Abstract: Although women’s slower advancement is well documented, research has largely treated delay as a by-product of bias or structural barriers rather than as a temporal process in its own right. We introduce the concept of women in waiting to capture how waiting emerges from gendered temporal practices that stalls women’s career advancement. Drawing on Simone de Beauvoir’s theorization of waiting as a gendered temporal mode and an inductive study of 71 women and men in a corporate leadership pipeline and 10 HR managers from a Fortune 100 multinational, we show how women’s careers are marked by distinctive forms of waiting – being deemed “not yet ready,” enduring longer promotion timelines, and adapting aspirations around deferred opportunities. Our analysis reveals that waiting is relationally produced: managers justify delay, peers normalize women’s patience, and women themselves internalize waiting as a career narrative. We theorize women in waiting as a multi-level mechanism linking individual experience, interpersonal interaction, and organizational practice, explaining why women’s advancement stalls even amid efforts to “fix” individuals or structures. In doing so, we contribute by (1) identifying waiting as a hidden barrier to women’s career advancement, (2) advancing research on temporality as relationally enacted, (3) integrating individual- and structural-level explanations through waiting, and (4) highlighting power in shaping how women wait and with what consequences.

 

 

About Kathleen Stephenson

Kathleen “Katie” Stephenson is an Assistant Professor of Organizational Change and Leadership with the Department of Management and Organization situated in the School of Business and Economics at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the Netherlands. She is the coordinator of the Leadership and Change Management MSc Program and the Director of the Diversity and Inclusion in Organizations Knowledge Hub at the VU. She is the European Representative-at-Large for the OMT division of the Academy of Management and an editorial review board member for the Academy of Management Review. Before joining the VU, she was a lecturer in Human Resource Management at the University of Liverpool Management School. She holds a PhD from the VU Amsterdam (2019). Katie’s research typically explores the intersection of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), leadership, and (organizational) change. As an ethnographer who was initially trained in the humanities, Katie often brings unique lenses (e.g., spatial and temporal lenses) into management and organization scholarship to theorize phenomena in new ways. Her work has been published in journals such as the Academy of Management Annals, the Journal of Management Studies, and the Journal of Organizational Behavior.