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This study aims to focus on understanding the work–family conflict of Indian women engineers through the lens of identity conflict.

Semi-structured interviews conducted with 20 Indian women engineers working in India and abroad of varying ages and work experience helped in understanding the types, sources and coping decisions about work–family conflicts experienced by them. Thematic analysis was conducted to analyse the qualitative data.

The findings reveal that as women engineers negotiate their “engineering” and “woman” identities, work–family conflict manifests as a battle of time and responsibilities, psychological strain and behaviour-based conflict. Furthermore, self-expectations and negative social sanctions play an important role in augmenting the experiences of these conflicts. The results also reveal how women re-strategize their career decisions to conciliate their conflicting identities.

This study furthers the literature on resolving work–family conflict by taking an identity perspective. Recommendations in literature such as work flexibility and part-time work, place the onus on women to increase their capacities to perform different roles better. Examining work–family conflict from an identity perspective allows us to look at the psychological processes underlying the challenges women face in balancing work and home in a male-dominated profession. These give insights into the need to go beyond accommodations in the workplace to redefine gender roles and relations for equal participation of women in the modern workforce.

The purpose of this article is to understand how women develop entrepreneurship as a career identity through women's various life stages. Using a life story approach, the authors study the formation of Indian businesswomen's entrepreneurial identity in businesswomen's unique socio-cultural context.

The study drew upon 15 semi-structured interviews with practicing women entrepreneurs using a qualitative methodology. Gioia methodology was used to systematically analyze the data for theory building.

The narratives of the Indian women entrepreneurs indicate that Indian women's entrepreneurial identity was a developmental process influenced by various episodes in different life stages-childhood, adolescence, marriage and motherhood. Life episodes influenced the creation and enactment of this entrepreneurial identity, which led to the emergence of entrepreneurship as a career choice.

The study's retrospective design may have raised concerns involving memory recall. The open-ended questions gave the participants the freedom to recount the life episodes that influenced the participants the most and may have partly mitigated this concern.

Prior studies have focused on specific life stages of women entrepreneurs, without taking a holistic life-story view, thereby missing out on how career identity is formed as a result of life episodes. Using the developmental psychology approach, the authors provide a nuanced and holistic lens to understanding women's entrepreneurship.