Abstract
This conceptual paper contributes a new perspective on the role of women academics’ friendships in helping them navigate and counter the masculine culture of academia. Drawing on Self-Determination Theory and Relational Cultural Theory, we contend that women’s friendships allow women to thrive by meeting core psychological needs that are threatened in a marginalized work environment. Women’s intra-gender friendships act as counterspaces that challenge deficit notions women often hold about themselves, which are particularly prevalent for early career academics and women of color. We examine these workplace friendships through the belief that the academy is a gendered workplace which results in women often experiencing significant challenges to their career success. Furthermore, we consider how women’s friendships can mitigate the effects of workplace marginalization and enhance well-being that results in career success. We conclude by challenging HRD scholars to consider how academia can make space for and value women’s friendships in the workplace to benefit both individuals and institutions.
Introduction
Despite women’s advances in the 20th century, western society remains patriarchal and its major institutions reflect male dominance which affects women’s experiences in the workplace. Women account for only 20% of seats in the U.S. House of Representatives and 23% of U.S. Senate seats (Center for American Women in Politics, 2018) and worldwide, just under 24% of seats in national parliaments are held by women (The World Bank, 2018). In business, the numbers are even bleaker with less than 5% of women CEOs among the Fortune 500 companies (Zarya, 2018). Academia is no exception to these gender disparities. Women hold only about 38% of tenured positions in U.S. universities and colleges and being a woman in the UK has a negative association with academic rank, with women making up less than 20% of all professors at research intensive universities (Santos & Dang Van Phu, 2019). The results of such historical inequalities are organizations framed by male-centric values—values that have been institutionalized into policies and practices that often disadvantage women. For instance, career progression assumes a linear model, yet researchers have shown that women’s careers are more likely to resemble “zig-zags” with periods of downward mobility and stagnancy (Gersick & Kram, 2002; Lepine, 1992; O’Neill et al., 2008). Women might take breaks in their careers to stay at home with their children and choose work assignments that are more flexible or involve less travel in an effort to balance their professional and family obligations (Gersick & Kram, 2002).
In higher education, the tenure track reflects a male-normative pathway with an “up-or-out” environment and a set timeframe for advancement (Antecol et al., 2018). Because the academic environment favors masculine ways of working and interacting exemplified in corporations, women experience alienation as they are expected to adapt to this androcentrism rather than academia shifting to be more inclusive of women’s ways of working. American universities, in particular research universities, have come to adopt a corporate model of managerialist hierarchies based on values of productivity, efficiency, and individualism in ways that favor men and create challenges for women (Alemán, 2014), and institutions in the UK are often described as neoliberal and repositioned as serving the economy (Brady, 2012). Such organizational structures can work against women’s success. Women may also arrive logically at the decision to opt-out of faculty positions (Van Anders, 2004) in the face of unrecognized service (Hanasono et al., 2019), social isolation (Aguirre, 2000), imposter syndrome (Hutchins & Rainbolt, 2017), work/life balance concerns (Drago et al., 2005; Ward & Wolf-Wendel, 2012), and bias in teaching evaluations (Mengel et al., 2019).
Additionally, Alemán (2014) points out that women’s lower publication rates in some fields are a result of more time spent on each publication with women generally favoring quality over efficiency. This lower rate of publication for women has a negative impact on their career advancement as it is cited as a main reason for lower tenure rates (Long et al., 1993). Furthermore, tenure and promotion policies do not frequently account for the increased time spent on family responsibilities, invisible service (Macfarlane, 2007), and teaching. All of these issues are amplified when framed within research that describes women faculty as more likely to experience feelings of isolation in their departments and be excluded from informal scholarly networks (Fox, 2010; Gardner, 2013). The masculine culture leads women to perceive the academic environment as exclusionary with women reporting feeling left out of networks that would lead to career progression and feeling silenced and undermined in the academy (Fotaki, 2013).
Thus, it is imperative that the workplace of higher education be made more equitable in order to increase employee well-being for all members and to ensure that career success is not contingent upon the privileged or marginalized status of one’s identity. This requires systemic change that occurs via a gradual, extended process involving a number of policy changes and interventions. We contend that one way to counter the barriers women experience in academia is through valuing and supporting friendships among them. Friendships can act as counterspaces that enhance individuals’ self-concepts (Case & Hunter, 2012) and satisfy core human needs that are thwarted in alienating work environments. Moreover, we believe that women’s friendships in patriarchal workplaces have the potential to be a lever of institutional change as they can empower women in ways that raise their status in the academy and center feminine values within institutions.
