Abstract

We explore identity conflicts of women who progress into corporate leadership in Canada. We problematize and built on role congruity theory to develop a theorization that leads us to ask the following three questions: (1) What conflicts do women who progress into leadership experience between their ideal and experienced identities, in both their professional and private spaces? (2) What practices of identity regulation lead to these identity conflicts? (3) What identity work do women do to resolve identity conflicts? Relying on extensive interview data, we document that women experience identity conflicts that manifest themselves in that interviewees feel invisible in their professional roles and visible in their non-professional (e.g., homemaker) roles and as gendered beings, in their professional and private spaces. These identity conflicts are linked to identity regulation practices that actors in their professional and private spaces engage in (e.g., they define roles) and that interviewees themselves do (e.g., women question their fit with roles). Interviewees react to identity conflicts by performing three kinds of identity work: lean-out practices (i.e., they change roles), lean-in practices (i.e., they change themselves), and bridging practices (i.e., they change how they relate to their space). We discuss the implications of our findings for the literature on identity and spaces.