Anchoring stability in a meritocratic world: Identities and career progression of women academics in STEM

Women’s career progression in contemporary STEM academia

Despite extensive critique of exclusionary structures in STEM academia, empirical studies continue to show how these systems shape women’s career progression—particularly through norms of uninterrupted productivity, limited leadership access, and undervaluation of care-informed pathways (Almukhambetova, 2025; Avolio and Cajo, 2024). Promotion within continuing appointments often requires sustained performance at the next level, typically without formal recognition or support (Blair-Loy and Cech, 2022; Feldman and Sandoval, 2018). These expectations clash with realities of career interruptions—due to caregiving, health, or structural barriers—which disrupt linear productivity models and compel women to reestablish credibility upon return (Maxwell et al., 2019). Women are also disproportionately tasked with service, pastoral care, and administrative duties—essential yet undervalued forms of labour (Diezmann and Grieshaber, 2019). In environments where teaching-only and part-time roles are common and institutional prestige hinges on research output, these contributions are further marginalised (Bennett et al., 2017; Rogers and Swain, 2022). Although this study does not focus on casual academics, the broader culture of research prioritisation and employment precarity shapes the conditions under which even senior women navigate careers (Fraser and Ryan, 2020; Woelert et al., 2026). Women with strong records in grants, teaching, and leadership must still continually validate their careers against dominant standards of excellence (McKinnon and O’Connell, 2020).

These dynamics are not unique to one national context. In Australia, they are embedded in a codified progression system spanning Levels A to E, which institutionalises performance expectations aligned with neoliberal and meritocratic norms (McKinnon, 2022; Sharafizad et al., 2024). Level C (senior lecturer) marks the mid-career transition, while Levels D and E correspond to associate professor and professor ranks (Nguyen et al., 2023). Though these ranks offer nominal security, progression remains contingent on sustained performance, often without guaranteed support (Francis and Stulz, 2020; Nguyen et al., 2023). Vertical segregation intensifies across these levels: women hold 32% of Level C roles, 28% at Level D, and only 20% at Level E (Department of Industry, Science Resources, 2023). These figures reflect persistent structural bottlenecks and gendered norms around leadership, merit, and institutional fit (Lipton, 2020; McKinnon and O’Connell, 2020). Accordingly, this study focuses on women at Levels C to E—roles demanding significant contributions across research, teaching, and service, yet governed by intensified scrutiny and misalignments between institutional expectations and lived experience. These bottlenecks must be understood through an intersectional lens that attends to the identity demands shaping women’s progression.

Intersectionality in the career progression landscape

Navigating these academic roles involves more than professional performance; women in STEM must also contend with overlapping identity demands shaped by care, migrant identities, and disciplinary norms (Budtz-Jørgensen et al., 2019). These intersecting demands do not operate in isolation but converge in ways that are both experientially layered and structurally patterned. Therefore, central to our approach is intersectionality—a framework that not only attends to the co-constitution of multiple identities but also foregrounds the power relations that shape their salience and consequences in particular contexts. As Hill Collins and Bilge (2020: 2) explain, intersectionality “investigates how intersecting power relations influence social relations across diverse societies as well as individual experiences in life . . . a way of understanding and explaining complexity, in the world, in people, and in human experiences.” This framing enables us to move beyond static, individualised understandings of identity to examine how women in STEM academia negotiate identity tensions within—and against—structural constraints. While prior scholarship has documented exclusionary norms and institutional barriers, less attention has been given to how women strategically navigate these pressures over time. A key gap lies in theorising the dynamic interplay between structure and agency—particularly how intersecting identities shape, and are shaped by, evolving institutional expectations and lived experiences within STEM academia. Rather than attributing career progression to isolated acts of merit, our approach foregrounds how exclusion is reproduced through institutional norms and epistemic cultures that obscure structural inequality (Araneda-Guirriman et al., 2023; Olry-Louis et al., 2022). These challenges are especially acute for women in STEM, whose aspirations and identities often diverge from dominant scripts of academic success. Building on this foundation, the next section explores how temporality and tensions shape the navigation of career progression in gendered STEM academia.

Navigation of tensions and temporality in career progression within STEM academia

Research on women in STEM and academia highlights the tensions in career progression shaped by personal, relational, and collective factors (Casad et al., 2021; Ruel, 2018). At the personal level, identity is entangled with institutional expectations and accountability (Callagher et al., 2021; Lehtonen and Yang, 2025). For women in STEM, these tensions often stem from conflicts between moral commitments and performative demands. Portie-Williamson et al. (2022) show how professionals experience moral injury when norms compel self-presentation that contradicts deeply held values. At the relational level, these dilemmas are produced through encounters with colleagues and evaluators. Fernando et al. (2020) illustrate how immigrant academics adopt dominant behavioural codes to appear competent, revealing identity as actively reshaped by unspoken norms of belonging. At the collective level, organisational cultures demand both assimilation and distinction. McCluney and Rabelo (2019) describe this paradox as the simultaneous pull of belongingness and uniqueness, exposing visibility as both necessary and risky. These dynamics intersect with career alignment: dominant narratives of linear, self-directed careers render alternative trajectories—shaped by care or exclusion—illegible (Chudzikowski et al., 2020). Existing work theorises identity tensions but often treats them as episodic rather than evolving processes (Casad et al., 2021; Liyanagamage and Fernando, 2022). What remains underexplored is how these tensions unfold over time within neoliberal logics of meritocracy and productivity (Bristow et al., 2025; Galuppo et al., 2025; Gavin et al., 2023).

