This is (still) a man’s world: Young professional women’s identity struggles in gendered workplaces

Abstract

Recent research has documented the rise of neoliberal and postfeminist sensibilities within young women’s sense-making and accounting activities in western countries – exemplified by the image of the “top girl”. Yet workplaces remain structured by male power and patriarchal norms. In this qualitative focus group study conducted in Auckland, New Zealand, we investigated how young professional women negotiate the contradictions between the “top girl” mode and gendered workplaces in their accounts of workplace difficulties. Our aim was to explore the affective dimension of participants’ identity struggles and to discuss possible implications for thinking about young professional women’s experiences of emotional distress. We identified shared narratives about how to “survive”, and suggest the imperatives bound up in them can be thought of as lessons that women learn to get by at work. In addition to reinforcing the status quo, they represent the negotiation of inherently conflictual professional identities, which places a considerable emotional strain on women.

Keywords

gendered organization emotional distress professional identity neoliberalism postfeminism “top girl”

The last few decades have seen young women take advantage of reduced educational and career barriers; indeed, girls and young women are now frequently positioned as the most likely winners in an increasingly competitive world and thus have become a “metaphor for neoliberal discourse of personal performance, choice and freedom” (Ringrose, 2007, p. 481). Yet, despite this apparent success, women remain twice as likely to experience depression as men (Yu, 2018). This article investigates how young professional women negotiate and navigate the contradiction between “this … glamor-worker mode of feminine subjectivity” (Harris, 2004, p. 19) and the actuality of the contemporary work organization as a place of both implicit and explicit sexism and gender-stereotyping where the “white male norm” and the possession of various types of mostly inherited capitals still reign supreme (Acker, 2006; Burt, 1998; Haynes, 2012).

We were interested in exploring whether an in-depth investigation of this kind of affectively laden identity work can contribute to our understanding of women’s experiences of emotional distress. Our approach to the study was informed by the emergent cultural slot of the “top girl” identified by McRobbie (2007), which is associated with holding down well-paid jobs, standing on equal footing with male peers, leaving behind the traditional female role of caring for and nurturing others, and indulging in refined consumption habits. According to Harris (2004, p. 46), “[t]he picture … of the high-achieving schoolgirl who goes on to a well-paid, successful, professional career is indeed a reality”, which appears to be backed up by ever new statistics of female success within tertiary education and evidence of women’s greater participation at junior levels of formerly male-dominated professions like accounting and law. It seems, then, that all over the western world, young, well-educated, middle-class women today have left behind traditional notions of female success associated with the role of mother and housewife (Nielsen & Rudberg, 2000). Instead, they expect to be able to provide for themselves, to have fulfilling careers and love relationships characterized by mutual support and equality (Everingham, Stevenson, & Warner-Smith, 2007).

In this article, we analyse narratives of workplace difficulties provided by young professional women who took part in focus group discussions. Following Wetherell (2012), we contend that identity and affect are intimately intertwined. As narrativization can be seen as indicating perceived breaches between real and ideal or self and society (Bruner, 1990), analysing these accounts might reveal “construction sites” of identity, associated with heightened vulnerability and uncertainty. Furthermore, we are interested in the discursive resources underpinning the “top girl” identity and how these might relate to upholding the status quo. Recent research has documented the rise of a “postfeminist sensibility” within young women’s sense-making and accounting activities in western countries, characterized by “the prominence accorded to ‘choice’ and ‘agency’, the emphasis upon individualism, the retreat from structural accounts of inequality and the repudiation of sexism and (thus) of the need for feminism” (Gill, Kelan, & Scharff, 2017, p. 227). A core feature of this discursive mode is the incorporation of neoliberal ideas (Baker, 2010; Gill & Scharff, 2011). Several empirical studies found that these notions – i.e. around the importance of hard work and entrepreneurialism – are indeed taken up by young women (and men), for instance when making sense of their educational choices and imagined life trajectories (Nairn & Higgins, 2007) or in accounts about their working lives (Scharff, 2016). Neoliberalism’s inherent assumption of meritocracy, that is, “the sense that liberal-capitalist society will reliably provide opportunities for individuals to carve out relations of reciprocity that seem fair and that foster life as a project” (Berlant, 2011, p. 3), fits well with a postfeminist view that there are no gendered impediments to women’s success. Therefore, in line with other recent critiques of postfeminism (Dobson & Kanai, in press), our study explores the gendered affective dimensions of neoliberalism.

