a new measure—career social support from women’s private domain (CSS-WP)— to assess the career-related support women receive from their private or non-work domains. Following a multi-phase scale development process, we developed and validated a new measure with three studies of independent sample groups from the patriarchal context of Bangladesh. The CSS-WP measure can assist human resource professionals, career counsellors and leaders in assessing career support for women in patriarchal contexts, thereby guiding initiatives to improve work-life balance, retention and gender diversity.