Catalyst is a leading nonprofit organization working to advance women in business and the professions. The Institute is archiving data from two of Catalyst’s recent studies—"Knowing the Territory: Women in Sales" and "Two Careers, One Marriage: Making It Work in the Workplace." Both of these data sets are available to faculty and graduate student researchers for secondary analysis. We are delighted to be able to make them available, as we believe that many interesting questions can be addressed with them.
To obtain the data, see the Obtaining Catalyst Data.
These data consist of a total of 100 transcripts of focus groups with women and men in business-to-business sales, and individual interviews with human resources managers and senior sales managers in twenty-one companies. Interviews with human resources and senior sales managers were 45 minutes to one and one-half hours long; focus groups were approximately two hours. The twenty-one companies included in this study represent consumer goods (non-durable), services, and industrial products industry sectors. All focus groups and interviews were conducted in 1993. Participating companies were contacted by Catalyst and asked to be a part of the study. Topics of the study included recruitment, training, compensation, promotion and retention practices and the internal work environment (including mentoring and networks) and external work environment (including work/family issues). These data could be used to address questions about barriers to women’s advancement into upper management, women’s strategies for negotiating traditionally male networks of colleagues and customers, and how organizations view the integration of women into their professional and managerial ranks.
Data from this study include transcripts of separate interviews with husbands and wives in 23 couples. Interviews were approximately 45 minutes long and were conducted over the telephone in 1996. Couples participating in the study were identified by snowball sampling, and were geographically diverse—approximately evenly distributed across the northeastern, mid-western, southeastern, southwestern, and western regions. Interview topics included the impact on both the marriage and on careers of being in a dual-career marriage, role definition, children, and workplace and social issues. These data could be used to address questions about how husbands and wives make career decisions in the context of maintaining a family, and how they negotiate family decisions in the context of maintaining careers.