The F Word: The Role of Women’s Friendships in Navigating the Gendered Workplace of Academia

The Distinguishing Features of Friendship

Despite friendship playing a significant role in career development (Caretta & Webster, 2016) and being regarded as important to workers’ well-being and sense of belonging (Sang et al., 2013), the concept is often ill-defined. Fehr (1996) stated that “everyone knows what friendship is – until asked to define it. There are virtually as many definitions of friendship as there are social scientists studying the topic” (p. 5). Broadly, friendship is an intimate attachment with people who are not kin (O’Connor, 1992), nor romantic partners. It is defined by three components: it is voluntary, it is used as a form of social support, and it is founded on enjoying the company of another (Monsour, 2016). Common aspects of friendship include acceptance, trust, ego reinforcement, shared activities, and compatibility (De Vries et al., 1994).

Of relevance to our conceptualization of friendship is the role intra-gender friendships play for women. O’Connor (1992) noted that friendship is of particular importance to women who tend to view themselves in relation to others and for whom friendships provide a critical source of self-validation. Women are more likely to see friendship as a site of self-disclosure and emotional sharing while men are more likely to see friends as those with whom they share activities (Sias & Avdeyeva, 2003). We concur with O’Connor (1992) that women’s friendships have been neglected, in part because they are not seen as serving any purpose in the patriarchal world where women’s roles have been subservient ones (Miller, 1986). The negligence of women’s friendships can also be seen as a product of a culture that divides the public and private spheres, thereby rendering people “disembodied automatons” (O’Connor, 1992, p. 10). This is unfortunate since women’s friendships allow them to generate alternative views and narratives of themselves in a world that frequently treats them as others and which socializes them to see themselves through the male gaze (O’Connor, 1992).

Given the affirming role of friendships for women, we favor the postmodern friendship concept proposed by Monsour and Rawlins (2014) in which individuals “co-construct the individual and dyadic realities within specific friendships. . .involving negotiating and affirming (or not) identities and intersubjectively creating relational and personal realities through communication” (p. 13). The identity-affirmation and self-disclosure elements of friendship become more critical in an environment that causes marginalized individuals to doubt whether they belong and that makes sharing anxieties difficult due to the evaluative nature of relationships in the workplace. This is why friendship emerges as an alternative to traditional workplace relationships such as mentoring that can reinforce feelings of self-doubt (Driscoll et al., 2009; Guramatunhu-Mudiwa & Angel, 2017; Martinez et al., 2015) and the view of the mentee as subservient and of lower status (Warhurst & Black, 2019).

In its traditional view mentoring is defined as a “sustained and purposeful one-to-one relationship between a mentor with advanced experience, knowledge, and wisdom and a protégé with less experience, for the purposes of professional development” (Warhurst & Black, 2019, p. 354). Although notions of mentorship have been broadened to be less transactional and more mutually beneficial for both the mentor and mentee, our review of literature suggests that there is still an understandable trepidation to self-disclose with workplace mentors (Driscoll et al., 2009; McGuire & Reger, 2003), and the typical status difference between the mentor and mentee limits the shared experience that is so prevalent in friendships and which makes them a source of comfort and validation. However, we found women who engaged in peer mentorship, defined as “two or more individuals into a co-equal relationships that supports mutual mentoring for career and psychosocial validation” (Driscoll et al., 2009, p. 5), frequently developed their relationships into ones consistent with the characteristics of friendship. Specifically, these peer mentorships were sources of identity-validation, emotional support, and a place to share feelings of inadequacy (Ek et al., 2010; Murakami & Núñez, 2014).

