The making of female scientific legends: Career narratives of the OWSD-Elsevier award winning early-career research scientists

Abstract

Many nations have been resolute in their pursuit of gender parity in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Yet, the underrepresentation of women in STEM careers continues to pose significant global challenges. ‘How’ and ‘why’ women experience work differently in such male-dominated environments has been the subject of extensive research in recent times. This thesis offers new, original, and fresh perspectives to move forward the conversation on how women in ‘masculine’ careers experience work by throwing the spotlight on a peculiar group of people who, despite their immense contribution to science, are often side-lined in contemporary discourse on careers in management research. Drawing on career construction theory and intersectionality scholarship as a lens, and ‘microstoria’ as an interpretive frame, the study explores contemporaneous scientific career stories as narrated by female early career researchers (ECRs) from developing countries where resource paucity tends to stymie the ‘doing’ of cutting-edge scientific research. In doing this, the thesis investigates how the often-invisible identities of positionality and situatedness of these ECRs intersect with their highly visible gender identity as females to shape how they experience work as early career scientific researchers from and based in developing countries. Adopting a constructionist approach and an exploratory qualitative research design, the main data for the empirical inquiry was collected using semi-structured interviews with thirty-five (35) past recipients of the Organization for Women in Science for the Developing World (OWSD)-Elsevier award for female ECRs from the developing world. This was supplemented with publicly available documents on the award, and the websites and social media pages (LinkedIn, YouTube, ResearchGate) of the award winners. With emphasis placed on their call to fame and their journeys to worldmaking in male-dominated scientific fields, the study explored and analysed how these ‘successful’ female ECR scientists make sense of their identities as scientists, experience scientific work in a context characterised by resource paucity, and craft their scientific careers The study presents three main findings. First, it suggests that the intersectionality of multiple identities allows ECRs to construct three distinct career identities: a relational career identity based on the concept of familial influence (family, mentors, role models), an altruistic career based on the concept of ‘calling’, and a fluke career orientation based on the concept of luck and chance. Second, the study addresses social inequities for female ECRs by examining the unique enablers and barriers faced by this group at the intersection of gender, positionality, and situatedness. Third, the study identifies several agentic ways in which female ECRs could both survive and thrive in STEM by highlighting the daily practices, strategies and coping behaviours that are utilized consistently to self-manage a career under such contexts of underdevelopment, weak institutions, and patriarchy; and sheds light on seemingly intractable patterns of strategies (passing and revealing), which constitutively help them to counter their feelings of (in)visibility and struggles in their everyday situated practices. Shedding light on the interaction between the self and societal agents and how these influence the career construction narratives of females at the early stages of their scientific research career lives, the study calls attention to several interventions that could be useful in mitigating the occurrences of bottlenecks in organisational career development.