This study foregrounds temporality as a central analytic, using time orientation—preferences towards past, present, or future—as a lens for understanding identity navigation (Mayrhofer and Gunz, 2020; Riach and Loretto, 2009). Linking career progression to time orientation illuminates how academics perceive and negotiate identities across temporal contexts (Brown, 2005; Weatherall and Ahuja, 2021). Within neoliberal academia, time becomes a regulated resource. Vostal (2015) critiques the accelerating pace of academic life, while Ylijoki (2010) contrasts “project time”—dominated by deadlines—with “process time,” reflecting slower scholarly development. These regimes privilege continuity and linearity while devaluing relational or interrupted temporalities, systematically marginalising those whose lives diverge from normative scripts (Sabelis and Schilling, 2013; Ylijoki and Mäntylä, 2003). For women in STEM, these constraints intersect with identity-based exclusions, making certain futures less visible or achievable (Rodriguez et al., 2025). Watt (2006) shows how gendered beliefs about scientific ability shape participation early, persisting into academia where credibility must be performed within masculinised norms privileging assertiveness and hyper-availability (Ashcraft et al., 2016; Fagan and Teasdale, 2020). Policy discourses emphasising adaptability have not disrupted these norms, leaving women to navigate tokenism and deficit framings under intensified scrutiny (Ruel, 2018; Sugiyama et al., 2024). This article addresses these concerns by examining how women academics in STEM negotiate temporal dimensions of career progression within neoliberal architectures structured by meritocratic ideals and rigid time regimes. Their experiences reveal systemic contradictions—between what is valued, visible, and possible. We conceptualise these navigations as integrated identity processes spanning past, present, and future: reflexive practices through which women resist dominant scripts, re-anchor trajectories, and articulate alternative meanings of legitimacy and success. In doing so, we contribute a temporally attuned, intersectional approach to career theory that foregrounds the structural labour required simply to be recognised within STEM academia.

Anchor points

Ruel (2018) expanded Glenn’s (2002) foundational work to explore the dynamic, power-infused construction of identities that act as stable APs, offering continuity and grounding across life stages, including careers. The APs are personal values, beliefs, or experiences that individuals rely on to stabilise their sense of self amid external pressures (Ruel, 2018, 2019b). We conceptualise APs both as a research tool and a personal mechanism for women in STEM. As a research tool, they reveal how marginalised individuals maintain identity coherence under systemic constraints; as personal resources, they guide career navigation and resilience. For women in STEM academia, APs—such as feminist beliefs, cultural identities, or family commitments—help navigate promotion processes and resist pressures to conform to normative career expectations. According to Van Hilten and Ruel (2022), APs provide a critical lens for understanding tensions created by the “us versus them” divide in gender-segregated workplaces. This divide, often intensified by cultural and gender norms, makes APs essential for resilience. They also illuminate how individuals exercise autonomy over time, making sense of lived experiences and career-related tensions (Aromaa et al., 2019; Van Hilten and Ruel, 2022). For instance, a long-standing commitment to equity-oriented academic practice may offer clarity when institutional demands align with personal values. Conversely, in contexts privileging productivity or competition, the same AP may generate dissonance, leaving individuals uncertain about reconciling commitments with advancement. These scenarios show that APs are not universally stabilising; they operate relationally—anchoring identity when alignment exists and producing tension when it does not. Misalignment between APs and neoliberal, meritocratic career structures can threaten identity coherence. Nonetheless, APs provide a framework for studying career progression tensions, enabling individuals to hold onto values despite shifting workplace demands (Aromaa et al., 2019; Ruel, 2019a; Van Hilten and Ruel, 2022). While APs are crucial for understanding how participants integrate personal experiences into career decisions, IIW—the second analytical dimension—deepens this understanding by revealing women academics’ strategies to manage overlapping identities.

Intersectional identity work

The IIW refers to the ongoing construction and negotiation of identities in response to tensions arising within intersecting systems of oppression (Atewologun et al., 2015, 2020). While APs emphasise stability, IIW foregrounds the fluid navigation of multiple, sometimes conflicting identities under structural inequalities. The APs act as internal resources, whereas IIW highlights relational work to maintain or adjust identities in line with institutional demands, often without scope for reinvention (Ibarra and Petriglieri, 2010). Building on Crenshaw’s articulation of intersectionality and Collins’ power-conscious framing (Hill Collins and Bilge, 2020), IIW examines how career tensions emerge from the interplay of macrolevel institutional logics and microlevel identity management. The IIW has been applied to marginalised professionals, including women leaders, immigrant scholars, and disabled workers (Donmanige et al., 2025). In this study, IIW interrogates how neoliberal academic regimes—hyper-productivity, constant visibility, and individualised merit—are navigated by women whose racialised, gendered, and classed identities diverge from the normative ideal of the disembodied academic (Strauβ and Boncori, 2020). Importantly, IIW is not framed as individual adaptation but as situated practice shaped by power-laden norms of credibility and success embedded in STEM academia. Our approach aligns with McCall’s (2005) intracategorical framework, directing attention to neglected intersections within women in STEM. Differences in caregiving, ethnicity, migration, and class shape distinct encounters with inclusion and progression (Kele et al., 2022). The IIW traces how institutionalised power is lived and resisted: managing visibility and invisibility—being hypervisible as a token yet invisible in leadership—illustrates systemic patterns of representation (Galbally et al., 2023). Decisions about parental leave or flexible work are constrained by assumptions about commitment and linear careers, disadvantaging women with caregiving responsibilities (Kataeva, 2022; Ruel, 2019a). These constraints, reinforced by gendered divisions of labour, fuel concerns about suitability for senior roles (Sharafizad et al., 2024). Thus, IIW offers a lens for understanding how women in STEM navigate identity dissonance and structurally encoded exclusions, linking micropolitics of self-presentation to macropolitics of institutional regulation. It builds on APs by showing that stability is negotiated through daily encounters with organisational norms and power structures, while also extending towards imagining future academic selves within—or against—neoliberal constraints.