These same characteristics were also evident in studies of women’s writing and research groups, but most accurately resembled friendship when members opted into them of their own volition and when they brought together women of similar status and identities such as new faculty and faculty of color (Driscoll et al., 2009; Ek et al., 2010; Macoun & Miller, 2014; Martinez et al., 2015; Murakami & Núñez, 2014; Rees & Shaw, 2014). In sum, voluntary, affirming relationships between individuals who engage in self-disclosure and view one another holistically rather than transactionally (Wright, 1978) are what distinguish friendship among other workplace relationships. In our view, such qualities lead to the formation of a counterspace, a setting that promotes “positive self-concepts among marginalized individuals through the challenging of deficit-oriented dominant cultural narratives and representations of these individuals” (Case & Hunter, 2012, p. 261). Solorzano and Villalpando (1998) initially described counterspaces as sites in which people of color challenge oppression, but the term has since been applied more broadly to include other marginalized groups as well. Here, we consider women a marginalized group within academia while recognizing that the extent of one’s alienation in the academy can be compounded by holding multiple marginalized identities.

Theoretical Background

Exploring women’s friendships in academia through Relational-Cultural Theory (RCT) (Miller, 1986) and Self-Determination Theory (SDT) (Deci & Ryan, 2000), we argue that friendships fulfill core psychological needs that counter the effects of marginalization and spur personal and professional growth. At its inception, RCT was novel for the way it challenged a view of psychological development as involving a process of increased independence (Lewis & Olshansky, 2016). It extended this thinking by appreciating the role of healthy adult relationships in the developmental process and elevating interdependence. In this view, relationships are vehicles for healthy psychological growth and lead to “increased sense of zest, empowerment, clarity, self-worth and connection” (Duffey & Trepal, 2016, p. 380). As such, relationships are not bonds we outgrow as we reach an independent state but instead are ones that we grow into and continually learn from (Miller & Stiver, 1997). The individualistic mentality that RCT challenges undergirds traditional academic structures that emphasize autonomy and independence to the exclusion of collaboration and mutuality. Institutionally recognized relationships in academia, such as advisor-advisee and coaching relations, are commonly viewed as ones that support individuals toward reaching a point in which the relationship is no longer needed. Although RCT is not antithetical to such conceptions, it addresses a missing appreciation for growing in relation to and because of our relationships with others. Thus relationships, viewed through the lens of RCT, do not need to be a means by which one reaches an end goal that, after accomplishing, negates the need for the relationship.

In our view, SDT helps to explain the basic premise of RCT that relationships are sources of psychological growth and well-being. The theory highlights how these nurturing relationships meet the core human needs of autonomy, competence, and relatedness—needs that predict employee work satisfaction and are associated with less burnout and exhaustion (Deci et al., 2017). SDT speaks to the motivational aspect behind relationship formation in alienating work environments by illustrating how people depend on each other to mitigate stress and threat, sometimes called “tending and befriending” (Taylor, 2002), by sharing in the affective load (Coan, 2008; La Guardia & Patrick, 2008). As Deci et al. (2017) stated, every organizational policy either supports or inhibits psychological needs. When needs are unsupported, as is the case for women in workplaces grounded in masculine values, personal well-being and work behaviors suffer (La Guardia & Patrick, 2008).

These core needs—autonomy, competence, and relatedness—have been found to promote optimal functioning across cultures and domains, including work (Deci & Ryan, 2008). Autonomy should not be confused with individualism, but instead with volition and a sense of psychological freedom in one’s choices and behaviors (Van den Broeck et al., 2010). Competence speaks to the need to feel effective and capable of developing skills and mastering challenges. Finally, relatedness describes the universal need to feel connected and cared for; when met, individuals feel a sense of belonging (Van den Broeck et al., 2010). For women, and particularly for early career academics and women with multiple marginalized identities, these needs are impeded by common feelings of imposterdom, isolation, and burnout that occur in the masculinized workplace. Of course, not all relationships will successfully meet these needs. RCT is complementary to SDT in outlining that in order for relationships to promote psychological growth, they must have mutuality, authenticity, reciprocity, empathy, and connectedness (Lewis & Olshansky, 2016).

