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Successful Ageing of Australian Baby Boom Career Women
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I am a PhD Candidate at James Cook University (JCU), Cairns investigating the
perceptions and expectations of baby boom career women in Australia toward
retirement or later life transitions.
My inspirational supervisors are Dr. Nerina Caltabiano and Dr. Marie Caltabiano.
Baby boomers are people born from 1946 to 1964. Career women refer to women
working full-time, part-time or in casual employment. The aim of this research
is to construct a model and measure of successful ageing and psychosocial
wellbeing for this cohort so that they continue to live meaningful and
fulfilling lives in their later years. The initial stage of this research
consisted of six focus groups conducted in Far North Queensland and Melbourne.
Currently in the second stage of the research, the National On-Line Survey has
been launched at
www.soe.jcu.edu.au/successfulageing or a pen and paper survey can be
requested by emailing
Lyn.Courtney@jcu.edu.au I am currently trying to get survey participants
from each Australian state and territory so that the voices of all Australian
baby boom career women are reflected.
To set the stage for this research, I was born in Stuttgart, Germany; thus
beginning a lifetime of travel. Beginning primary school in Yokohama, Japan and
graduating from high school in Las Cruces, NM, USA, I attended 13 schools in 12
years in three continents. I began University at New Mexico State University in
1969; however, similar to many women, I did not complete my degree as I married,
went to work and became a working parent.
Looking for new adventures in 1989, my husband and two sons spent six months in
Queensland and ultimately migrated to Australia in 1991, becoming Australian
citizens in 1993. Searching for the perfect home in Australia, we took a seven
year road trip around Australia stopping to live in Cairns (2 years), Brisbane
(3 years) and Perth (4 years) before returning to Cairns to make it our
permanent home.
In 1999, after both sons had graduated and moved away from home, I began
searching for purpose and meaning in my life. With JCU literally on my doorstep,
I decided to follow my interests and enrolled in the Bachelor of Psychology
degree. It was during that year that I realized that I had also found my
intellectual home. I thrived at JCU and life took on special meaning and focus
that had previously escaped me. I became actively involved in the JCU Mentor
program, eventually being employed as the Mentor Program trainer and
administrator. Before long, in 2004, graduation day arrived. What I had
anticipated being the end of my academic years, as I had finally reached my
lifetime goal of graduating from university, turned out to be the rich
foundation for my academic passion.
For me, such passion was hard, if not impossible, to squelch. I was off and
running into my Honours year researching the impact of the JCU Mentor Program on
the first year experience at university. And, before I knew it, I was
considering postgraduate studies. Being a baby boom career woman, I became
fascinated with what my destiny might be in my later years as ageing strategies,
interventions, policy and programs were generally guided by trying to meet the
needs of previous generations. I anticipated these strategies and policies would
not be applicable to me in my later years as I knew I was distinctly dissimilar
from my parents and previous generations, therefore, I was driven by a desire to
investigate baby boomer’s perceptions and expectations of retirement. A PhD
project required me to narrow the research scope first to women, who have
undergone dramatic role reversals, to career baby boom women who were expected
to “retire” within an antiquated and male model for retirement. I am currently
about half way through my PhD and have presented my focus group findings at four
conferences in 2006 where I won the prize for best paper by an emerging
researcher at the 39th National Australian Gerontology Association Conference.
At the same time that I am working on my PhD, I need to survive financially and
I have been fortunate to work with Professor Neil Anderson, Deputy Head of the
School of Education as his Senior Research Officer on an ARC Linkage Grant
investigating declining female participation rates in Information Communication
Technology (ICT) career pathways and with the Queensland Centre of Science, ICT
and Mathematics Education in Rural and Regional (SiMERR) Australia on a variety
of research projects.
