Women Lifting Up Women: The Transformative Potential of Parallel-Peer Connections

Women in masculine-typed roles often experience their gender identity as a barrier to proving themselves by the ideal-worker norms of their male-dominated occupations. Yet, these women often internalize these experiences, blaming themselves for their struggles. They rarely identify as members of a disadvantaged identity group and often distance themselves from other women at work. How and when might such women externalize their struggles as gendered and collective? Drawing on data from a qualitative field study of staff working in many masculine-typed roles across various male-dominated occupations at a U.S. public-lands management organization, I develop grounded theory suggesting when and how some women might come to reappraise some of their struggles as rooted in the gendered cultures of their occupations rather than in their own deficiencies or idiosyncratic circumstances. I find that “parallel-peer connections” between similarly situated women outside their local tokenized work groups can spark transformative mindset shifts when these encounters occur under the right conditions: during a window of sensemaking about a career impasse and in a less competitive context that is conducive to sharing confidences. Some women credited these shifts with prompting them to shed years of self-doubt and to promote gender equality at work. This study contributes to our understanding of supportive workplace relations among tokenized women and mindset shifts at work.