Women’s Friendships Act as Counterspaces that Embed Feminine Values

In an environment that feels exclusionary, it is not uncommon for those who share feelings of marginalization to seek solace and support in each other, thereby forming a counterspace that allows members to validate one another, share microaggressions, and challenge negative views of their identities (Ong et al., 2018). In the context of women’s friendships in the academy, these spaces resist and invert the values of the patriarchal work environment. For many women, this means establishing egalitarian, encouraging, and reciprocal relationships, often to compensate for a lack of authenticity and comradery in expected, and accepted, forms of workplace relationships. Previous research has established that women find motivation through encouragement, rather than through challenge as men tend to (Mayer et al., 2008) and that they seek those who champion, accept, and confirm them (Levesque et al., 2005). These championing behaviors are often found in peer support rather than in hierarchical relationships since traditional mentorship operates from a deficit-model and can reinforce the notion of the mentee as being subservient (Warhurst & Black, 2019). Hence, women in faculty positions describe supportive interactions with co-workers (Hill et al., 2005) as critical to their overall career satisfaction in ways that hierarchical relationships are not.

RCT advocates that healthy relationships involve reciprocity with both individuals feeling that there is give and take (Lewis & Olshansky, 2016), and this is contrast to the more transactional nature of traditional mentorships that position one person as the recipient of the other’s knowledge. This can intensify feelings of inferiority. Friendships can still resemble or manifest in accepted, yet modified, workplace structures such as mentorships, but these must still counteract the hierarchy found in traditional forms of mentoring and have a degree of mutuality. Furthermore, mentors need to be careful not to detract from the mentee’s autonomous development by assuming similar career interests and trajectories and shaping them to fit into familiar molds (Warhurst & Black, 2019). As a counter to these fraught relationships, women seek out workplace relationships that are characterized as egalitarian, collaborative relationships that emphasize “power with” rather than “power over” others (Bottoms et al., 2013; Ek et al., 2010; Levesque et al., 2005; Lewis & Olshansky, 2016; Mayer et al., 2008; Murakami & Núñez, 2014; Van Tuyle & Watkins, 2010).

Take for example, two assistant professors, McGuire and Reger (2003) who describe in their scholarship choosing to co-mentor each other because traditional mentoring opportunities in their institution did not allow them to freely share their fears and insecurities due to the power imbalance and worry of evaluation. Likewise, Webster and Boyd (2019) discussed developing an inter-departmental friendship which countered neoliberal metrics and competition and contributed to their “ongoing resilience and willingness to continue” (p. 53) along their challenging academic career paths. Other women in the academy such as Driscoll et al. (2009) described in their work how, as early career academics, hierarchical mentoring relationships left them frustrated and reinforced feelings of self-doubt. Instead, in line RCT’s emphasis on authenticity in growth-fostering relationships, they longed for a peer group in which they could more genuinely present themselves including their doubts and fears. Thus, they established a bi-weekly group that proved to be more effective in supporting their research and identity as scholars. These instances reinforce Emmeche’s (2015) claim that friendships are easier and more likely to form in the academy when individuals are at the same level of the meritocratic hierarchy. When institutions assign mentors or only endorse formal mentoring schemes, they overlook the egalitarian structures women prefer and their desire to self-disclose and interweave the professional and the personal.

Taken together, these studies illustrate the contention of Knickmeyer et al. (2002) that same-gender friendship between women acts as “. . .social support characterized by intimacy, self-disclosure, mutual concern, a sharing of resources, [and] equality in power” (p. 38). Viewed through the framework of SDT, it becomes clear that women are motivated to form and sustain these self-disclosing relationships because they fulfill the human need for relatedness by providing a shared sense of communion and intimacy (Van den Broeck et al., 2010)—traits not typically found in formalized mentoring relationships or in the autonomous workplace of academia. These relationships then help women navigate the matrix of power relations in the academy (Morley, 1999) and provide a counterspace that is an adaptive response to a workplace that presents social adversity (Van den Broeck et al., 2010), not only due its masculine values of productivity, objectivity, and individualism, but also because of the implicit competitiveness among colleagues that is a product of one’s worth being tied to metrics like grant dollars and number of publications.

