Career counseling with lesbian clients

Current career-counseling models were not specifically designed to meet the needs of lesbian career clients. Cook, Heppner, and O’Brien (2002a) proposed an ecological career-counseling perspective for women that seems to be particularly well suited to the needs of lesbian career clients as well. Such a perspective acknowledges the dynamic interplay between the person and the environment as well as the importance of understanding a person in context. At a minimum, lesbian career clients face unique career concerns due to their sexual orientation as well as their gender. Furthermore, like other career clients, lesbians must contend with other aspects of their identity that may be marginalized and unacknowledged in current career-counseling models (e.g., race-ethnicity, socioeconomic status [SES], disability). An ecological model encourages the counselor to carefully consider interventions focused on changing person-environment interactions.