Förhöjd kompetens eller välling i hjärnan?

Sammanfattning: The purpose of this study was to examine if women's career was affected by becoming a mother after 35 years old. It was also our intention to discover if it was an intentional or an unintentional choice to postpone giving birth just for the sake of the career. We have read articles that are implying that women´s career possibilities, combined with children, is difficult and of current interest in today's society. Science has shown that it no longer appears to be women's main life objective to give birth but they now also wants a career. We wanted to shed some light on the subject from two different angles, so we looked both from the women's perspective and from the employer's perspective. We have chosen qualitative data collection method. To gather our empirical material we have interviewed individuals with primary knowledge in this subject. To do so we have used so-called interview guides that we have created ourselves. However this material could have resolved in a sum of subjective interpretations. We have tried to prevent this by also using secondary data such as books and scientific surveys. These have had quantitative elements. In our study we have used three theoretical conceptions which were gender role socialization, gender contract and time resource hypothesis. We used them while analyzing our empirical material. We found that the majority of our interviewed older first time mothers had made a deliberate choice to postpone forming a family just for the sake of their career. The survey also showed that our interviewed employers found it to be competence enhancing for women to have children. If the woman had reached an age of 35 (or older) when she got her first child the employers rather thought that they where loosing competence at the office. This was one of the negative aspects, that we found, of women waiting to after 35 years old to start a family.