The Influences of Career Support and Sexual Identity on Sexual Minority Women's Career Aspirations‪.‬

Over the last decade, there has been an emergence of conceptual and empirical research focused on career-related issues specific to sexual minorities. Despite this emergence, there still remains a paucity of research devoted exclusively to the career development of lesbians (Chung, 2003). Researchers continue to study the career development of lesbians and gay men together, regardless of the assertions from some researchers that sexual minorities should not be treated as a homogeneous group when exploring career-related issues (Elliott, 1993; Etringer, Hillerbrand, & Hetherington, 1990). Special issues on the career development of lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) individuals appeared in The Career Development Quarterly'(Pope, 1995) and the Journal of Vocational Behavior (Croteau & Bieschke, 1996) . Prior to 1995, however, there had only been 11 published empirical studies on the career experiences of LGB individuals, and of these 11 studies, five focused exclusively on the career experiences of lesbians (Croteau, 1996). Although these studies have been important to the development of future theoretical and empirical efforts focused on lesbians' vocational issues, these studies have been criticized as mostly atheoretical (Croteau, 1996).