Our conceptualization of the transformative role of women’s friendships in academia emerged out of the strong friendship that formed between the first and third author of this article after meeting in the second author’s class. As Ph.D. students, we dealt with self-doubt, anxiety, stress and imposter syndrome that may be typical in graduate school, but is amplified for women (Cowie et al., 2018). These feelings were exacerbated by the first author’s status as a first-generation student who had a non-traditional educational track that included leaving high school early, thus carrying with her the stigma of a high school dropout, and the third author’s navigation of the university as an international student who felt she had to prove herself worthy of graduate study in the U.S. For both of us, entering a doctoral program felt like crossing over into an unfamiliar, imposing landscape with its own language, customs, and accepted behaviors, one wherein our belonging was always precarious. However, as our friendship progressed and we shared feelings of self-doubt, it felt as if an oppressive mental burden was lifted. We validated each other’s ideas and assuaged insecurities which led to a newfound enthusiasm and energy in our work. We began to collaborate, presenting at conferences, writing pieces together, and leading teaching seminars. Crucially, we recognized that these first endeavors that helped to cement our identity as scholars are ones that we would not have embarked on alone—at least not in the same quantity or without considerable anxiety. As we reflected on the ways our friendship transformed our experience in graduate school, we began to wonder about the value of women’s friendships in academia more broadly and whether others experienced a similar shift in their academic and workplaces experiences after forming an intra-gender friendship. Yet, when we began exploring the literature, we found that there was a paucity of research that used the term friendship explicitly despite many of the researchers describing characteristics of their relationships that are typically associated with friendship. This omission may indicate a reluctance to use the term friendship—a dirty word, unprofessional and ill-fitting with the masculine values of work that see relationships as transactional and outside the scope of professional interaction (Pillemer & Rothbard, 2018).
Nevertheless, guided by two questions: What role do women’s friendships play in their experience of the academic workplace? And what outcomes, personally and professionally, follow from the formation of women’s friendships in academia?, and a theoretical framework that combines Relational Cultural Theory and Self-Determination Theory, we show how women’s relationships that contain the characteristics of friendship counter the marginalization they experience in academia through the creation of a counterspace that embeds feminine values of egalitarianism, mutuality, and reciprocity in contrast to hierarchical, performative, and goal-oriented values typically found in the workplace. This paper is structured as follows: first, we identify the distinctiveness of friendships among women and the role of friendships in personal and professional development, noting how they diverge from other work relationships such as mentorships. Next we explain how Relational-Cultural Theory (RCT) and Self-Determination Theory (SDT) converge to build our conceptualization of women’s relationships as counterspaces that meet critical human needs that are unsatisfied for many women in the academic workplace. We then present our conceptual discussion with three main propositions in response to our guiding questions: (1) Women’s friendships act as counterspaces that embed feminine values; (2) Women’s friendships counter the effects of workplace marginalization, and (3) Women’s friendships propel scholarly development. We end by calling for a line of HRD scholarship that further investigates the role of friendship among marginalized groups in the workplace, including a deeper inquiry into the wider institutional impacts they can promote.
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 in the Academy
To begin, it should be made clear that embracing friendship as voluntary relationships that meet the human needs outlined by SDT, and that are composed of the characteristics described in RCT, led us away from workplace relationships that are formalized, involuntary, or inorganic. We thus excluded institutionally facilitated research groups and assigned mentorships as we posit that these relationship structures have masculine workplaces values embedded within them. In our view, friendships are undervalued or replaced with more accepted, hegemonic terms like mentoring in order to counter negative perceptions (Berman et al., 2002; Morrison & Nolan, 2007) of friends in the workplace. So, despite the prevalence of these dominant terms in the literature, we kept the concept of friendship (Monsour, 2016) as our guide when interpreting the application of terms like peer mentor or writing group in the literature.
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).
Discussion and Implications
In this article we demonstrated that women’s friendships act as counterspaces that fulfill the core needs of autonomy, competence, and relatedness, each of which is threatened in the masculinized environment of academia. The bond of friendship also counters the effects of marginalization, allowing women to resist internalizing notions of inferiority. In turn, their scholarly identity is confirmed, and this catalyzes their work in ways that benefit them and the institutions in which they operate. Despite these merits, women’s intra-gender friendships are undervalued by higher education administrators and faculty, largely ignored by HRD scholars and practitioners, or reframed by those who push to the forefront seemingly more accepted, hegemonic terms like mentoring that give the false grandeur of professionalism. We contend that new attitudes and practices that not only acknowledge, but honor and champion women’s friendships have significance for both theory and practice.
