Breaking Through Despite the Odds: Learning from the Career Experiences of Successful BAME Women

Abstract

The obstacles that minority groups face can often result in perceptions that success is beyond one’s control, further resulting in feelings of powerlessness, dependency, detachment, and resentment. Unlike their white counterparts who face ‘glass ceiling’, ethnic minority women who have less support and even fewer opportunities to advance, encounter “concrete ceiling” or “concrete walls” which are more difficult to break. Societal and organizational structures often put prejudicial barriers in their path which overlook merit, thereby impeding their advancement to senior positions. Being constantly overlooked, despite being competent, can negatively impact their leadership aspirations. So how do these women shield themselves from the frustration and marginalization that comes with the racial and gender prejudice they face and how do they achieve career success? To understand this, we interviewed 50 ethnic minority women in senior leadership positions. Deviating from the norm in business and management literature, we adopt a positive psychology perspective and delineate elements of Hope to examine their career goals, their motivation to reach these goals (agency) and how they go about achieving these (pathway). We found that the women in our study were hopeful in their goal pursuit, aware of the disadvantages they faced, anticipated these, and successfully identified pathways to achieve their goals and advance their careers. We develop a conceptual model based on our findings which has theoretical implications for both diversity and career success literatures.