The gendered workplace

Gendering and gender-stereotyping are ongoing processes; a large body of research supports Acker’s (1990) claim of the “gendered organization” (Britton, 2000; Derks, Ellemers, Van Laar, & De Groot, 2011; Muhr, 2011):

[O]rganizations reflect masculine values and power, permeating all aspects of the workplace in ways often taken for granted. Not only the formal structures of institutions, their recruitment, promotion and appraisal mechanisms and their working hours, but also informal structures of everyday interactions reinforce women’s inferiority. (McDowell, 1997, p. 29)

Supposedly gender-neutral definitions and terms used by personnel and management theorists alike, such as “job” or “employee”, are imbued with gendered associations and presuppose “a particular gendered organization of domestic life and social production” (Acker, 1990, p. 149). The ideal worker is a white, middle-class man who dedicates most of his waking hours to paid work, unencumbered by family or other obligations.

Similarly, “the dominant construction of professionalism” is “linked to traditional male working hours” (Smithson, 2005, p. 288). In a recent study on women lawyers’ career progression, Pringle, Harris, Ravenswood, Giddings, Ryan, and Jaeger (2017) found, for instance, distinctive gendering processes at work in large law firms in New Zealand resulting in what one participant described as “masculine-competitive” (p. 442) organizational cultures that are to a large extent determined by the mostly white male senior partners. What is more, the majority of the 52 female interviewees were accepting of this status quo, including accepting the persistence of “old boys” networks, sexist practices in male-female interaction and long working hours. Taylor (2011) points out that women’s professional identities, in this case as creative workers, form part of gendered subjectivities which are linked to particular practices such as the women lawyers’ non-resistant attitude described by Pringle et al. (2017). In a study on professional women’s relationship with alcohol, Watts, Linke, Murray and Barker (2015) found that participants view drinking as “a masculine ability demonstrating stamina” (p. 219) and as a prerequisite for conforming to workplace norms “set by male bosses” (p. 227).

However, Holmes and Schnurr’s (2006) analysis of data from the Wellington Language in the Workplace Project (LWP), one of the largest studies of this kind worldwide, suggests that normative pressures to “do masculinity” may be contingent in part on the type of workplace. In workplaces perceived as feminine, notably organizations which are “people-oriented” (p. 34), they found that the use of discursive styles traditionally associated with femininity by both women and men is regarded as unremarkable. While these findings seem to suggest the increasing valorization of “performances of femininity” and their use as “workplace resources” (Adkins, 2001, p. 669) at least in some industries, other studies show that women continue to face harsh social and career-related penalties for engaging in masculine-typed behaviour (Laadegard, 2011; Heilman & Parks-Stamm, 2007). Nadesan and Trethewey (2000, p. 228) analysed the advice given to women on how to build effective professional identities:

The popular success literature contends that there are two paths to success and both must be pursued for its realization. First, women must rid themselves of specific psychological barriers acquired during childhood gender socialization. Second, women must learn to comport their bodies in a manner that minimizes their sexuality while, simultaneously, avoids the dangers of hyper-masculinization.

The image that emerges is that of women being expected to walk an extremely fine line as they try to build a convincing professional identity, navigating both organizational norms of masculinity and societal norms of femininity. Despite the wide dissemination and institutionalization of feminist ideas (Illouz, 2007), the attribute which is still most commonly ascribed to women is being oriented towards others and their needs (Heilman & Parks-Stamm, 2007), thus essentially equating womanhood with motherhood. Studies regularly identify motherhood as a significant career barrier and source of discrimination in organizations; at the same time societal perceptions around what it means to be a good mother make the prospect of successfully juggling career and childcare responsibilities even more unlikely for women. The individualizing discourse at play here turns the question of whether or not professional women need to choose between career and family into a matter of personal adequacy, resourcefulness and resilience (Wood & Newton, 2006). The central assumption that it is women’s responsibility to plan and manage motherhood efficiently (Sevón, 2005) miraculously transforms structural and material constraints both within the organization and in society at large into individual deficits (Cahusac & Kanji, 2014; Pringle et al., 2017).

Both such largely invisible as well as more explicit forms of sexism and gender discrimination are common experiences for professional women (Elvira & Graham, 2002; Pringle et al., 2017; King, Botsford, Hebl, Kazama, Dawson, & Perkins, 2012; Leskinen & Cortina, 2014), which emphasizes their precarious and inferior position within work organizations. Although gender discrimination is such a widespread phenomenon, very few studies have investigated its impact on women’s mental and emotional well-being (Belle & Doucet, 2003; Landrine, Klonoff, Gibbs, Manning, & Lund, 1995; Ussher, 2011). Even less attention has been paid to the interaction between particular social identities such as the “top girl” mode, experiences of gender discrimination and emotional distress. By focusing on the affective dimension of young professional women’s identity work, this article aims to contribute towards closing this gap in the literature.