Identity play

Career progression requires individuals to navigate their current identities while envisioning and preparing for the roles they aspire to achieve (Budtz-Jørgensen et al., 2019; Nazar and Van der Heijden, 2014). These prospective selves act as motivators, influencing career conduct, mentally preparing individuals for new circumstances, and experimenting with possible selves when navigating the intricate career progression process (Strauss et al., 2012). To this end, IP involves provisional trials of potential future selves, promoting identity growth and exploration (Ibarra and Obodaru, 2016; Stanko et al., 2022). Extending the concept of IP, Stanko et al. (2022) offered a new definition that considers how an individual places a version of themself in different scenarios of oneself. They include “possible” (concerned with inventing and reinventing oneself), “improbable” (selves that are possible but highly unlikely ever to become part of the actual self), and “impossible selves” (as selves that will never become actual). This taxonomy sharpens how scholars can account for the tensions and limits involved in imagining futures under constrained institutional conditions. Stanko et al. (2022) revealed the interplay between situated work practices and human agency, illustrating how these interactions influence possible, improbable, and impossible selves. This expands our understanding of identity exploration under institutional and material constraints, especially in academia. For women academics in STEM, where the ideal academic is often imagined as disembodied, uninterrupted, and male-coded, IP allows for provisional engagement with senior roles that may otherwise feel incompatible or implausible. While IIW reveals how individuals navigate tensions among existing identities shaped by structural power relations, IP offers a future-facing, imaginative mechanism through which individuals test and rehearse different academic selves (Stanko et al., 2022). This shift from managing current constraints to envisioning alternatives makes IP especially valuable in understanding how women in STEM negotiate the limited templates available within meritocratic academic environments. While IIW focuses on navigating existing multiple, intersecting identities within societal constraints, IP emphasises creativity and imagination. This distinction provides a fresh perspective on identity dynamics by focusing on possibilities rather than constraints in career progression. In this article, we show how IP allows women academics in STEM to explore future career selves, constructing alternative trajectories and fostering resilience in male-dominated contexts. This imaginative experimentation—rather than wholesale transformation—enables navigation without abandoning core commitments.

Together with APs and IIW, IP forms the conceptual foundation for our study, offering a temporally attuned, power-conscious analysis of identity-related tensions in career progression. Against this backdrop, we address the research question: how do women academics navigate career progression through identity-related experiences in STEM academia? We explore lived experiences as they navigate advancement to senior roles, responding to calls to capture how marginalised workers negotiate progression in highly normative, gender-segregated settings.

Research design overview

This article draws on a larger qualitative study examining the career progression landscape of Australian STEM academia, which included in-depth interviews with 32 women academics (mid- to senior levels) and 18 institutional decision-makers (e.g. deans of faculties, heads of departments) involved in academic promotion. While the broader project sought to capture both groups’ lived experiences and perspectives, early coding revealed recurrent moments where institutional criteria and individual professional values were in direct tension. These moments frequently centred on the recalibration of professional identities during promotion processes—for example, the implicit privileging of research outputs over activities such as community engagement or collaborative leadership. The recurrence of such tensions across early transcripts prompted a shift in analytic focus, leading to the decision to centre this article on the women academics’ lived experiences, with these identity negotiations forming the conceptual anchor for the findings. We adopted CGT informed by an intersectionality framework that foregrounds power, structure, and temporal complexity (Kassam et al., 2020). Our use of intersectionality follows Hill Collins (2020) analysis of power, moving beyond static accounts of identity to examine how intersecting systems—such as gendered norms, racialised academic practices, and class-based assumptions—pattern lived experiences in STEM. In this study, intersectionality functioned as a methodological lens, sensitising data collection and analysis to the interplay between social location and institutional power and attuning us to how participants navigated identity tensions within evolving academic contexts. By centring both structure and agency, the combined CGT-intersectionality approach enabled us to interrogate dominant merit-based narratives and trace the strategies women used to negotiate institutional boundaries of legitimacy and success (Kassam et al., 2020; Levitt, 2021). The following section addresses researcher reflexivity and positionality, detailing how the research team’s identities, disciplinary backgrounds, and institutional locations informed the study’s design, data generation, and interpretive decisions.

Reflexivity and positionality

Researcher reflexivity and positionality were integral to the study, ensuring a critical and transparent approach throughout (Spellman, 2024). The research team comprised one doctoral researcher (first author) and three tenured faculty members (two associate professors and a senior lecturer) across two Australian universities. The team brought together expertise in career research, organisational psychology, business, management, industrial relations, and nursing. All members had training in qualitative methods and prior experience in constructivist and interpretive paradigms, which shaped our methodological self-consciousness throughout the study. The first three authors had migrant backgrounds, and all four had between 5 and 15 years of experience in academia, which positioned us in various ways relative to participants’ experiences. Our disciplinary backgrounds—psychology (first author), management (second author), industrial relations (third author), and nursing (fourth author)—provided distinct analytical lenses that shaped both the framing of research questions and the interpretation of findings. We approached positionality as dynamic and layered (Spellman, 2024). The first author, who led the interviews and coding, drew on her identity as a migrant woman academic and her training in psychology to build rapport with participants while also recognising that her own experience of career barriers outside Australia could risk biasing attention towards negative framings.

