Jamie Ladge

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Verified

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• Ph.D.
• Professor (Full) at Boston College

While the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on mortality and morbidity is becoming more understood, the severity of the long-term effects remains unknown: this includes medical sequelae of long COVID but also the impact of the social and economic upheaval on population health. Working parents faced many challenges during the pandemic, and the impact of th...

It is well documented that female minority founders (FMFs) face disadvantages in starting and scaling their ventures. However, the causes of these disadvantages—as well as how FMFs navigate these challenges—are less understood. Our article adopts an intersectionality lens, which allows us to focus on and examine the multiple intersecting dimensions...

This paper explores how pregnancy discrimination at work is perceived by both employers and pregnant employees. Using a public, qualitative dataset collected by the UK Equality and Human Rights Commission that offers perspectives from both employers and pregnant employees, we explore the unfair and unethical treatment of pregnant employees at work....

Many women experience psychological and emotional challenges during their transition to becoming a working mother. Postpartum depression (PPD) is one common, salient aspect of motherhood that can serve as a work–life shock event and profoundly shape women’s work and nonwork lives yet has evaded discussion in the organizational sciences. Taking a gr...

Despite becoming increasingly represented in academic departments, women scholars face a critical lack of support as they navigate demands pertaining to pregnancy, motherhood, and child caregiving. In addition, cultural norms surrounding how faculty and academic leaders discuss and talk about tenure, promotion, and career success have created press...

Many questions remain with respect to what it actually means to be an involved father today and the ways in which organizations can encourage a more holistic view of men as ideal parents and professionals. In this chapter, we reflect on these considerations by drawing from prior research and set an agenda for further examining fatherhood in an orga...

In this review, we synthesise the growing body of interdisciplinary research on fatherhood and employment for the purpose of guiding future management studies research on the topic. We argue that shifts in research approaches and assumptions are required to fully understand the situation of contemporary employed fathers. Our review draws attention...

During the COVID-19 pandemic many countries enforced mandatory stay-at-home orders. The confinement period that took place may be regarded as a multi-domain work-life shock event, severely disrupting both the professional and the family sphere. Taking an identity lens, this study examines whether and how identity changed during confinment by drawin...

The recent COVID-19 pandemic has raised the visibility of health care workers to the level of public heroes. We study this phenomenon by exploring how nonphysician health care workers, who traditionally believed they were invisible and undervalued, perceive their newfound elevated status during the pandemic. Drawing from a qualitative study of 164...

Combining responsibilities at work with caregiving, working mothers are experiencing growing shame for not living up to anyone’s expectations, including their own.

The adoption of work‐family supports (WFSs), defined as discretionary and formal organizational policies, services, and benefits aimed at reducing employees’ work‐family conflict and/or supporting their family roles outside of the workplace, has become a growing trend in contemporary organizational life. Yet, despite their widespread popularity and...

Chapter 9 focuses on the important role men can play in supporting women as they create positive paths through work and motherhood. While we have talked about men at home and at work in previous chapters, this is an important enough topic that it warrants a specific chapter. We begin by discussing the benefits for mothers, children, and fathers whe...

Chapter 5 considers how working mothers navigate work and family as they move from the daily responsibilities of raising children to parenting adult children to retirement. As working mothers’ parenting role shifts in conjunction with midlife changes, they may begin a process of career recalibration as they consider what they want to do that is mea...

Chapter 8 introduces the more common life disruptions working mothers may experience. These disruptions include navigating one’s own health and well-being, managing situations with one’s children or spouse, and responding to unexpected caregiving responsibilities with one’s extended family. Unfortunately, these disruptions occur more frequently tha...

While women have made great strides in the workplace over the last several decades, it is far too early to declare victory. Women still hold a disproportionately small number of executive level positions and high-growth entrepreneurial ventures. Although many factors contribute to this lag, the key issue that we have focused on in this book is the...

Chapter 2 explores the foundations of working motherhood as women become pregnant and begin to negotiate professional and mothering roles as they disclose their pregnancies at work and prepare for maternity leave. We discuss three significant adjustments most women experience as they begin to integrate pregnancy and work. The first is a psychologic...

Chapter 1 begins before a woman even becomes pregnant. Many women spend years focusing on building a career, taking the time to build essential human capital skills that make them valuable resources in the workforce. However, there comes a time when most women begin to think actively about their future and determine whether or not that includes hav...

Chapter 3 covers the transition to the postnatal period. We focus first on the experience of maternity leave and some of the factors that help and hinder new mothers in the process of becoming confident about being good mothers. We consider the varied ways women go about managing their maternity leave both in terms of work and at home and the quest...

Chapter 7 moves beyond workplace flexibility to consider career flexibility, which refers to the varied career choices working mothers make as they pursue their work/life path. We begin by introducing a more expansive view of career beyond the traditional career ladder. This holistic career model encompasses work, family, and community interests an...

In Chapter 4, we move beyond the first-time experiences of early motherhood to consider how life as a working mother shifts as a family structure evolves. There has been a predominant focus on pregnancy and women’s initial transition to becoming a working mother, yet as children age and careers shift, working mothers face new work and home decision...

Chapter 6 focuses on the topic of flexible work arrangements. Workplace flexibility is often romanticized as an answer to all the challenges working mothers face. While flexibility can be particularly helpful to working mothers as they integrate work and family, it also introduces new complexities working mothers need to consider. This chapter help...

Every working mother's path is unique and should be celebrated, not lamented. Yet all too frequently, working mothers are presented with advice, rules to follow or guidelines as if all women's experiences are the same and a one-size-fits-all solution is appropriate. Maternal Optimism: Forging Positive Paths through Work and Motherhood aims to prov...

