2025/03/17 by Mabel Torbor, David Sarpong, Mairi Maclean +1 · 8 citations
Business, Management and Accounting · Engineering · Psychology · Social Sciences · #Dynamics (music) #Emotional Labor in Professions #Engineering #Gender Diversity and Inequality #Gender studies #Intersectionality #Management and Organizational Studies #Negotiation #Pedagogy #Psychology #Social psychology #Social science #Sociology #Visibility #Work (physics)
paper · open access · doi:10.1177/00187267251323854
published in Human Relations 79(1), 3-31 (SAGE Publishing)
openalex publication_date 2025/03/17 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/25
How do women negotiate and express authenticity in professional contexts where their presence and identities are largely rendered (in)visible? We draw on intersectional invisibility as our conceptual lens to explore how women early career researchers subjectively negotiate authenticity given prevailing conditions of visibility, invisibility and hypervisibility at work. Based on semi-structured interviews with recipients of the Organisation for Women in Science from Developing Countries (OWSD)-Elsevier award, we illuminate how (in)visible conditions shape the subjective negotiation of authenticity, informing the agentic capacity of women researchers to express themselves authentically in professional settings. Our findings reveal the negotiation of authenticity is closely tied to gender performance in a manner that aligns with perceived professionalism. This entails compartmentalising personal values when feeling invisible, experiencing a heightened awareness of context-specific boundaries when visibility increases and enacting adaptive agency when hypervisible. We thus posit authenticity as a continuous process of ongoing identity construction and negotiation rather than a static ideal.