While prior research recognizes that women struggle to maintain legitimacy for their successes and that self-narratives play a key role in building such legitimacy, theory provides limited insight into how women build legitimacy through their self-narratives. Our findings from an inductive, qualitative study of 40 women who rose to elite levels in corporations or entrepreneurial ventures during the latter half of the 20th century, despite considerable underrepresentation by women in similar roles, shed new light on how women narrate their own legitimacy. We build a theoretical framework showing how women legitimate their successes in the face of gender-based challenges, identifying six discursive legitimation strategies women use to explain and justify success against the odds. We also explore why women differ in the constellations of strategies they present in their self-narratives. While women universally pull upon multiple discursive legitimation strategies to explain their successes, we find that women’s social class origins and the organizational sector in which women ascended, either corporate or entrepreneurial, relate to the discursive strategies women employ in their legitimacy narratives.
Keywords: Personal Development and Career; Gender; Success; Diversity; Perception; Situation or Environment;
Citation:
Clair, Judith A., Kathleen L. McGinn, Beth K. Humberd, Rachel D. Arnett, and Katherine Chen. "Class Matters: The Role of Social Class and Organizational Sector in High-Achieving Women's Legitimacy Narratives." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 18-014, August 2018. (Revised August 2018 for requested resubmission.) View Details