Women’s Friendships Counter the Effects of Workplace Marginalization

Secondly, in exploring the question of the role women’s friendships have on their experience in academia, we found that they counter the effects of workplace marginalization. Membership in a counterspace has a twofold impact: first, it allows individuals to cope with and regulate the stress of being in an unsupportive social environment, and then, once no longer in a threat state, allows individuals to use that relational space as one from which to explore and grow (La Guardia & Patrick, 2008). These outcomes were evident in the literature on women’s close peer relationships in academia with members sharing that they found in each other a place to cope with feelings of inadequacy and self-doubt (Bottoms et al., 2013, Driscoll et al., 2009; Esnard et al., 2015; Guramatunhu-Mudiwa & Angel, 2017; Macoun & Miller, 2014; Martinez et al., 2015; Packer-Williams & Evan, 2011; Rees & Shaw, 2014). For example, a Latina woman in a peer mentoring group wrote that “feelings of inadequacy permeate our psyches on a regular basis” with one member sharing that “my self-confidence and abilities are constantly assaulted” (Ek et al., 2010, p. 544). However, buoyed by the group, members felt they could let their guard down and take a break from the exhaustion of the performativity of academic discourse that conflicted with their own cultural values. Sociology scholars Andrew and Montague (1998), described their friendship as a “haven from the daily negotiation of a patriarchal sociocultural world” (p. 360). Similarly, a woman scholar in a collective of Latina women wrote about how her peer group resisted the values of the university that ran counter to her own, for example by rejecting the notion of objectivity in research. She wrote that “our recognition of one another’s struggles and specifically our affirmations of the challenges in living and breathing academia in all of its imposing Whiteness, maleness, heterosexism, classism and capitalistic notions of success, have given us the space to breathe” (Martinez et al., 2015, p. 93).

In their bonds with one another, women found a sense of belonging that led to resilience to deal with the challenges of working in an environment they often felt insecure in. Participants in a feminist reading group described how the group offered an alternative to the combative, masculine, and antagonistic environment and that the group allowed them to “develop confidence and resilience for not just dealing with it but challenging it and working to make a better environment for the women who would come after us” (Macoun & Miller, 2014, p. 289). One form of resistance is in asserting one’s identity as a scholar in an environment that continually undermines it. Driscoll et al. (2009) discussed how women in a peer mentoring group struggled with existential questions about their role in the university such as: “Who was I? What was my purpose at this institution? Could I own the identity of writer-scholar? Could I believe that I might achieve tenure?” (p. 12). They found that the group “provide(d) strength for survival” (p.14) and enabled them to understand and affirm themselves as scholars. Andrew and Montague (1998) point out that confirming one’s identity as a scholar is of no small consequence in the gendered workspace where women have been made to feel inferior and self-critical.

The identity-confirmation outcome of women’s friendships is consistent with the SDT’s articulation of the need for competence. As the literature illustrated, feeling competent did not come easily and was continually brought into question as women navigated academic processes such as rejected manuscripts and tenure review. Within the counterspace of their friendships, members were able to validate each other’s insights and scholarship, thus bolstering their self-esteem and self-efficacy in the work environment. Individuals derive feelings of competence and esteem in large part from their relationships with others such that rejection or praise from those around us significantly influences our perceptions of our own competence and worth (Kaufman, 2020). In an academic environment, and especially within research universities where rejection is a common occurrence, women are vulnerable to having their sense of competence stymied, and this is enhanced for women academics of color and early career academics whose identities feel conspicuously precarious. Yet, affirming relationships mitigate these effects with need-supporting relationships allowing the individual to mobilize their resources and “provide the necessary foundation from which the person may face challenges optimally” (La Guardia & Patrick, 2008, p. 203).

