PREFERENCES OF CURRENT FEMALE UNIVERSITY STUDENTS - FAMILY OR CAREER?

The main objective of this article was to establish the attitudes of female university graduates to motherhood and family life and to what extent they prefer career to family. The survey should verify whether the prevailing opinion on the correlation between the growing number of career-oriented women and the achieved level of education as opposed to those family-oriented, is true. The participants in the survey were 218 female students in total who study at the same faculty but in different fields of study, i.e., social work and economics and management. Female social work students gave statistically significantly different answers than those studying Economics and management. There were differences in partial questions (e.g., the size of the salary which would make female students delay motherhood) verified using the Mann-Whitney Test, as well as in the overall typology. While female social work students unambiguously prefer questions focused on children and family, those studying economics and management value career more, as proved by the Wilcoxon signed-rank test. Hence, the orientation of women does not only relate to the educational level, but very significantly to the field of study as well.