Gender and professional trajectories: management life stories

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to define the gender aspects regarded as relevant in a woman’s career, as well as the situations or elements, which are narrated, as an experience of success or failure in their professional development. Design/methodology/approach Through an approach similar to life stories and a longitudinal phenomenological perspective analysis, the author identifies the experiences and feelings of nine women who, in 1998, occupied mid-level positions. Findings The stories offer a reading of the trajectory at three different levels: the working environment, the experience undergone and the principles of action developed through their careers. These stories show and demonstrate that gender and subjectivity are intertwined, enacted upon and reproduced in the workplace. Research limitations/implications Despite having collected information on two occasions, allowing us to reconstruct their paths and isolate the gender issues from this set, this is not a purely longitudinal research as it includes a longitudinal phenomenological perspective. Originality/value The stories have helped to weave the experiences and feelings of more than a decade of professional development and have shown how subjectivity is committed to a world of prescriptions and proscriptions that confers differences applicable to both sexes, where being a woman explains some of the ways in which female roles are understood and interpreted in relation to themselves and their environment.