To address potential missed areas, alternative interpretations were actively debated between the first and second authors, using loosely coupled abductive reasoning to move iteratively between data and theory. This form of reasoning refers to a semi-programmatic analytic mode grounded in empirical data, extant literature, and established methodological principles while also allowing space for impromptu creativity, serendipitous insight, and intuitive leaps (Fleming and Oswick, 2025). These interpretations were then shared with the third and fourth authors to assess whether the analytical claims resonated with their disciplinary perspectives and experiential understandings. Researcher reflexivity was practised throughout via memo writing, peer debriefing, and team discussions (Spellman, 2024; Yip, 2023). For instance, team discussions identified when assumptions stemming from insider positions—such as familiarity with academic systems—might obscure the significance of participants’ insights. This practice aligned with CGT’s emphasis on methodological self-consciousness and enhanced the credibility and trustworthiness of our findings (Charmaz, 2014). We also considered power dynamics within the research encounter. While participants often viewed the first author as a peer, particularly those in Level C roles, she remained aware that institutional affiliation and her role as a doctoral researcher could introduce perceived hierarchies. Following Yip (2023), we used these moments as analytical cues, examining how trust was negotiated and how disclosures emerged in relation to the researcher’s positionality. Therefore, collective reflexivity enabled us to integrate these dynamics into analytic decision-making, including sampling and data generation in the study.

Comprehensive overview of the sampling strategy and interview protocol

Ethical approval for the study was granted by the Social Sciences Human Research Ethics Committee of the first author’s affiliated university. We used purposive sampling to recruit women academics in STEM disciplines across Australian universities who held senior positions. Participants were identified via publicly accessible university websites, and targeted email invitations were sent to over 120 women academics across 16 institutions. These participants were selected because their positions reflect a critical juncture in academic career progression where leadership roles become institutionally possible but remain structurally contested. As noted in the literature review, mid- to senior-career levels are characterised by intensifying performance demands, declining gender representation, and heightened scrutiny—making them particularly suited to investigating identity-related career tensions (Bowyer et al., 2022). Participation was voluntary, and all participants received an information sheet outlining the study’s purpose and their rights. The 32 participants of this study range from 14 senior lecturers (C) in the mid-career level, 7 associate professors (D), and 11 professors (E) in senior career levels. The demographic data (see Table 1) of the women academics highlight a significant intersection of identities, with many participants navigating careers in STEM as migrants (e.g. from Europe and Asia) or as first-generation academics within their families. A notable proportion is balancing caregiving responsibilities, which, coupled with their relationship statuses and community affiliations (e.g. queer, first in the family), thus indicates the diversity in personal circumstances and illustrates the critical role of identity in shaping career progression pathways.

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Table 1.

Participant overview.

Participant	Current designation	Career level	Age group	Years of experience	Geographical region	Caring responsibilities	Relationship status	Specific community/communities
WA01	A/Prof.	D	40–49	15	European	No	Single	Migrant
WA02	Senior Lecturer	C	40–49	16	North American	No	Married	Migrant
WA03	Senior Lecturer	C	30–39	8	European	Yes	Partner	Migrant
WA04	Senior Lecturer	C	40–49	22	East Asia	No	Partner	Migrant
WA05	Senior Lecturer	C	40–49	7	Eastern European	No	Divorced	Migrant
WA06	Prof.	E	50–59	11	Asia-Pacific	Yes	Married	Queer
WA07	Senior Lecturer	C	40–49	15	Asia-Pacific	Yes	Married	First in the family
WA08	Senior Lecturer	C	30–39	13	South Asian	Yes	Married	Migrant, first in the family
WA09	Senior Lecturer	C	50–59	33	Asia-Pacific	Yes	Married	Not disclosed
WA10	Prof.	E	50–59	34	Asia-Pacific	Yes	Married	Not disclosed
WA11	Senior Lecturer	C	30–39	3.5	Not disclosed	No	Single	First in the family
WA12	Prof.	E	50–59	32	Latin America	Yes	Married	Migrant, first in the family
WA13	Prof.	E	50–59	33	East Asia	Yes	Married	Migrant
WA14	Senior Lecturer	C	40–49	16	South Asian	Yes	Married	Migrant
WA15	A/Prof.	D	40–49	17	Southern Europe	Yes	Married	Migrant
WA16	Senior Lecturer	C	40–49	18	Asia-Pacific	Yes	Married	Not disclosed
WA17	Senior Lecturer	C	40–49	22	Asia-Pacific	Yes	Married	First in the family
WA18	A/Prof.	D	40–49	22	Asia-Pacific	Yes	Married	First in the family, Lesbian
WA19	Prof.	E	50–59	16	Not disclosed	No	Married	Not disclosed
WA20	Prof.	E	50–59	30	Asia-Pacific	No	Married	Not disclosed
WA21	Prof.	E	40–49	17	Asia-Pacific	Yes	Married	First in the family
WA22	A/Prof.	D	40–49	17	Not disclosed	Yes	Married	First in the family
WA23	A/Prof.	D	40–49	24	Eastern Europe	Yes	Married	First in the family
WA24	Prof.	E	30–39	14	Not disclosed	Yes	Married	First in the family
WA25	Senior Professor	E	60–69	30	Eastern Europe	Yes	Single	First in the family
WA26	A/Prof.	D	50–59	15	South Asian	Yes	Married	Migrant, first in the family
WA27	A/Prof.	D	30–39	10	Asia-Pacific	Yes	Married	First in the family
WA28	Prof.	E	50–59	20	North America	Yes	Married	Not disclosed
WA29	Senior Lecturer	C	40–49	17	Southeast Europe	Yes	Married	First in the family
WA30	Prof.	E	40–49	11	Central Europe	No	Married	Not disclosed
WA31	Senior Lecturer	C	30–39	15	Southeast Asia	Yes	Married	Migrant
WA32	Senior Lecturer	C	40–49	26	Asia-Pacific	Yes	Married	Not disclosed

The development of the interview protocols was preceded by 1 focus group discussion and 10 pilot interviews with women academics in STEM, which served to refine question wording, sequencing, and thematic coverage. The interview guide served as a flexible framework, allowing discussions to evolve organically and incorporate novel insights. The guide comprised open-ended questions in four key thematic areas: (1) the evolution of personal and professional roles, (2) sources of career support and mentorship, (3) experiences with the academic promotion process, and (4) identity-related tensions. Sample questions included: “Can you map your career progression across different personal and work roles?” and “Tell me about your most recent promotion—what supported or constrained your decision to apply?” Participants were also asked to reflect on their experiences and negotiations of career progression conversations. These diverse narratives provided a rich empirical foundation for our analytical focus on how identity tensions are navigated over time. Interviews were conducted online or in person, recorded with informed consent, and transcribed verbatim. Interview duration ranged from 38 to 83 minutes, with a mean of 43 minutes. Theoretical saturation was reached after 26 interviews, with the final 6 confirming the recurrence of central themes (Hennink and Kaiser, 2022). The next section outlines the data analysis procedures.