Women’s Friendships Propel Scholarly Development

When psychological needs are met through mutual and affirming relationships, individuals experience a sense of safety that allows them to thrive (Kaufman, 2020). High-quality connections with others that consist of a feeling of mutuality, including mutual vulnerability, can lead to a feeling of “buoyancy and spontaneity” (Kaufman, 2020, p. 42) which triggers “expansive emotional spaces that open possibilities for action and creativity” (Dutton & Heaphy, 2003, p. 266). This was borne out in the literature in which women discussed how their relationships with one another had an energizing force that resulted in increased scholarly production. In a review of Latina women’s groups in academia, Murakami and Núñez (2014) described how through their relationships, women built their capacity to engage in goal-oriented activities, entering a state of flow that was made possible due to how each other’s support “freed up personal and collective energy” (p. 293). Similarly, in a series of testimonies about the impact of a writing collective for women scholars of color, one woman explained how the members’ connections with one another “served as the basis for genuinely meaningful and rigorous intellectual engagement and production” (Martinez et al., 2015, p. 92). Macoun and Miller (2014) asserted that the feminist reading group they participated in led to scholarly development due to the lack of pressure to perform and to “show off with our theoretical knowledge” (p. 292) that they felt in other research environments. Instead, participants found that, contrary to their experiences in the workplace, they felt comfortable admitting to each other when they did not know something and were able to test out ideas that furthered their intellectual horizons.

Importantly, it is not just that friends provided enthusiasm for current work, but that the bonds of these friendships birth work that may have never been produced without the validation received from one another. Andrew and Montague (1998) discussed in their paper how the encouragement and stimulation of their relationship led to new collaborative projects and work that they admitted would have been abandoned had they not done it together. Similarly, Rees and Shaw (2014) found that participation in a women’s peer mentoring group that led to friendship resulted in numerous collaborative teaching and research projects, and that women benefited from interacting with those in different disciplines as it led to cross-disciplinary work and a broadening of perspectives. This reflects the synergistic effect that emerges from collaboration, which Clark and Watson (1998), in their study of women academics, found had the potential to enrich lives. This enriching effect can be attributed to an increased feeling of autonomy, or the feeling of choice and ownership over their efforts (Rigby & Ryan, 2018), as women were able to identify work that was meaningful to them and be validated in their choice of it, rather than feel compelled to work for solely for external reward. Autonomy then increases internal motivation which predicts greater job persistence, performance, and well-being (Deci et al., 2017).

Another element of women’s workplace friendships that contributes to increased professional success is the newfound access to information, including the sharing of tacit knowledge (Bottoms et al., 2013; Bridge & Baxter, 1992; Murakami & Núñez, 2014; O’Meara & Stromquist, 2015; Rees & Shaw, 2014). Women have been known to leverage their workplace friendships with other women to draw on a deep network of knowledge about university practices (Driscoll et al., 2009), share expertise on various research methodologies and theories (Bottoms et al., 2013; Núñez et al., 2015), and provide critical feedback on their work (Murakami & Núñez, 2014) all within the context of a safe and trusting relationship where information can be shared and debated (Smith & Yeo, 2009). These numerous benefits illustrate how when women band together in mutual support of one another, their relationships can counteract the career deficits brought on by marginalization in the patriarchal work environment. One study found women faculty creating an “old girl’s network” to share institutional knowledge such as policies and funding processes (Rees & Shaw, 2014). Their naming of the group as an “old girls’ network” contrasts the traditional “old boys’ network” to show how they acted to counter the privileges traditionally associated with men’s informal groups, which, for various reasons, have not become as common a source of power and opportunity in the same way for women. And notably, these types of relationships have tangible outcomes that are beneficial to both the individual and the organization. For instance, peer mentoring among women medical faculty resulted in enhanced career satisfaction, publications, and promotions (Mayer et al., 2008). This is not surprising given that researchers have consistently found that satisfaction of basic psychological needs leads to enhanced work performance and employee well-being (Deci et al., 2017), and because more generally, relationships can act as a job resource that contributes to increased employee engagement and job embeddedness, and the reduction and/or prevention of job burnout (Milam, 2012).