Methodology and methods

As part of a larger study on the socio-cultural context of experiences of depression in young high-achieving women (Chowdhury, Gibson, & Wetherell, 2019), the first author ran focus group discussions around work-related pressures and challenges with young professional women in Aotearoa/New Zealand. The aim of this study was to conduct in-depth qualitative research with a small sample which would allow us to focus in detail on emotionally conflictual aspects of participants’ identity negotiation. We were interested in talking to women who would be deemed “top girls” – that is high achievers who are successful in their careers. In order to avoid the difficulties connected with a self-definition of “being successful”, we recruited young professional women working in contexts and with potential career paths that would place them in this category.

After ethics approval was granted, participants were recruited through the dissemination of advertisements by a large professional services firm in Auckland, New Zealand, to their female employees, as well as snowballing through the first author’s personal networks. The purpose of the study was described to participants as “trying to better understand what it is like to be a young professional woman in New Zealand”, both in terms of difficulties and stresses as well as motivations and successes.

This article is based on data from five semi-structured focus group discussions with a total sample of twelve young professional women recruited from seven different firms. We attempted to create groups of strangers; however, we achieved this end in only three of the groups due to the considerable time constraints and ensuing scheduling difficulties, which also affected group size. We initially aimed for groups of four or five women, but this turned out not to be feasible (several times participants withdrew at the last moment because of unforeseen work-related commitments). The average age of the sample was 29 years; three-quarters were either partnered or married at the time of the interview; only one woman had children. The median annual income of the sample was $85,000 (NZ dollars) and thus considerably higher than the median income in New Zealand, which was $48,800 in 2016 (“Who earns what?”, 2017). All except one participant held either Bachelor’s degrees or postgraduate qualifications. According to the 2013 census of major ethnic groups in Auckland, 59.3 per cent of the population identify with at least one European ethnicity, 10.7 per cent as Maori, 23.1 per cent as Asian and 14.6 per cent as Pacific peoples. In comparison with the general population, the sample slightly over-represented ethnic minority individuals: half the sample were of European descent, while the remaining half had Pacific Island or Asian origins. This selection bias could have been due to the fact that individuals with a double minority status – gender and race/ethnicity – are often exposed to higher rates of discrimination (Hayes, Chun-Kennedy, Edens, & Locke, 2011) and therefore more open to participating in relevant research. All participants identified as heterosexual and had been New Zealand residents for at least five years at the time of the interview. Table 1 lists pseudonyms, age, ethnicity, profession and family status for all focus group participants. Note that the designations respondents themselves chose are reported. “NZ European” is a self-identification commonly used by New Zealanders of European descent and corresponds to “white”/“Caucasian”. Six of the women were not born in New Zealand, and four of these had emigrated as adults.

Table 1.

Demographic information on focus group participants.

Pseudonym	Age	Ethnicity	Profession	Family Status
Focus Group 1
Maria	35	European	Data Analyst	Partnered
Sara	25	Samoan	HR Advisor	Partnered
Focus Group 2
Grace	25	Taiwanese	Solicitor	Single
Amy	27	Malaysian	Senior Product Designer	Civil Union
Rebecca	38	Samoan-Chinese	HR Manager	Married
Focus Group 3
Anna	27	White	Senior Financial Accountant	Married
Mira	28	Malaysian	Financial Accountant	Partnered
Focus Group 4
Kamala	34	Indian	Financial Advisor/ Accountant	Married
Andrea	28	NZ European	In-House Legal Counsel	Married
Julia	34	NZ European	Finance Manager	Partnered
Focus Group 5
Tara	28	NZ European	Agency Director	Single
Sophie	23	NZ European	HR Advisor	Single

We hoped that placing participants in a peer group context would activate the social norms and practices which characterize their workplaces. Furthermore, the group format allows for the participants’ terms and views to take priority over those of the facilitator in shaping the course of the discussion (Kitzinger, 1994). Our aim was to explore emotional conflicts, for instance arising from the irreconcilability of the “women can have it all” discourse and experiences of sexism, and to thereby bring to the fore potential links between available identities, such as the “top girl” position, and negative affective reactions, such as worry, anxiety and frustration.