Data analysis

Data analysis followed an iterative process using constant comparative methods (Charmaz, 2021). A focused coding structure was employed and supported by NVivo software, balancing analytic creativity with rigour throughout the coding stages (Charmaz, 2021). Initial codes were generated through line-by-line in vivo coding, while subsequent focused coding enabled the identification of patterns across interviews. Memo writing and peer debriefing supported reflexive engagement with emerging insights, facilitating analytic depth and transparency throughout the process (Charmaz, 2014; Retkowsky et al., 2023). Theoretical coding was then used to integrate and refine core categories. To establish the representativeness of emergent categories, we drew on Hill et al.’s (2005) framework, which classifies codes as variant (evident in two or three participants), typical (appearing in at least half), or general (present in all). While the analysis extended beyond merely identifying typical categories, most theoretical codes were evident across at least half of the participants’ narratives.

To concretise how the analytic process moved from raw data to theoretical development, we offer an illustrative example. In early interviews, participants described career navigation dilemmas that were deeply entangled with institutional constraints and identity positioning. For instance, one participant described having difficulty advancing to the next level and feeling dissatisfied with the outcome of promotion negotiations, while another recounted being deliberately slowed down in her efforts to reach Level E (WA07—Level C, Australian, carer, first in the family; WA01—Level D, migrant, not in a relationship). These accounts were initially coded with terms such as career progression blocked and self-imposed pacing. Through focused coding, these excerpts were grouped under the abstract conceptual category career progression tensions, which captured how women navigated misalignments between institutional expectations and personal or identity-informed constraints. Moreover, surprising and layered accounts—such as participants’ references to cultural values and conflicting institutional demands—prompted a return to literature beyond the initial scope. For instance, while the research initially centred on IIW to examine how women academics negotiate multiple identities in career progression, early interview data revealed that participants routinely drew on past professional and personal experiences to stabilise their career narratives. This insight prompted an expansion of the theoretical framework, particularly through engagement with Ruel’s (2019b) work in the Canadian space sector. Thus, providing a critical comparative foundation for developing anchored career narratives as a core theoretical category in our analysis.

As analysis continued, the focus shifted to the temporal and identity-laden scaffolding women deployed to make sense of and resist institutional demands. This marked a key conceptual turning point—a moment of what Klag and Langley (2013) describe as a conceptual leap, in which abstract theoretical insight emerges from sustained empirical engagement. Through iterative memoing—written records of the researcher’s thought process—(Sudarsan et al., 2022: 381)—and abductive inquiry, the first author posed the critical question: are these participants navigating careers through identity strategies that are both anchored and imaginative? In addition, as the analysis progressed, participants’ references to imagined futures and career recalibration introduced the concept of IP as a complementary lens to IIW. This expansion was catalysed by sustained theoretical memoing and was further sharpened when the first author attended a workshop on temporality led by Christopher Sykes (Dawson and Sykes, 2016). This facilitated deeper recognition of how past, present, and future time points functioned as structuring devices in women’s and institutional decision-makers of career progressions, such as deans of faculties and heads of department narratives. This temporal orientation also clarified distinctions among the three theoretical codes, which are further explored in the sections to follow. For example, WA02’s return to academia despite familial disapproval illustrated the stabilising role of emotionally fraught AP, WA18’s assertion of queer feminist identity highlighted how preexisting configurations were strategically mobilised within institutionalised gender norms, and WA04’s decision to delay promotion to spend time with her mother demonstrated how imagined futures could be shaped through IP. These codes were not developed in isolation but evolved through constant comparison, theoretical sampling, and reflexive engagement with data and literature. Therefore, the final theoretical framework did not emerge deductively but crystallised through abductive, temporally attuned, and reflexively mediated analysis (Fleming and Oswick, 2025; Sætre and Van de Ven, 2021). It captures how women academics in STEM navigate institutional misalignment and identity tension through stabilising referents, strategic reconfiguration of identities, and imaginative future projections. These strategies—anchoring, negotiating, and envisioning—are explored in the following section.

Anchored career narratives

Anchored career narratives examine how women academics stabilise career trajectories through reference points connecting personal and professional lives. Anchors—family support, migrant identity, and career-first orientation—help sustain coherence amid institutional uncertainty yet can fracture under organisational misalignment, prompting re-anchoring and identity renegotiation. Family support emerged as both a moral compass and a site of tension, shaping interpretations of work experiences and decisions about progression. Anchors are not static; they evolve through relational processes as women navigate coherence and contradiction within STEM’s demanding contexts. An example is seen when academics persist in academia despite family disapproval:

My family could not provide me with any comfort because they couldn’t understand why I would even participate, why I would give people like this who sought to treat me like this was acceptable, why I would give them a moment of my time. And yet I went back. I . . . I consider it for me like a battered wife. Your family looks at you and shakes their head and goes, why be there? (WA02—Career Level C, North American, migrant, married)

This quote starkly captures the emotional complexity embedded in anchored career narratives. For WA02, familial disapproval becomes a destabilising force that amplifies vulnerability. Her metaphor of being “like a battered wife” offers a searing critique of institutionalised harm, symbolising profound dissonance between ethical commitments and systemic marginalisation (Sharafizad et al., 2024). Yet her return reflects anchoring to the intrinsic value of work, revealing how the absence of external validation can paradoxically stabilise persistence. This interplay underscores how APs become sites of emotional reckoning and strategic reengagement for women with intersecting identities. Conversely, WA25 pointed to the positive impact of spousal support:

