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While women are increasingly in senior positions in accountancy firms, a century after gaining entry to this once exclusively male field, they are still struggling to achieve career success. The concept of possible selves and a model of career crafting are activated in an analysis of how a set of New Zealand professional accountants have pursued their careers. This paper aims to focus on how people actively craft career selves in the context of organisational and gendered constraints, some of which are self-imposed, and therefore, can be modified and revised.

Interviews with 36 male and female accounting professionals in New Zealand – 21 working in private firms and 15 in academia identify how careers are shaped by contexts, cultural understandings of gender, organisational structures within which accountants are located and wider environmental factors.

Women accountants in this study are both agential and responsive to a range of constraints they encounter. These women challenge the notion that professional achievement requires single minded allegiance to a career; their strategic career crafting demonstrates how career and family commitments are not irreconcilable but can be skilfully integrated to nurture multiple selves. Their strategies are considered alongside those of a comparable set of male accountants.

This paper contributes to the literature on possible selves and the complexity of gendered lives through the application of a career crafting matrix to explore how accounting professionals forge careers and construct multiple selves.

Despite more than 50 years of research into gender and work, the impact of women occupying managerial positions persists to be under-represented in mainstream human resource management (HRM) literature. The purpose of this article is to identify and explore the perceptions of women who decided to choose their career path either in IT or HR positions to explore their motivation, career strategies and success factors.

Twenty semi-structured interviews were conducted with women occupying either IT or HR managerial positions. The study included two datasets: (1) women representing managerial positions in IT and (2) women representing managerial positions in HR.

Women holding HR managerial positions took action to achieve the intended position in their dream industry since their studies. On the contrary, the choice of the IT industry was one undertaken by candidates with no previous IT experience. Because the IT sector is dominated by men, women in these positions still had to prove their competences.

The research showed that women cannot be ignored in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) industry, and they prove a valuable resource for managerial positions in IT or HR departments in many sectors.

The research underpinned a new boundaryless career model for both HR and IT positions.

This paper aims to explore the position of women in the communication management sector in Spain from their own experiences. The study examines female communication and leadership styles, emphasising the cost of leadership in which they are leaders or led.

This study used a qualitative methodology based on in-depth interviews with 22 women actively working in top companies and agencies: female communication directors, female employees with a female leader and female employees with a male leader. Data were analysed through thematic analysis.

Results show mixed communication and leadership styles. In addition, the high level of self-demand of female communication managers stands out, making it challenging to achieve a work-life balance and the implementation of successful role models.

Exploring the factors of female leadership remains necessary to understand and make their situation in various industries and positions visible. It also helps remove barriers to leadership, guide organisations in addressing gender discrimination issues and develop mechanisms for the internal promotion of female professionals.

To the best of authors' knowledge, this is the first study exploring the leadership and communication styles of women in the Spanish Public Relations (PR) and communication management industries. It also highlights the aspects influencing the cost of leadership.

Recently, the relationship between gender representation and organizational performance has been the focus of various studies. However, some research gaps still exist. First, in the healthcare sector, this relationship has been poorly explored. Moreover, in public management studies, researchers focusing on performance tend to focus exclusively on gender differences at the top and/or middle management level. This research aims at exploring the relationship between women's representation and performance in public hospitals at all organizational levels.

To achieve the research objective, 63 healthcare organisations were analysed through ordinary least squares regressions on panel data from 2012 to 2018.

Results show that, in the hospital setting, gender diversity and financial performance are related at every organizational level.

To the authors' knowledge, this is one of the first studies focusing on the link between gender and performance at every level of professional and employment category; avoiding focusing exclusively on top management, which was the case in previous studies on the topic. Moreover, it contributes to a poorly explored literature which is gender studies in public healthcare management.

This paper addresses the issue of the underrepresentation of women in leadership positions within the information and communication technology (ICT) and engineering fields. The study examines the complex issue of vertical segregation and gender equality by exploring the barriers that women encounter and the potential coping strategies they adopt to advance in their careers.

The study employs a qualitative approach, conducting semi-structured interviews with 17 women at middle and upper management levels in the ICT and engineering sectors. This approach aims to better understand women's workplace experiences and gain deeper insights into the nature of the barriers they face.

The study identifies four main factors hindering women's progression toward senior management positions, namely working hours, work-family conflict, social role stereotypes and second-generation bias. The results also offer useful insights into the coping strategies adopted by women to overcome these barriers.