Group discussions always began with asking participants to comment on the idea of a “widening gender gap” in reference to a recent (NZ) newspaper article which reported girls’ and young women’s increasing educational and career success. The groups were conducted by the first author and did not follow a set interview schedule to allow for as much detail and exploration as possible, but all covered the following topics: participants’ definition of success, a question around whether “women can have it all” and the relevance of feminism for young women today, workplace difficulties and experiences of discrimination, and their thoughts on why young professional women might get depressed. One of the topics that emerged unprompted was (planning) motherhood and its potential career impacts. Discussions lasted between one and two hours and were audio-taped (with permission) and transcribed.

As a first step after completion of data collection, the first author listened to the recordings while reading the transcripts, removed identifying information and assigned pseudonyms. Initially the transcripts were coded thematically to gain familiarity with broad patterns and trends in the data; examples of early codes are “(career) success requires acting white and male”, “women and men are (naturally) different”, “women bring women down”, “women have to constantly prove their worth”. We noticed that the discussions contained numerous emotionally charged stories and short anecdotes about workplace difficulties, often describing their own or a female co-worker’s behaviour or emotional response. What these stories seemed to “do” was to formulate rules or lessons participants had learnt about “how to be a professional woman”. Narrating these experiences did, however, generate considerable negative affect in participants. This was reflected in the words participants chose but also in their tone, which could be described as exasperation or frustration. Additionally, topics and issues which generated a lot of (heated) discussion were considered affectively loaded. According to Wetherell (2013, p. 360), affect and discourse cannot be neatly separated – “entangling has always/already occurred as participants’ current actions usually orient to past familiar practice”. From this perspective, emotional struggles take the form of particular affective-discursive practices, as part of situated and therefore relational activities, shaped by the social identities in play. It seemed to us that participants expressed these struggles through the “lessons” contained in their accounts. The next step in the analysis thus consisted of collating all the data extracts containing stories and anecdotes on workplace difficulties. This approach was guided by the assumption that an important motivation for storytelling is to impart life lessons to others (Merrill & Fivush, 2016). This meant exploring what kinds of experiences warranted account-giving activities rather than investigating the story process per se. Narrating activity helps people cope with ambiguity. At the same time, particularly when accompanied by the expression of strong negative affect, it can be seen as an indicator of friction, of ruptures in participants’ professional identities. The analysis is structured around the main themes distilled from participants’ accounts of workplace difficulties organized in the form of survival lessons and explores the affective dimension of these instances of identity negotiation.

Analysis

Lesson One: Act like a man but don’t be a bitch

I have never once felt disadvantaged for being a female. And then I started working at [accounting firm], which is a fairly heavily male dominated firm, so I am in HR but I support […] the corporate finance team. So it’s really Wall Street, lads, lads, lads. It’s really been since I started working there that the gender differences have really hit me. (Sophie, 23, HR advisor)

In the excerpt above, Sophie not only talks about the uneven gender ratio at her workplace, that is, its material properties, but also refers to organizational culture. Her use of the words “Wall Street” and “lads” carries a host of connotations of masculinity. Later in the interview, she elaborated on this by telling a story about a woman who was refused a promotion “even though technically she was meeting all the criteria” because “she was quite introverted and shy” and her male managers were worried that “she wouldn’t be able to get on with clients”. It was thus not the woman’s competence which was questioned but the suitability of her personality. Not being a typical “Wall Street lad” – loud, brash, aggressive – she was deemed to be less effective with her presumably mostly male clients. In a kind of reverse case scenario, Grace and Rebecca emphasized how advantageous it was for their careers to have “white man hobbies”.

[I]t’s easy for a law firm to interview me and be like okay well you qualify on paper but you fit because, you know […] I can basically talk about any sports code, but that’s just like part of my personality. (Grace, 25, solicitor)

My last role I did, I was the recruiter for a bank […] and my portfolio that I had was done with the commercial bankers, so my stakeholders were 95% male. Banking is very relationship based so to build relationships and get recruitment done, I was going out for drinks with all the males, hanging out with them. And I got to a stage where I realized that the best way to get them on board and to influence them was to almost become like a male. But funnily enough, fortunately my hobbies are quite male […] if I hadn’t had that passion, would I have gotten to where I am now? (Rebecca, 38, HR manager)

However, women who perform a “masculine masquerade” (McDowell, 1997, p. 197) at work and divest themselves of all feminine attributes are likely to be perceived pejoratively.