He’s (husband) generally supportive . . . and he knows that I put my career first most of the time, but sometimes he really calls me on it . . . I have often thought I wouldn’t have a life outside work if I didn’t have him. You know, he actually does help bring that balance back into my life . . . (WA25—Career Level E, Eastern Europe, first in the family, single parent)

In contrast to WA02, WA25 positions spousal support as a stabilising anchor that facilitates a demanding academic career while mitigating overwork. Her narrative reflects how relational anchors resist the absorptive logics of academic labour, especially in settings that valorise individualism and constant productivity (Abdellatif et al., 2025; Johansson et al., 2024). Another anchor point was migrant identity. The WA05 illustrates how prior cultural norms shape interpretations of host-country academia:

It’s much stronger for me than being a woman. I notice that how women are raised in Australia is probably different than in Europe. Because I think . . . Europe is much more, much more equal. (WA05—Career Level C, Eastern European, migrant, divorced)

Her European egalitarian background serves as a benchmark for assessing gendered expectations in Australian STEM academia. When misaligned with institutional logics, these comparative moral referents generate dissonance (Brown, 2015; Patton and Doherty, 2020). Temporal anchors also shaped career pacing. The WA01 reflects deliberate resistance to accelerationist norms:

But umm . . . I now find myself slowed down, actively slowed down, in my trying to get to level E. And part of that, I’ve been told, has been of my own making because I have tended to the form at a certain level that is above the essential area . . . (WA01—Career Level D, European, migrant, not in a relationship)

Her recalibration highlights agency in resisting externally imposed timelines, prioritising meaningful alignment over normative progression scripts (Asirvatham and Humphries-Kil, 2020; Watermeyer, 2015). In contrast, WA07 exemplifies pressure to conform to linear career expectations:

. . . now I’m in a five-year position with not really getting what I wanted out of the negotiation . . . about pretty much every single part of my career, I’ve had issues in getting to that next level. With the exception of PhD to post-doc, that was easy . . . (WA07—Career Level C, Asia-Pacific, married, first in the family, carer)

Her narrative reflects cumulative fatigue when institutional scripts fail to accommodate complexity or caregiving responsibilities. This struggle underscores how AP interact with rigid promotion regimes, exposing the fragility of progression within intersecting identity structures (Bowyer et al., 2022; Villar-Aguilés and Obiol-Francés, 2022).

These narratives reveal the temporal, relational, and structural complexity of anchored career narratives. When aligned, anchors create coherence and momentum; when misaligned, they become sites of tension, exposing fissures in institutional logics. Career anchors function as dynamic reference points, activated in response to structural affordances and constraints of neoliberal STEM academia. They act as provisional stabilisers that, when tested by structural shifts or identity conflicts, prompt adaptive identity work. Participants described moving from reliance on cultural anchors to reshaping professional identities when those anchors no longer sufficed, underscoring how stability is always provisional and negotiated through intersecting identities. Our focus here is on the temporal and relational grounding that precedes the more deliberate identity reconfigurations explored in the IIW matrix. This distinction clarifies conceptual boundaries while recognising that, in practice, these processes interweave.

Intersectional identity work matrix (IIW matrix)

The IIW matrix examines the interplay of multifaceted identities across personal and professional spheres. Informed by Hill Collins and Bilge’s (2020) concept of the matrix of domination, this framework offers a lens for understanding how women academics experience intersecting systems of power—sexism, racism, heteronormativity, and classism—within neoliberal, meritocratic institutions. The examples that follow illustrate how participants drew on varied and sometimes conflicting identity resources—grief, migration, parenthood, minority status, and sexual orientation—to resist, reframe, or redirect academic trajectories in the face of structural inequities. The IIW foregrounds not only identity navigation but also the structural conditions that constrain or enable such work. Rather than treating identity work as adaptive or individualised, this section explores how participants leveraged existing identities in response to institutional marginalisation, highlighting how these identities are situated within power relations. The IIW appeared frequently in reflections on how prior experiences and identity configurations were drawn upon to stabilise self-understanding amid failure or exclusion. These narratives reveal how women reactivated AP—grief, migration, parenthood, and minority status—to reframe institutional assessments and exercise agency over career paths. For instance, WA07’s quote underscores how familial loss, caregiving, and social class background act as sources of perspective and endurance:

I think a lot of that has played into my resilience in and ability to push to achieve and I don’t think I’m pretty good with failure. I don’t. It doesn’t really get to me because I think I’ve experienced bigger things in life, like death, death of a sibling and things like that. It’s a lot. I have a bit of perspective . . . (WA07—Career Level C, Asia-Pacific, married, first in the family, carer)

The WA07’s narrative does not frame resilience as an abstract trait but as grounded in lived hardship. Her positioning as a first-in-family academic and carer intensifies emotional labour, while detachment from institutional failure signals rejection of dominant evaluative norms. These intersecting positions recalibrate what counts as success, diluting the disciplining force of neoliberal meritocratic measures. This constitutes resistant identity work—reclaiming value from nonacademic spheres and asserting dignity against devaluation (Ross et al., 2022). The WA02’s account reveals the emotional toll and institutional devaluation faced by precariously positioned academics who labour invisibly to meet ever-rising benchmarks:

. . . Often spending a lot of my time feeling like a failure and questioning my abilities and always always feeling not good enough. And I think what reinforced that was what I was trying to do when I wasn’t being paid to work part-time, where I was an adjunct. I was trying to do my own research or finish up chapters from my various postdocs to try desperately to get those published so that I had more publications, so that I had more citations, so that I could apply for an ARC grant . . .. I exhausted it, and every single time, I was rejected and told it wasn’t good enough, that, you know, I wasn’t in the top 10% . . . (WA02—Career Level C, North American, migrant, not in a relationship)