The study highlights the persisting underrepresentation of women in senior positions, indicating a societal and organizational lag in terms of inclusion and equity. It underscores the importance of developing effective policies to address the challenges faced by employees striving to balance their work and family commitments. Training is recognized as an important tool for raising awareness about gender stereotypes among employees and reducing second-generation bias.

This study provides valuable lessons derived from its findings, including potential strategies that organizations can implement to help women navigate and overcome workplace barriers in the ICT and engineering fields.

The core of this study is women in mining. The aim of this study was to analyze the perception of women, about their work environment, their career, the human resources policies and practices and the work–family balance in the context of a multinational organization in the sector.

The case study was carried through semi-structured interviews with 27 women who work in this organization.

Although women report that they are capable of exercising any position/function in the company, they perceive wage gap in the investigated organization; that maternity leave and the fact of having children impact their career and their rise to higher positions in the organizational hierarchy negatively; situations of prejudice and discrimination experienced at work. Sometimes subtly, sometimes not so subtly, but they still constitute barriers faced by women in mining.

Although the debate around the issue of gender inequality in organizations is not recent, little has been produced about the working condition of women in occupational fields where male domination is strong, such as mining.

This chapter discusses female managers’ and entrepreneurs’ views on lifelong learning. The main empirical data were drawn from interviews with 67 women participating in training and coaching programmes in South Savo, Finland, in 2017–2021. Many of the women belonged to the working sandwich generation (WSG). The particular focus was on how lifelong learning relates to these women’s careers, wellbeing at work, work–life balance and search for meaningful lives. A model integrating women’s earning, learning and meaning aspects of work and life was developed. The findings of the study show that considering women’s fragmented work careers, lifelong learning is often crucial for them. For an individual, opportunities for lifelong learning and meaningful work assure personal development, wellbeing at work and a sustainable career. For employing organisations, offering opportunities for learning and meaningful work for their employees constitutes a competitive advantage.

This paper aims to explore the motivations behind women in a developing South Asian country – Sri Lanka – to embark on entrepreneurship in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields, which is a doubly masculine hegemony operating within a culturally nuanced gendered context.

The study employs a qualitative research approach, conducting in-depth semi-structured interviews with 15 STEM women entrepreneurs, following the theoretical lenses of push and pull motivation theory and gender role theory.

Although the motivations of STEM women entrepreneurs cannot be exclusively categorized as either push or pull factors, the pull factors had a greater influence on the participants in motivating them to become entrepreneurs. The primary motivators for starting businesses in STEM were: inspiration from something or someone, inner calling, the identification of business opportunities, the need for flexibility, necessity and/or desire to help society. It was often difficult to identify one dominant motivator in many instances, as many factors were interlinked to motivate women to start a business. The study also revealed that gender ideologies could stifle the participants' motivation, while the inner need to break these gender ideologies implicitly stimulated their motivation.

The study contributes to and expands the knowledge of STEM women entrepreneurs in general and to the limited existing knowledge of STEM women entrepreneurs in developing countries specifically. The paper brings contextual novelty as Sri Lanka produces more female STEM graduates than men, which is unique compared to most other parts of the world.

Qualified immigrants (QIs) and their work experiences have been studied using a wide variety of theoretical approaches with divergent characteristics. This paper reviews theoretical progress and proposes directions for future research and practice.

Using relevant keywords, articles indexed by Web of Science in management, business, industrial relations and applied psychology were systematically searched for and analysed. In total, 60 theoretical articles published during 2008–2018 were included. The theoretical progress and future theoretical and practical challenges were organised based on the notions of equality, diversity and inclusion.

Eight theoretical approaches utilised to study QIs' work experiences were recognised: (1) human capital theory, (2) career capital theory, (3) theory of practice, (4) intersectionality, (5) social identity theory, (6) sensemaking, (7) cultural identity transition and (8) the career-centred approach. The contributions and limitations of each theoretical lens were then scrutinised. Overall, research on QIs still lacks a comprehensive theoretical framework. As a step towards that, the paper proposes considering the role of organisations and labour market intermediaries, strategic view over the immigrant workforce, agency–institution play, identity–capital play and host–immigrant play.

The focus is on theory development and empirical papers with no clear theoretical foundation are excluded.

This review is the first attempt to summarise and direct the divergent research on the topic. The main contribution is setting an agenda for future research, particularly by proposing the elements of a comprehensive theoretical framework for studying QIs in the workplace.