The girl that used to work there […] we’ll talk about her as being a bitch because she liked things done in a certain way, so that made her a bitch. So it’s a way of do I then just not be nice to people at work because my personality is generally quite bubbly and quite friendly. Can I not be like that and do I just have to be one way all the time because then when I turn around and say okay no, enough, we need to do it like this and I am more direct, people turn around oh you’ve had a bad day, oh are things not good at home, is Peter not doing the dishes. That is the sort of response you get. (Andrea, 28, in-house legal counsel)

Andrea had prefaced her remarks with the words “I am told I am bossy all the time still now” to which Julia (34, finance manager) replied: “And why is that negative? […] If you were a man you would be decisive and that would be amazing”. Andrea’s difficulties illustrate the dilemmatic nature of the identity work that young professional women have to do on a daily basis. Being professional requires women to display masculine behaviours such as assertiveness and a direct communication style without violating traditional norms of femininity – an almost impossible balancing act. Lesson One stands in sharp contrast to the “top girl” ideal of carefree self-confidence (Gill & Orgad, 2015) where the imitation of “male behaviour” functions “as a post-feminist gesture” (McRobbie, 2007, p. 733); instead young professional women are exhorted to stay within the extremely narrowly defined “acceptable” bounds of both masculinity and femininity.

Lesson Two: Women (at the top) bring other women down

[W]omen bring other women down and then some women get to the top by you know all sorts of ways and I think that is a really negative thing? We don’t have females at the top we wanna aspire to because either they’re just an awful person and they’re bringing other women down or they’re really lonely and have nothing but work and we don’t have those people that we want to aspire to be. (Sara, 25, HR advisor)

One of the most striking images that emerged in the discussions was that of the female villain, of the woman – often in a senior position – who has a “chip on her shoulder” (Andrea) and therefore treats her female subordinates poorly. Julia (34, finance manager) described the negative effects of having such a female boss:

She was very all over the show in terms of her like how she would present herself to her team. Some days it was “morning, how are you”, all happy and then the next day it would just be like never make eye contact with you or acknowledge you. So that was really hard actually in that it literally had an effect on me every day because I never knew what she was going to be like, and whether you had to prepare to be shot down or whether it was like happy days and fine.

The explanation for this phenomenon proposed by Grace and Andrea was that these women “had it hard coming up” and “had to fight to get where they are”. Amy’s (26, web designer) account of why women bring women down was in line with the Queen Bee theory of female competition (Staines, Tavris, & Jayaratne, 1974):

I think they call it the Smurfette effect. So in Smurfs there is only that blond Smurf. In so many cartoons as you are growing up there is only that one hot chick or that one beautiful character that is a female among everyone else. So already sort of like starts injecting the sense of right, I need, if I am going to be that person, what do I have to do. I have to weed out my competition. I have to be faster, stronger. I have to fight harder. And so everyone else who are supposed to be on your side suddenly you are fighting against.

As Sheppard and Aquino noted in a recent article on female same-sex conflict at work, “the notion that women have troublesome same-sex workplace relationships has spilled over into the management literature and underlies investigations into the queen bee syndrome” (2017, p. 692, emphasis in original) without there being any empirical basis for it. When our participants talked about other women in the workplace, more often than not there was an almost accusatory undertone to their descriptions. Rebecca stated it explicitly: “we all need to back each other. Women don’t tend to do a lot of that.”

At the core of the Queen Bee narrative lies the assumption that success and femininity do not go together well, which acts as a strong deterrent for women when it comes to articulating their career ambitions, especially in a female peer-group context. None of the focus group participants defined success in terms of “going to the top”; instead ideas like “being able to do what I enjoy” (Amy), “contribut[ing] in some way” (Mira) and “being happy in your life” (Kamala) dominated. The two definitions differing from this type of discourse that were offered – “to be financially independent” (Andrea) and “earning a certain amount and having a certain job title” (Anna) – needed to be hedged with self-descriptions of being superficial. The fact that even in such a small sample there was very little variation in interviewees’ descriptions of success illustrates how powerful age-old notions of femininity, like modesty and other-centredness, still are. The anecdotes participants recounted about women who bring other women down can be viewed as cautionary tales that conjure up an anti-ideal of femininity, the cold-hearted woman at the top. Yet, the environments these young women operate in on a daily basis are built on the principles of competitiveness and entrepreneurialism.

I found that with the male team that I was on there is always proving against each other, well you have to prove yourself, and I hate that type of you know you’ve got to constant... that really made me hate my life, hate myself, hate everything. I needed to be in bed all day on Saturday because I feel so sad. (Kamala, 34, financial advisor)

Disavowing ambition, the way participants had done in the interview context, is not an option at work:

Maria: Another thing is if you hear people saying that somebody does not want to go [in]to management, from conversations you can deduct that they find that person to be weird? Like why wouldn’t he want to?

Sara: Or that person isn’t committed […] I mean you don’t ever tell anybody that you don’t wanna move up you’re happy where you are then they think oh you’re complacent.