This reflection illustrates how structural vulnerability—shaped by precarious employment, settler-colonial dislocation, and racialised metrics of excellence—deepens academic marginalisation. As an Indigenous, migrant woman in Australian STEM, WA02 occupies a structurally underrepresented position that institutional discourses often frame in deficit terms. Her narrative exemplifies IIW as a response to epistemic exclusion: repeated attempts to align with dominant norms of worth—publications, citations, and grant success—both reaffirm belonging and reproduce internalised inadequacy. Rather than straightforward adaptation, WA02 undertakes an exhausting cycle of identity recalibration that mirrors symbolic violence. Her experience shows identity work as an ongoing negotiation of legitimacy within systems that devalue minoritised academic labour. Similarly, WA18 highlights the tension of asserting a politicised identity within a male-dominated, heteronormative academic culture:

I can be really blunt about it [feminist beliefs and LGBTQA identity], a lot of men I work with are really anxious around that, you know, and I can understand why there’s societal pressure. They’re worried about being inappropriate as I’m vocal in my feminist beliefs and being a member of the LGBTQA+ community. (WA18—Career Level D, Asia-Pacific, married, lesbian, first in the family)

The WA18 leverages intersecting identities—gender, sexuality, and feminist consciousness—as mechanisms of self-definition and disruption. Her reference to men’s discomfort reveals how asserting these identities destabilises gender norms and evokes institutional unease. This discomfort operates as both constraint and catalyst: while risking exclusion, it opens discursive rupture where heteronormative and patriarchal expectations become visible and contestable. Identity work here becomes political emplacement within a system rewarding conformity and silencing dissent (Coleman et al., 2023; Salazar, 2023). While WA18’s strategy involves vocal assertion and disruption from within, WA12 offers a perspective on career decisions shaped by intersecting identities conflicting with institutional expectations. Her choice to step down from leadership reflects not retreat but refusal rooted in structural disillusionment:

I think today is the first time since 2011 that I do not hold a leadership position because I just asked for a break . . . I think something changed inside me, and I am really not happy with how higher education in Australia . . . (WA12—Career Level E, Latin America, married, carer, migrant, first in the family)

The WA12’s decision challenges the normative equation of success with constant progression. Her identity as a migrant, carer, and woman of colour magnifies structural alienation, as institutional expectations for relentless availability clash with culturally embedded responsibilities. Rather than framing burnout as individual vulnerability, her statement reveals cumulative disenchantment. Her choice constitutes an intersectional withdrawal strategy—preserving self-worth amid marginalisation (Cretchley et al., 2014; Feldman and Sandoval, 2018). Extending this departure from institutional conformity, WA06 illustrates how IIW can also involve spatial reorientation beyond the university itself:

I have been offered more leadership roles outside of universities than inside universities. I also seek more leadership roles beyond the universities because my contributions are invited more, heard and respected . . . External opportunities to progress my career are a priority for me partly because I’m not interested in playing power games for university promotions (into Executive level) . . . (WA06—Career Level E, Asia-Pacific, married, queer)

The WA06’s narrative reflects a strategic redirection of identity work beyond academia. Her decision to seek leadership elsewhere is not an abandonment of ambition but an intersectionally informed strategy of boundary-crossing. As a queer woman in senior academia, she positions external spaces as more inclusive and affirming, challenging masculinised, competitive logics embedded in promotion systems (Ashencaen Crabtree and Shiel, 2019; Liu et al., 2026).

These accounts show that existing identities are not merely managed but also mobilised—as anchors of resilience or frameworks for refusal, redirection, and resistance. The IIW is therefore not an internal adjustment to professional norms but a negotiation within power-laden structures. Intersectionality functions as an analytic of power, revealing how women’s career strategies are shaped by histories of marginalisation and institutional inequity. This matrixed identity work builds on narrative coherence afforded by AP while opening space for imaginative exploration elaborated in the next section on IP. Within the IIW matrix, participants negotiated tensions through historically situated, culturally embedded, and professionally constrained positionalities. Yet identity work extends beyond managing present contradictions. Women academics also engaged in prospective identity navigation—envisioning future selves, testing pathways, and weighing the affordances and sacrifices of promotion. Whereas IIW foregrounds negotiation within power-saturated contexts, IP introduces a more imaginative and agentic process for reconfiguring potential academic futures.

Identity play (IP) nexus in promotional futures

The IP nexus explores how women academics imagine and pursue advancement through possible selves, fostering hope and linking identity exploration with career progression. Three recurring patterns emerged: prioritising family or personal commitments over promotion, rehearsing readiness through leadership or service roles, and making life-course decisions—such as forgoing children—based on anticipated career demands. Through experimenting with potential roles, participants assessed how envisioned futures aligned with values and aspirations. Such experimentation was crucial for navigating complex academic environments, where women weighed the implications of senior roles for work-life balance, time, and governance responsibilities. These patterns form three modalities of IP: temporal deferral (postponing promotion to protect personal priorities), anticipatory enactment (testing provisional selves through institutional roles), and preemptive self-limitation (foreclosing futures in anticipation of structural incompatibilities). Together, they clarify the temporal, emotional, and structural logics of IP. As participants tested hypothetical scenarios and temporal trade-offs, they aligned future selves with present responsibilities, illustrating IP as both adaptive and constrained.

Demonstrating the first modality of temporal deferral, WA04’s excerpt reflects a temporal recalibration grounded in care ethics, where personal priorities override institutional expectations.