The scholarship of women’s intra-gender friendships in masculinized work environments is insightful in what drives employee engagement and satisfaction, factors that are now widely recognized as promoting benefits across organizations (Markos & Sridevi, 2010; Schneider et al., 2018). Rigby and Ryan (2018) noted that HRD has shifted from focusing on externally motivating employees toward understanding how to cultivate employee’s existing internal motivation. This involves understanding what workplace experiences employees find meaningful and valuable and that meet the needs of autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Our article contributes to this inquiry by highlighting the role of women’s friendships in meeting these needs, which, at this point, largely occur serendipitously through women finding their way into workplace friendships with other women. But more intentionality in understanding this underappreciated social force is needed, especially because workplace friendships have long been known to increase employee commitment, morale, creativity, and innovation (Kram & Isabella, 1985; Rawlins, 2017; Sias, 2008), particularly for women (Mann, 2018).
While friendship formation will always have some degree of fortuity, there are ways to increase its likelihood and elevate its importance in the workplace. To start, HRD and higher education scholars need to normalize and investigate the phenomenon of friendships in scholarly literature and research and consequently, this can lead to the normalization of workplace friendships in practice. One practical step is for leadership to facilitate conditions that are conducive to friendship development. Factors such as close physical proximity, shared work tasks, extra-organizational socialization, and job interdependence are ones that have been found to lead to workplace friendship development (Boyd & Taylor, 1998; Sias & Cahill, 1998). Unfortunately, the higher education work environment is one where such factors are scarce. Faculty and graduate students often work independently on their research and courses and come into their offices on idiosyncratic schedules. This has only become more amplified with the expanded “work from home” practices brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. Whether face-to-face or virtually, those fulfilling a managerial role, including doctoral advisors and mid-level supervisors, can encourage peer collaborations among staff in a similar rank, as these endeavors may lead to friendship. Our review of literature illustrated that women bonded together when they shared a marginalized identity, such as being new academics, like doctoral students or early career faculty, or women scholars of color. This makes sense as friendship is known to blossom and be called on in times of life transition and stress (Rawlins, 2017). When individuals perceive instability in an environment and their need for belonging is not being met, they turn to social protection systems (Kaufman, 2020). This is a consideration that management should keep in mind by recognizing the additional need for peer support among marginalized employees.
HRD practitioners and higher education professionals also need to be reflective about inadvertently—or deliberately—overly espousing values of performativity, competition, and individualism that may impede friendship development and further marginalize employees for whom these values conflict with their own. In a study of gendered faculty career trajectories by Steidl and Sterk (2016), they note that one of their male participants warned, “not to say that your colleague is a friend in this war, probably maybe he’s your enemy. He’s your competitor” (p. 601). Such thinking becomes ingrained in the organizational culture and comes at the cost of possible positive outcomes. For example, we have heard the advice within academia to not share one’s ideas with others because of the risk of having them stolen, thus preventing the benefits and joys of peer collaboration that were so integral to the creation of women’s scholarship and in forming a scholarly identity in the studies we reviewed. In academia where competition is encouraged, such attitudes can render friendship a subversive act (Berg & Seeber, 2016).
In addition, signaling that academics should be wary of sharing ideas and collaborating inhibits social capital development that is integral to navigating the work environment and which is an asset for a healthy workplace (Timberlake, 2005). Sheerin and Hughes (2018) urged for an understanding of how to support women in building social capital, and Wang (2009) called for an examination of “organizational structure, demography, workflows and processes, organizational policies, and work that assignments that may constrain women’s networking” (p. 38). To this, we would add the need to investigate how these workplace features encourage or limit women’s friendship development. One way to study women’s social capital development in the workplace is by studying women’s intra-gender friendships in the academy through network analysis that explores the expressive ties that involve the exchange of friendship and trust in addition to purely instrumental ties (Ibarra, 1993). In particular, a mixed methods social network analysis that investigates the structural dimensions of these friendships, as well as the more personal aspects of these relationships, would be revelatory in understanding how these relationships form and how members experience and derive meaning, motivation, and engagement from them. This might be of particular importance in a time of social isolation and virtual workplaces where spontaneous interactions are rare, and thus the need for relatedness is threatened. As McBain & Parkinson (2017) remarked, when organizations become more fragmented and employees more isolated, friendship becomes a critical means of attachment where the friendship anchors individuals to their work environment, preventing feelings of abandonment.