There is a split between what is sayable for women about their ambitions and what is expected of them in the workplace. A noticeable consequence of the pathologization of female success was the lack of pride expressed by participants in their achievements. Instead, self-doubt and feelings of anxiety and insecurity were recurrent themes in the discussions. The tension between the demands of neoliberal, competitive workplaces and what Negra (2009) has identified within popular culture as the image of the “‘bad’ female professional” (p. 88) associated with a backlash against women’s greater participation (and success) in the workforce is experienced by young professional women like Maria (35, data analyst) as “an inner struggle”.

Lesson Three: Motherhood (still) is a career barrier

In this part of the analysis, we ask how the pressures and difficulties that young women face in balancing career and motherhood (Cahusac & Kanji, 2014; McIntosh, McQuaid, Munro, & Dabir-Alai, 2012) were dealt with by our sample. Of the twelve women interviewed for this study, only one was a mother. Nevertheless, motherhood became a dominant topic in the focus group discussions.

I was scared when I went for this [job] interview because I thought to myself, and I know I am qualified, I know I have really good experience. I am confident in what I do in my ability. But I remember thinking “oh maybe because they look at my age, they see the ring on my finger, they think oh well that’s what’s next for her. Perhaps we shouldn’t take her in this role.” […] But they tell me “you were the best candidate”. So then I felt better. But then I think I don’t know if three females applied. But it does leave a little you know like a confidence thing on you. (Kamala, 34, financial advisor)

Kamala’s words link sexist and discriminatory organizational practices to experiencing low self-confidence and thus show how encountering social and structural barriers can lead to the very private and individualized experience of feeling less worthy. In this case, it was not a concrete negative outcome, i.e. not getting the job, but the threat inherent in the situation that had an adverse emotional impact on Kamala.

A more direct experience of discrimination that featured in participant’s talk was the scrutiny of women’s (potentially pregnant) bodies.

So the only senior management person at our work that is female, she is the HR manager, she was leading a conversation at the lunch room because apparently somebody said that somebody is pregnant. And she was leading the gossip and going around quizzing people. “Oh, are you pregnant?” And like it’s completely normal. And everyone was like “this is terrible”. […] It’s like “that was really personal”. That is not something that you go around pointing at like, “you are an HR person, you should be leading by example”. You are not going to start going “are you pregnant?”. Or you walk down the hall and one of the older ladies will say to me “oh you’re next, you’re going to have the next baby”. And I am just like “no, don’t talk to me about that because it’s none of your business”. (Andrea, 28, in-house legal counsel)

Andrea’s story is yet another salient example of gendering that is completely unrelated to women’s behaviour. Young women in organizations are constantly reminded that they are of child-bearing age and that this might disadvantage them and stall their careers. Andrea’s strong emotional reaction to the transgressive behaviour of the HR manager and her older female colleague, which appears to have had no negative consequences, can be seen in what she would have liked to say to them (“you are an HR person, you should be leading by example”, “it’s none of your business”). While her account clearly conveys frustration with this intrusion into her privacy, it also speaks of powerlessness in the face of such persistent discrimination. The most influential factor in these young professional women’s socialization into organizational norms and practices was witnessing what was happening to their female co-workers as a result of motherhood.

[I]n our auditing department we actually had quite a lot of managers […] that were women but they were all at that age and then they started having kids […] Audit is really, really hectic. They do midnight hours. It’s definitely very strenuous. And like a lot of them actually moved to kind of lower positions, even though they were on track to become partner, just so they could get a bit more of a work-life balance. It was kind of sad in that respect that the company couldn’t actually recognize they were losing talents […] because they wouldn’t be more flexible. (Anna, 27, financial accountant)

Anna’s narrative spells out the career costs associated with starting a family. Even though she was “sad … that the company couldn’t actually recognize they were losing talents”, she did not feel impelled to push for more equitable organizational policies. Instead, the solution she suggested when asked what might make things better for young mothers was “advocating women that actually are making it work, you know, that have a family that are still advancing in their career”. Earlier in the discussion, Mira had talked about her own experience with working mothers who “did what they had to do and then went home and they made sure they could fit it into that time”. The lesson learned is that it is the individual woman’s responsibility to fit motherhood around work, something that can lead to a considerable amount of negative affect: “makes me panic to think about it” (Mira). However, participants not only felt worried and anxious about the future prospect of needing to balance career and motherhood, they also felt the need to prepare for this step, i.e. maternity leave, carefully.