To me, it’s not that much of an issue if I’m promoted or not. I do have my mum . . . so you know, I try to see her as much as I can. So, last year, I didn’t want to spend my entire month staring at my computer when I could just hang out with my mum. So that was my decision, that was the main reason why I didn’t apply. (WA04—Career Level C, East Asia, partnered, migrant, no caring responsibilities)

The WA04’s decision illustrates strategic deferral and highlights how collectivist orientations—often shaped by cultural norms and migrant positionalities—intersect with academic expectations, reinforcing IP as a gendered, cultural, and affective exercise (Järvinen and Mik-Meyer, 2024; Larsen and Brandenburg, 2023). This illustrates the modality of temporal deferral, in which promotion is intentionally postponed, safeguarding relational and moral commitments.

Showcasing the second modality of anticipatory enactment, WA28 demonstrates proactive engagement with institutional roles to build readiness for imagined futures:

I realised early on that part of my progression planning would go into administrative roles. So first, I sought them out . . . So most of my time was spent on being deputy head of school . . . And so that’s allowing me to see an even bigger view of the university . . . (WA28—Career Level E, North America, married, not disclosed community affiliation)

Her IP is future-oriented and institutionally embedded, affirming that promotional readiness is not only cognitive but materially enacted through institutional participation (Abdellatif et al., 2025; Rosa, 2022; Strauβ and Boncori, 2020). This anticipatory enactment echoes the concept of provisional selves (Ibarra and Obodaru, 2016) and draws on AP’s established earlier work in her career—such as cross-institutional collaboration—which stabilises imagined leadership identities. This demonstrates the temporal interplay between anchored career narratives and IP, where past experiences provide legitimacy and emotional grounding for experimenting with provisional senior selves. Here, IP takes the form of anticipatory enactment, as future leadership identities are provisionally inhabited through present institutional roles. The WA12 concerned strategic pursuit of leadership and service roles as a way to rehearse readiness for promotion:

But . . . look, I will be very honest. I really enjoy being head of discipline and after that, every job that I got is because I put my hand up. And because I really like that . . . (WA12—Career Level E, Latin America, married, migrant, first in the family, carer)

This narrative captures the affective dimension of IP, where joy and satisfaction in leadership roles consolidate the imagined self in senior positions. Her migrant and first-in-family status adds layers to this trajectory, suggesting that IP may function as a tool of self-legitimation in contexts where structural barriers—such as underrepresentation or cultural othering—undermine self-worth (Bowyer et al., 2022; Maxwell et al., 2019). Enjoyment becomes affirmation, sustaining continued enactment of possible selves despite marginalisation. This further exemplifies anticipatory enactment, where affective investment stabilises and reinforces provisional senior selves.

The third modality revolved around decisions to delay or forgo having children—where IP surfaced in its most existential form, balancing personal life decisions with academic demands:

But some of the reasons why I chose not to have children is because I recognise that children and academia are in many ways incompatible. I see the horrors happening to my colleagues and I realised that things were already so hard I couldn’t make my life harder. That in itself is its own story, but. I don’t know . . . (WA02—Career Level C, North American, married, migrant, no caring responsibilities)

This narrative demonstrates the emotionally charged stakes of IP when participants negotiate irreconcilable futures. The tension between caregiving and academic life reflects critiques of neoliberal academia’s incompatibility with embodied lives (Brown and Loza, 2025; Wieners and Weber, 2020). The WA02’s decision reflects a preemptive negotiation of the matrix of domination, where intersecting pressures of race, migration, and gendered care norms render certain futures untenable. The IP here functions less as aspirational self-design and more as damage limitation, safeguarding professional continuity at the expense of personal aspirations. This illustrates preemptive self-limitation, where imagined futures are actively foreclosed in anticipation of structural incompatibilities.

Across these narratives, the IP nexus spans a spectrum from constraint-driven adaptation to agentic future-shaping. The WA04 and WA02 illustrate how anticipated constraints—care duties and structural incompatibilities—prompt temporal deferral or self-limitation, while WA28 and WA12 exemplify more agentic anticipatory enactment. This variation underscores that IP is not inherently liberatory; its outcomes depend on structural flexibility and intersectional positioning. Promotional aspirations are negotiated within a nexus of personal values, institutional scripts, and identity investments, adding a critical dimension to understanding academic agency under gendered and racialised systems of promotion in STEM. These three modalities demonstrate that IP operates as a differentiated repertoire through which promotional futures are postponed, enacted, or curtailed. Overall, the findings show that women academics do not rely on a single mode of identity navigation but draw from a repertoire of strategies—anchored career narratives, IIW, and IP—depending on context, institutional pressures, and personal commitments. These mechanisms were rarely deployed in isolation. The AP often provided temporal and moral grounding for IP or intersectional agency, while IP enabled imagining futures that reconciled tensions arising from competing identity expectations. Rather than a fixed sequence, these processes operated dynamically and in combination, shifting in response to career crossroads, institutional climates, and life-stage considerations. This integrated, temporally situated identity work reflects how marginalised academics exercise constrained agency within normative meritocratic systems. In the following section, we explore the study’s theoretical and practical contributions.

Limitations and suggestions for future research

The TIN-CP provides a robust, practice-oriented framework for understanding identity management in diverse and restrictive contexts. However, it assumes a level of personal agency that may not be accessible to all individuals, particularly those operating in highly constrained or oppressive environments (Froehlich et al., 2020). Future research should examine how varying levels of agency and external support shape the effectiveness of APs, IIW, and IP across organisational contexts. To better capture the career experiences of marginalised workforces, scholars should adopt diverse methodological approaches that reflect the multifaceted nature of identity management. Further research should also include workers in nonstandard arrangements, such as part-time or sessional roles, to address the distinct challenges they encounter. Expanding empirical contexts to include marginalised professional groups across the global North and South is essential for developing culturally sensitive and contextually relevant strategies that reflect diverse perspectives and structural realities.