It is important to acknowledge that women’s friendships and social relationships in the workplace are not a panacea nor are they guaranteed to result in personal and professional growth. As Bierema (2005) found in her study of a women’s workplace network, such groups, particularly when instituted externally and within a predominantly masculine climate, can serve to reproduce patriarchy, in part by adopting masculine attributes. Our article advances an understanding of the characteristics of women’s relationships that lead to beneficial outcomes by illustrating that growth-fostering relationships are ones that possess the traits outlined in RCT: mutuality, authenticity, reciprocity, empathy, and connectedness (Lewis & Olshansky, 2016). It is the presence of these characteristics that result in a trusting, intimate bond that meet psychological needs, whereas an institutionally facilitated group can appear to be a perfunctory, mandated intervention meant to give the appearance of promoting equity. This in turn can limit buy-in, intimacy, and trust between members. We call on HRD scholars to further explore the characteristics of workplace relationships that meet psychological needs and spur personal and professional growth, in an effort to understand factors that drive internal motivation and engagement. This will complement research that measures lagging indicators of positive workplace cultures, as Rigby and Ryan (2018) noted, that tell us little about how these positive factors formed in the first place.
Just as Warhurst and Black (2019) observed that the research on mentoring was suspiciously positive, we too are wary of promoting a rose-tinted view of friendships without acknowledging the potential challenges they can pose. Such downsides were seldom reported in the literature, although Andrew and Montague (1998) offered one point of concern in discussing how their friendship blurred the divide between their personal and work lives. More generally, Pillemer and Rothbard (2018) noted that workplace friendships can lead to prioritization of what is best for the relationship over making good decisions. This is an area ripe for inquiry. In studying workplace friendships, HRD scholars can purposely ask participants about the trade-offs and downsides that women had to navigate and how this compares to the riches of friendship. This includes investigating the accuracy of narratives of women’s intra-gender competition, and to what extent they are exaggerated or facilitated by the workplace environment. For instance, scholars point out that to the extent that competition between women does exist in the workplace, it is thought to be a mechanism by which women cope with inherent gender bias (Derks et al., 2016). Since competitiveness can impede friendship development, these are important factors to explore. We also urge women in the gendered workplace to resist such notions and harness the power of same-gender support, thereby subverting gender expectations and the concept of the queen bee syndrome (Staines et al., 1974). Despite potential challenges, we suspect that in a marginalized work environment, friendship will provide more positives than negatives. Moreover, unearthing the negative attributes of workplace friendships can result in practical ways to navigate challenges in order to maximize the value of friendship.
This article has taken up the question of the role of women’s intra-gender friendships in their experience of the academic workplace and the outcomes that follow from them. We now press HRD scholars to engage in research that furthers the propositions set forth in this conceptual paper that women’s friendships are a potent form of support that counters the effects of marginalization in ways that spur personal and professional growth. This requires designing studies that explore factors that help facilitate women’s friendships in the workplace, the role of career stage to influence the need or desire for women’s workplace friendships, how women’s friendships may vary by organizational context, and what larger impacts friendships can have institutionally. This last call in particular is relevant to understanding how women’s friendships can surpass personal benefits to effect change more widely. In agreement with the notion of the personal as political, we see the potential value that these counterspaces can have more systemically in institutions, though it is unclear how friendships go beyond their walls to seep into organizational culture more fully. It may be accomplished in indirect ways such as the way women’s relationships increase their retention (Gardiner et al., 2007), a prerequisite for a more equitable workplace, or by providing the support to engage in direct action. Examples exist, such as in the case of Chan (2010) who observed that women drew on other women as allies in order to engage in acts of resistance against the marginalization and gatekeeping in their universities. While we continue to work toward a truly equitable workplace that negates the need for a counterspace, we offer that friendship can empower women to thrive and this is an essential part of their success in the academy.
Conclusion
We sought to champion the supportive nature of women’s workplace friendships by showing how their relationships with one another mitigated the impact of workplace marginalization by meeting psychological needs that spurred personal and professional growth. We believe that there is more to these relationships that deserves uncovering. We suspect that in a society that prizes individual narratives of accomplishment, stories of connection and the role they play in fostering success and change often go unheard. We thus urge HRD scholars to take up the task of studying women’s workplace friendships in higher education and beyond. In doing so we can disrupt what Collins (2020) in his introduction to the 2020 AHRD Conference in the Americas’ Town Hall called master narratives—hegemonic story structures that uphold narrow cultural expectations and norms and that marginalize those whose experiences and values lie outside of them (McLean et al., 2018). Within the workplace, these are ones that neglect or decry friendship and thus limit our understanding of how women’s relationships drive engagement and well-being as well as their potential to enact change within organizations.
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.