Andrea: [Y]ou have a responsibility of okay if I am going to have a year off work then what can I learn now and what can I do now and what can I fit in now to try and compensate for that. So that is a stress that I have now. I am not planning on having children in the next few years but that is something that I have already started thinking about, is how can I make this work to like maintain my career and have children because I need to try and learn as much as I can now […]

Julia: It’s like you’ve got to put the groundwork in like be somewhere for a few years so they know you are totally committed and you’ve put all the effort.

Andrea: [B]efore somebody then says oh you’re a mum or whatever and I can be like but I’ve got all this experience, I can offer something.

Julia’s use of the vague metaphor of “put[ting the groundwork in” is representative of all the gender-related lessons discussed so far. What “ought to” be done – young professional women’s prescribed best practices, if you will – remain blurred and hard to grasp objectives and elicit insecurity and self-doubt. This feeling of never being (good) enough almost seems to be a direct consequence of the neoliberal lens so clearly applied in the data extracts discussed here. Anna’s suggested solution for improving the situation of young working mothers succinctly sums up the “top girl” perspective on how to battle structural inequality – work harder.

Lesson Four: Accept it – sexism is part of the game

I’m part of this mentoring group and we had this catch-up last week and one of the girls said something that absolutely shocked me […] She gets on really well with her boss who’s a male and she was at a client meeting and he was saying “oh you know this meeting is really, really important, so like maybe you could try to be a little bit flirty with the client” and she was just like “Excuse me? You want me to go in there and flirt with clients because I’m the junior young girl in the team?” And she was absolutely mortified and so she just she shrugged it off and she went into the meeting […] I mean it’s almost no surprise coming from a law firm that sort of thing happens but she said she doesn’t think her boss meant it in that way. She thinks he just used the wrong word but she said “I just had to talk to him about it because it made me feel so awkward” and just it was really demeaning for her that that’s why she was there to wear the short dresses and the high heels […] (Sara, 25, HR advisor)

At first glance, the narrative quoted above seems to be a furious feminist manifesto. It is brimming with indignation and outrage, yet a decisive element is missing – the condemnation of its male villain. When the interviewer asked Sara if her friend had raised the incident with her boss, she told the group that “she’d thought about thought about thought about it” for weeks and had only mustered the courage to approach him after having been urged to do so by the other women in her mentoring group. There are two things to learn from this story for other young professional women. Ideally, they should be able to “shrug off” sexist comments from their male boss (or co-worker); it certainly should not affect their work performance. If they cannot do so and must raise the issue, they should avoid an accusatory stance and instead adopt a sympathetic and understanding attitude towards the male perpetrator. Consequently, it is the women who are expected to carry the emotional burden of sexist interactions and to swallow their anger and disappointment. Popular culture and media discourse are saturated with feminist ideas (Gill, 2007) and participants’ talk shows that they have integrated these ideas into their self-narratives. As a result, they experience the irreconcilability of workplace demands and their feminist identities as conflictual and distressing.

The next story is not only about the emotional labour that women perform at work but also about the increased amount of actual work associated with sexist practices:

We have issues that come up all the time at work which we will raise to the general counsel, he makes the decisions […]. He’ll leave us to go back and speak to whoever in the company we need to speak to, saying “unfortunately we can’t do this because of this, this and this”. Then they will often go above our head to their manager who will then talk to my boss who will then say no. […] And I think it’s partly being legal, people see us as a hindrance rather than just trying to do stuff properly. […] But I think there is also that, those girls, because we get referred to as the girls, “those girls don’t know what they are talking about. I’ll just go up to the manager who is a male and their boss and he’ll do it.” […] They cherry-pick. So they will ask one person. If they don’t like the answer they go to the next person. We talk in the team so we are like “oh he asked me about that and we had a 40 minute discussion yesterday about this and now you’ve gone and asked this person the exact same question”. But there is that worry that if there was a male there, we would have that as well, the men going to talk to the men just because they don’t like the response, the perceived response from the women. (Andrea, 28, in-house legal counsel)

Andrea works in an all-women legal team at a big firm in a male-dominated industry. She and her female colleagues have to deal with the men in their company routinely going behind their backs using unofficial communication channels, questioning their authority and forcing them to re-open cases that have already been decided. Only the word of her male boss, who is also the director of the firm, has enough weight to put an end to such behaviour. Later in the interview, Andrea said that she often works late because she wants “to get on top of it” and “prove to people that I am doing a good job”. It immediately suggests itself to make a connection between her experience of continuously being undermined and the extra effort she feels obliged to put in. Even so, she still feels “anxiety on Saturday night worrying about going back to work on Monday”. This association of work and self-doubt goes back to her first three years at a law firm when she was “almost broken down” and needed to get “over that feeling that I am just really bad at everything that I do”. The combination of the “high-performance culture” typical of law firms (Pringle et al., 2017) and gender discrimination puts a large amount of emotional strain on women like Andrea. While the narratives discussed here do not subscribe to what McRobbie describes as postfeminism’s “distaste for feminism” (2007, p. 733), they do seem to propagate a certain tough-mindedness, namely the ability to not be negatively affected by sexism, associated with the “top girl” ideal.