This study explores the experiences of young professionals as they move through different career paths and narrate their careers. Drawing primarily from semi-structured in-depth interviews with 40 young professionals with at least three years of professional employment post-graduation from the same program of study as well as data obtained from the...

Although participation of women in entrepreneurship continues to grow, a gender-performance gap persists. While the differential inputs and values perspectives have investigated both external and internal forces that help explain this gap, neither perspective has considered an important cognitive mechanism that captures gender differences: identity...

While often focused on theory building and intellectual credibility, management scholars have rich, complex lives outside of academia. Their non-work lives may inform the phenomenon they choose to study, the research questions they ask, and even how they engage with the field. We suggest management scholars may benefit from becoming more transparen...

Working parents often contend with how to effectively portray themselves as both devoted professionals and good parents. In this article, we introduce the construct work-family image as a cross-domain, collective image representing how competent an individual is perceived to be as a parent and a professional by key constituents in both work and lif...

Working parents often contend with how to effectively portray themselves as both devoted professionals and good parents. In this article we introduce the construct “work-family image” as a cross-domain, collective image representing how competent an individual is perceived to be as a parent and a professional by key constituents in both work and li...

This study explores the experiences of lesbian couples as they move through the different stages of pregnancy and re-enter the workforce after maternity leave. The study draws on semi-structured in-depth interviews conducted at three points in time: middle and late pregnancy and after the return to work. The findings suggest that the transition to...

Despite the prominent place of work-family conflict (WFC) research in organizational psychology, surprisingly little is known about the WFC experiences of individuals who belong to LGB families. We argue that challenging heteronormative assumptions of "family" by examining the WFC experiences of employees with LGB families may reveal an added layer...

Over the past two decades, there has been extensive research across diverse disciplines exploring the treatment of pregnant women in the work context (Gatrell in Human Relations 1–24, 2013). One of the most significant challenges women experience during pregnancy relates to their ability to manage their evolving sense of self as work and motherhood...

This chapter addresses fatherhood in the context of the workplace and family. We begin with a review of the current literature on fatherhood to consider the primary theoretical perspectives that are relevant to understanding men’s transitions to fatherhood: gender, identity, and work-life integration. Then we discuss the transition to fatherhood in...

https://hbr.org/2016/08/coping-with-the-effects-of-emotionally-difficult-work In a recent study published in Journal of Management Inquiry, we explored how carrying out necessary evils affects those who must do the work, not just once or twice, but repeatedly — hundreds or even thousands of times. We conducted in-depth interviews with 21 HR profes...

“Necessary evils” require employees to psychologically or physically harm others to produce a perceived greater good. Employees can also help others during necessary evils tasks by providing assistance and support to those harmed. Through an inductive, qualitative study of human resources employees’ experiences carrying out downsizing, we explore h...

The work reentry period following the birth of a first child is a time of uncertainty for a professional woman. During reentry, a new mother is often questioning who she is and how effective she can be as a mother and working professional. In this study, we conceptualize reentry as a period of resocialization as we explore the first-time mother's c...

A recent Forbes.com article states that “Women must take a special interest in supporting other women in order to help make gender equality in business a reality” (Perkett, 2014). But to what extent do women actually serve as catalysts for reducing inequality? As women now hold about fifty-percent of all management positions (Bureau of Labor Statis...

In this study, we examine whether female entrepreneurs are held to a different standard than male entrepreneurs in obtaining financing from banks. To test this idea, we draw from the literature on signaling theory to propose that characteristics specific to the firm and the entrepreneur act as a means to communicate (i.e., signal) the inherent qual...

Purpose This study takes an identity lens to explore how men experience fatherhood in the context of their work amid shifting ideologies of fathering. Methodological Approach This study uses a qualitative, inductive approach with an interview methodology. Findings This study finds that men hold multiple images within their fathering identities that...

While the organization man was once synonymous with being an "ideal worker" who prioritized work over family, men's increased involvement in childrearing has changed the meaning and value placed on fatherhood. Little, however, is known about how this "involved fathering" shapes identities, work experiences, and work-related outcomes for fathers. Dr...

Through our grounded theory qualitative research, we explore how women begin to construct and react to images of possible multiple selves as professionals and mothers during the liminal period of pregnancy. Our study makes a contribution to identity transition scholarship by introducing and exploring the intricacies of cross-domain identity transit...

There has been extensive writing both in the popular press and the academic literature on the unique work-life challenges of professional working mothers. Professional working mothers often must manage competing gender biases – being perceived as cold-hearted (Cuddy et al., 2004) or worse, bad mothers (Epstein et al., 1999) on one hand and less com...

Our marching orders to the field around work-life [are] certainly to walk the talk. We can't just talk about making a change in our envir-onment and making a change in our culture and making a change in how we deal with one another in our workplace. We actually have to put it into action. We have to be willing to make the commitment to focus on dif...

While pregnancy in the workplace is a fairly common occurrence today, there are still numerous covert and overt biases women must navigate when pregnant at work. Current research on pregnancy in the workplace has primarily highlighted the substantive negotiations that pregnant women engage in with regards to maternity leave and role definition. In...

a b s t r a c t This study examined the effects of family and career path characteristics on objective and subjective career success among 916 employed mothers. Among family variables, age at first childbirth was positively related and career priority favoring the husband was nega-tively related to both income and subjective career success; number...

Existing research on how timing childbirth impacts career success is lacking. Economics and sociology scholars have addressed the issue but little headway has been made in understanding implications for starting a family on women's careers. A handful of studies have used wages as the dependent variable as opposed to other more comprehensive measure...

In this article, we examine work-life and identity integration issues for professional women. Specifically, we investigate how expectant mothers experience changes in their professional self-conceptualization as they begin to integrate new maternal-centered identities into their established identities as working professionals. Using data from our r...