Discussion and conclusion

In our analysis, we explored four gender-related “survival lessons” that young professional women learn in order to navigate gendered workplaces, namely that they are expected to find the right balance between feminine and masculine qualities, that they cannot count on same-sex solidarity, that motherhood (still) is a career barrier (if it is not “managed” adequately), and that they should tacitly accept that sexism is an inextricable part of being a professional woman. The irreconcilability of the assumption of equality inherent in both neoliberal and postfeminist discourse with the persistence of gendered and gendering practices within work organizations leads to potentially severe and disabling identity conflicts for young professional women. The richness of participants’ accounts suggests that coming to terms with these demands is an ongoing affect-laden process of re-writing and re-positioning themselves, a seemingly never-ending work of identity as the space set out for professional women is almost impossible to inhabit. Yet, coming to terms with and living with a hostile organizational reality is exactly what a “top girl” is expected to do.

Within a conventional organizational psychology framework, this affective-discursive struggle would likely be read as a manifestation of work stress; commonly, the onus for change would be placed on the individual woman (Newton & Fineman, 1995). Frequently invoked organizational ideals of individual resilience and stress-fitness brand negative emotional reactions to workplace conditions as dysfunctional and individual deficits. At first glance, it therefore seems to be encouraging that participants were very vocal about experiences of gender discrimination and sexism in the focus group discussions. However, their shock and frustration intertwined with what Gill, Kelan, and Scharff have termed ‘c’est la vie accounting’ (2017, p. 227), a kind of resigned acceptance of the status quo which imbued their talk with a sense of inevitability despite the frequently expressed conviction or at least hope that things are getting better. This kind of affect hinges on both postfeminist and neoliberal discourse with their focus on individual empowerment and self-management.

For Couldry (2010), a distinct feature of neoliberalism is an acceptance of economic and social reality as a “matter of necessity” (p. 14) – the market demands it and so it has to be. Neoliberalism “works” as long as it makes good on the promise of providing opportunities and rewarding effort with (financial or career) success because its individualist logic can be incredibly seductive and even empowering, particularly for girls and young women who identify with the “top girl” ideal. It is only when this equation does not add up anymore, when “apparently emancipatory discourses (and invocations of female voice) are combined with deeply retrogressive models of what counts as success for a woman” (Couldry, 2010, p. 120) that the cracks begin to show. The survival strategies on offer for young professional women are either to assimilate and therefore to self-silence or to leave their organization in the hope that they might find a less adverse environment elsewhere.

While our analytic focus lay on gender, in particular, the emergent “top girl” ideal, future studies with an explicitly intersectional approach that take into account race, class and sexuality are needed to better understand the connection between marginalized social identities in the workplace and emotional distress. The fact that half of our study participants had a “double minority status” potentially shaped their accounts in particular ways, i.e. by heightening their awareness of being “othered” or by making the “top girl” identity especially attractive as a survival strategy. However, as these self-positionings (i.e. being a Samoan or Asian woman) did not feature prominently in participants’ talk, we did not have adequate data for applying an intersectional lens in the analysis.

Our analysis has highlighted young women’s emotional struggles associated with building inherently fraught and contradictory professional identities within gendered organizations. Identification with the “top girl” ideal not only fails to equip young women with the right meaning-making “tools” for navigating sexist or “toxic” environments; it also encourages them to accept this status quo as if it were a fact of nature. In particular, we have attempted to show that the irreconcilability of contemporary female subjectivities, which construct young women as capable, in charge and efficient self-managers, and sexist work environments is a potentially heavy emotional burden young high-achieving women are expected to carry.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Nilima Chowdhury received her Master's degree in clinical psychology and psychotherapy in 2009 from Humboldt-University, Berlin. In 2015, she enrolled as a PhD student in psychology at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. Her research project explores the socio-cultural context of emotional struggles and experiences of depression in young professional women aka ‘top girls’.

Kerry Gibson is a clinical psychologist and an associate professor in the School of Psychology at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. Her research focuses on the way that people's experiences of mental health difficulties and services are shaped by age, gender and culture.

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